Warren Buffet's new train set cost a mere $26.3 billion. Buffett has Montana farmers worried, and he has environmentalists scratching their heads. Buffet's train set is called the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line and it has a virtual rail monopoly in Montana. The company owns 90 percent of the tracks in Big Sky country, and has tended in the past to act the way you would expect a monopoly to act.
     When diesel prices went up over the past two years, shipping rates for a bushel of wheat or barley went up, sometimes as much as 20 cents overnight. When diesel prices fell earlier this year, so did the cost to ship a bushel of grain. But it took awhile - four months, Allen Merrill, president of the Montana Farmers Union, and it didn't come down very far. A mere two cents.
     And the environmentalists? Well, sure, trains use less fuel per ton mile than trucks. But Burlington Northern's car are filled mostly with coal. So you're using a fuel-friendly method to move mountains of one of the world's biggest pollutants. That's almost as complicated a calculus as cap-and-trade.
     Merrill and his fellow growers are hoping Buffett will pay them a visit and listen sympathetically to their concerns.
     A couple of posts by Wall Street Journal blogger Michael Corkery outlined the concerns of farmers and environmentalists. You can read them here http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/11/04/maybe-buffett-just-likes-playing-with-trains/ and here http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/11/04/big-issues-with-burlington-northern-in-big-sky-state/

     Thieves have been hitting farm equipment dealers hard in recent weeks, with a couple of Pennsylvania dealers reporting losses of $100,000. According to Dave Close, operations manager for the Northeast Equipment Dealers Association, they are currently cooperating with a dozen police departments and 30 or 40 dealers who've been robbed. A surveillance camera caught these images of a tractor trailer pulling into a dealership and apparently making off with some pricey equipment. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres interviewed  area dealers about the situation, and prepared a report for tomorrow's edition.

     When chickens go bad, people can act like dumb clucks. http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/when-chickens-go-bad/uf7f2sdc