TRUMP’S GREAT WALL OF CHEESE
MANY years ago I dropped out of university and decided to try my hand at farming. It was a logical career for me, I thought. After all, I’d grown up on a farm and helped with all the chores of farming.
I’d driven tractors, dosed sheep, fixed farm generators, welded broken wheelbarrows and hunted jackals. I was practically a farmer already. I formed a partnership with a friend whose father owned a piece of land in what is now Mpumalanga, and found myself in possession of a farm lorry and a small herd of skinny scrub cattle of various shapes and colours. Their job was to grow huge under my care and then be sold at an enormous profit, making me very rich.
One or two of them did manage to gain a little weight, but by the time they were ready for market foot-and-mouth disease broke out not far from where I was pretending to be a farmer, and the government stock inspectors banned all stock movement. Then, while I sat watching my two fat cows, a drought started.
The usual summer rains just didn’t arrive. The farm dam dried up and the grass turned brown. My fat cows became thin cows again and by the time the foot-and-mouth scare was over, they were suitable only for use as bonemeal. I decided farming might not be for me after all and found work selling blankets. (The newspaper job came much later.) There are just too many things beyond a farmer’s control.
In parts of the US, they recently experienced a near perfect farming season. Grazing was lush and plentiful and the dairy herds produced rivers of fresh milk.
Fresh milk has a short shelf life, so the excess was turned into cheese (which can be kept for much longer than milk). Now I hear that the US is suffering from a cheese mountain, the likes of which has never been experienced before. Farmers are going out of business because there isn’t enough demand for all that cheese.
One commentator said there was enough mozzarella in storage in the US now to completely cover the Capitol and the White House. I wonder whether President Donald Trump has considered building his wall out of cheese. It might solve several problems at the same time. It would have to be a harder cheese than mozzarella, though. Maybe slabs of Parmesan, or well-matured Cheddar could be used as building blocks, with a cream cheese mortar. It would certainly win Trump the farmers’ support. Last Laugh
A Texan farmer was on holiday in Australia and met an Aussie farmer, who invited him to his farm. He showed the Texan his wheat lands and the Texan sneered: “I have wheat fields 10 times that size.”
Then he was shown a herd of cows and said: “You call those cows? Our Texas Longhorns are twice as big as that.”
Later a kangaroo came hopping across the farm road and the Texan exclaimed: “What the heck is that thing?”
The Australian gave him a disbelieving look and said: “You mean you don’t have grasshoppers in Texas?”