Lindsay Snyder as the designated titular character is the new high school teacher in the small town of Buffalo Valley in North Dakota. Her romance with local farmer Gage is telegraphed early on but the book documents the 200-odd inhabitants of the town in particular the ‘downtown’ businessmen and woman and the families who parent her flock of students.
Although nominally a romance this book is more the chronicle of small town life on the prairies.
The book highlights the dilemma faced by farmers. If the weather is bad they may have no crop to sell but have still incurred debt to finance that crop; if they experience a bumper crop the law of supply and demand may deflate prices to a point where growing the crop is no longer profitable. Governments may issue crop insurance but that is yet another cost. Government programs such as marketing boards set quotas and set prices that can often be bested outside the system. Independent minded farmers resent government interference in their business. Quota systems end up seeing producers buying and selling quotas at exorbitant rates. If your cows produce milk beyond your quota the price you get for it is negligible. And in common with fisherman the price the consumer pays for food reflects the cost of transportation, warehousing, storage, packaging, and processing--money the grower does not see.
Although nominally a romance this book is more the chronicle of small town life on the prairies.
The book highlights the dilemma faced by farmers. If the weather is bad they may have no crop to sell but have still incurred debt to finance that crop; if they experience a bumper crop the law of supply and demand may deflate prices to a point where growing the crop is no longer profitable. Governments may issue crop insurance but that is yet another cost. Government programs such as marketing boards set quotas and set prices that can often be bested outside the system. Independent minded farmers resent government interference in their business. Quota systems end up seeing producers buying and selling quotas at exorbitant rates. If your cows produce milk beyond your quota the price you get for it is negligible. And in common with fisherman the price the consumer pays for food reflects the cost of transportation, warehousing, storage, packaging, and processing--money the grower does not see.
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