A Tip for Taz & Others Who May Need Diesel Post y2k:

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IMHO if fuel gets scarce, farmers will have some kind of priority; makes sense don't you think?? Here in Oklahoma, a person can go to their county tax assessor(NOT treasurer) and fill out an application for an agricultural sales tax exemption. When you have the card issued to you by the state, you can buy diesel with red dye in it for your tractor & farm use without paying any state sales tax on it. If you are caught on the highway with the fuel in your diesel pickup, there is a BIG fine. Also, you don't have to pay sales tax on animal feed, and other farm "type" things like cattle vaccination medicine, etc,etc. The diesel is delivered to our 500 gallon farm tank - we recently bought more tanks and now have a capacity for about 2,000 gallons. In this state, in addition to real estate tax, we are taxed on "personal" property - which includes cattle, all types of farm equipment, etc. Therefore when you fill out your application, it may be a good idea to list something like "asparagus" as the farm type thing that you will be producing for sale to the public. Then they ask what type of equipment you have, you can answer "a shovel". If your state does not have such a sales tax exemption arrangement, then go to the Farm Service Agency for your county - this used to be the ASCS office. Fill out their paperwork to get a federal farm number from them. Plant a few pecan trees, plant asparagus, put down something that would qualify you as a food/fibre producer. I really believe that "farmers" will get first dibs on fuel;particularly when the overseas food supply line crashes along with the overseas oil supply.

-- jeanne (jeanne@hurry.now), July 24, 1999

Answers

P.S. Some farm tractors use propane as fuel. I suppose the sales tax exemption would work for that also. Like TP, you cannot store too much fuel. (propane is 62 cents per gallon here right now; and is scheduled to go up!)

-- jeanne (jeanne@hurry.now), July 24, 1999.

I grew up on a farm in southwest Oklahoma, and we used to buy butane "on the short ticket" (without taxes) for our farm tractors. If we heard one of the state inspectors were in town, we changed the dual carburetor out of the picket and disconnected the fuel line from the tank in the pickup bed to the engine. Then, when they were gone, we put it back. Having a big tank of propane in the back of the pickup was real handy if we or one of the trailers got a flat. Typically, my dad would air it up with butane. Now that I am off the farm, this just boggles my mind to think about, but it was quite common back then. You always had to tell the guys at the filling station "there's butane in the tire" so they wouldn't smoke while they were fixing it.

This reminds me, that one of the things that i don't have in my storage is baling wire. And as any farmer knows, you can fix just about anything with baling wire, hehehe.

-- robert waldrop (rmwj@soonernet.com), July 24, 1999.


Right on Robert! Baling wire is a close second to duct tape!! What county/town were you from in SW Okla...I'm in Comanche county, the Lawton/Ft.Sill area.

-- jeanne (jeanne@hurry.now), July 24, 1999.

I'm from Tillman County (4th generation), in a rural section of the Frederick-Davidson Metroplex. Many of my cousins and other relatives are still in the area, I haven't lived there since 1975, although I visit every year (sometimes more often). Yes, I remember when going to Lawton was going to the big city. As far as i am concerned, however, the city fathers destroyed the soul of that town when it razed the downtown redlight/bar district and put up that mall. 77 bars in a six block area, I remember from news stories in the 60s. It was quite a right of passage for teenagers in the area to head over to Lawton and buy a beer in the bars, pretending to be soldiers.

Groping for some y2k relevance, besides being a good place to buy cheap farm land which will usually receive enough rain to grow something edible (emphasis on "usually" as there have been some notable exceptions over the years), a large number of the cotton farmers in the area have switched to corn due to the relentless immigration of the boll weevil into the area. The idea originally was to plant the corn, insure it, then the dry weather would kill it, and then collect on the insurance. This year, however, they have had oodles of rain, and the corn is doing quite fine. So there will be quite a bit of corn harvested in that area and probably stored in the elevators. And corn is a lot more edible than cotton (although the cotton seed oil is quite useful as a food product, or you could make BIODIESEL out of it (There, I did it, finally returned to some semblance of respect for the thread subject.)

I expect that if faced with a major fuel shortage, many farmers will begin making their own fuel. i remember my Daddy talking about (in the early 1960s, when everybody was worried about nuclear war), that if we had one and the refineries were destroyed, we would make alcohol and methane gas and run our tractors and pickups off of those fuels. There's alcohol for gasoline engines, methane gas for propane/butane engines, and biodiesel for diesel engines. Biodiesel can be used in a diesel engine without modifications to the engine, either mixed with regular diesel or straight biodiesel.

Biodiesel is made by mixing lye and methanol, and then mixing this product with any kind of vegetable or animal oil. a byproduct of the first step will be glycerine soap.

There's a whole series of websites devoted to this subject. the "Veggie Van" is probably the best place to start:

www.veggievan.org

Robert Waldrop, "Bobby Max"

-- robert waldrop (rmwj@soonernet.com), July 24, 1999.


Yes Robert - 77 bars in a 6 block area!!! Murders galore! Some people called it "Little Chicago", but most people used the artillery term: "Impact Zone". Another tip for fuel: Do you remember as a teen going into a oil well tank battery area and "requisitioning" the high-octane "drip" that could be had with a little patience???

-- jeanne (jeanne@hurry.now), July 25, 1999.


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