All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Kelly Wallace is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

---

When producer Melissa Smith first mentioned the idea of doing a story on how more and more people, anxious about the stock market’s daily gyrations, are kissing their stocks and bonds goodbye and saying hello to unconventional investments, like alpacas, comic books and wine, I kind of thought these folks might be a little crazy. I mean, alpacas? How could the llama-like creatures possibly be profitable? And is it really wise to turn your back on your 401k and a market which, over the long run, traditionally brings in a positive return?

I don’t have the answers to all of those questions, but after doing the story for tonight’s CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, I admit I did wonder if breeding alpacas could turn me into a millionaire. No, I’m not entirely serious, but meeting Peggy Parks, who started investing in alpacas a year ago, did get me thinking.

Read full post…

Kelly Wallace is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

---

Ever wonder why a gallon of milk costs as much as it does (more than $4 at my local grocery store in New York City) and who benefits when the prices go up? We did.

That’s what led to tonight’s piece on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.

With the price of a gallon of whole milk up 15 percent in the past year (May 2007 – May 2008), we thought someone must be profiting big time. Could it be a great time to be a dairy farmer?

Not a chance.

We met Richard Byma, a dairyman in northern New Jersey for the past 36 years, who told us his costs are skyrocketing — feed and fertilizer have doubled in the past year, and rising gas prices at the pump mean higher farm fuel prices for his farm equipment.

Read full post…

Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

---

Who is winning with high corn prices? Perhaps a few smart corn speculators on La Salle Street in Chicago are laughing in their new Bentleys, and maybe there are some newly wealthy corn farmers who might enjoy the high prices a bushel fetches these days, but when you look at how crucial corn is in the supply stream of food we consume, your wallet is going to feel anything but happy.

The connection between corn and meat is simple; most of the meat you eat is fed corn. (I say "you" because I was born a vegetarian and have stayed that way. No judgments, though!) The scene of bucolic beef cattle grazing grass their entire lives is a rarity. There are still small organic farm operations that do that, but the majority of beef cattle end up in a feed lot for the last leg of their lives, where they are fed a diet high in corn. Lack of mobility and constant feeding helps the cows "beef up" and reach your dinner table sooner.

Farmers like Steve Foglesong at the Black Gold Ranch can try to keep his cattle on grass feed longer, he can try to "take more cows to market" and consequently have less mouths to feed but at some point his input costs will have to get passed onto consumers. No cattle farmer likes to have to get rid of their herd until it’s time because it takes two-to-three years to develop a single animal.

You'll actually feel the pinch faster if you are shopping for chicken or pork because the life cycles of these animals is shorter. When we caught up with David Hale, who helps run his tiny family farm in Campbell, Texas, he told us that the cycle of a chicken is somewhere around nine weeks and every time he has gone to buy feed for the past year, it has been higher. He even showed us his feed bills that were 50 percent higher than the year before – and they now included a fuel surcharge which wasn't there before.

Read full post…