pinebeltquilter

I would pay 25.00 per yard before I would plant a cotton patch and pick it by hand again. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Gramma

Everything seems to be going up except the paychecks or the social security. When will it stop?

sidneymarie

I was talking to the owner of my local QS and he said that some the fabric dealers like moda and hoffman said that there was a pretty bad drought going on in China and the crops were really down and that is the reason for the increase.

fmd36

Wheat...drought and fires in Russia and Egypt let it rot in the fields. Great way to drive the prices up. My investment advisor says it is a good time to buy bullets and beans (ha-ha)

2ursula

Not a bad idea, but those 'traders' sleep under a blanket not made from cotton but from money, and that warms pretty well.

Luckily, they also live in a house of cards:

People in third world countries where they make all those nice goodies like cotton fabrics for pennies a pound
a) are not stupid and
b) have wireless these days.

Cotton growers in many parts of the world are squeezed to the brink of existence these days, while traders get rich beyond any merit. You think those people who lose the fruit of their labor to bankers and traders are not even angrier than we are (or more desperate)?

People will do the smart thing, get together with some Western entrepreneurs and bypass the official markets.
Just let the prices go up a little more. It will happen, it always does. Where there is opportunity (speak: money), there will be entrepreneurs. Those price spirals always get stopped, especially when working folks get poorer from paycheck to paycheck and the customers have no choice but to stay home.

2ursula

Yes, the secret behind it are our Government's subventions.

It takes 0.7 gallons of gasoline to run the tractors and machines to produce 1 gallon of ethanol.

1 gallon of ethanol has only 70 % of the energy that's in a gallon of gasoline. (So if you would use the corn energy for the production of corn ethanol you would have left almost nothing over. The system would use for the production almost everything it produces. I am NOT kidding and I am not the only one who can hardly believe this insanity.)

The production costs for corn ethanol are so high that our Government pays more than $2.00 fore each gallon of corn ethanol (aside from the other subventions).

And this insanity, which makes healthy food and other essentials too expensive for poor people, robs the soil of too many nutrients and with its mono-cultures does a hell of a lot of damage to the environment and the weather -
all this mind-bogling incomprehensible stupidity -
is run by our representatives.

It is in fact our fault.

We elected those watchamacall'em!

sewin'sam

What? AGAIN???? Not coffee! & cotton???? Oh nooooooo! :-o

madamekelly

This is what happens when our government pays people not to grow things! Artificial inflation, and people who do not pay taxes on production- No garden, No taxes. People think welfare is expensive, but it does not cost near as much to our economy as these stupid programs do. Too bad the bozos who started this #%%$#@^&*()*^$# program are not here to enjoy what they have done to our economy.

penski

well in that case i need to head on down to the fabric store and stock up !!!!! sounds like a good reason to me

Quiltntime

I read that too. One reason for the price hike in cotton is due to the floods in China where a good percentage of our cotton comes from. Hopefully, the crops will be plentiful next year.