Inflation Slams Corn, Lumber And GON

Tight supplies, high demand—a perfect recipe for skyrocketing prices.

Looking to build a new box stand overlooking a deer feeder? Pump the brakes on that idea. In less than a year, the price of lumber has increased 380%, and corn prices have jumped 145%.

Lots of deer feeders are slap empty right now because of the cost of corn. It is a good time to consider storing the deer feeders in the garage for a while. Let your deer relearn how to browse. Yellow acorns are about to be a luxury many hunters won’t be able to afford.

In addition to figuring out where your oak trees are located, you might also consider planting some food plots this year. And if you’ve been feeding corn and not planting food plots, you might want to consider planting food plots anyway—not because of corn prices, but because you will do the wildlife lots more good.

Corn is already sky-high, and experts believe it could reach all-time record levels. Eight dollars a bag is going to be the good-old days, kind of like a buck-seventy-five for a gallon of gas.

What if corn hits $15 a bag? How many hunters are still going to spend $30 to fill a trough feeder that the deer and coons will empty in three days?

It’s not just a lack of supply and high demand that’s causing skyrocketing prices. It’s hard to produce a product when no one wants to work.

Bob Bauer, executive director of a forest industries association, said, “I’ve been out in the last month visiting a number of mills and nearly every place I go they’re looking for employees and can’t find them. The number one thing that I hear, especially out in the rural areas of the state and from my counterparts in the South, is with all of the packages that have been put together—the high amount of money that’s going into unemployment—they simply can’t compete with somebody that can sit at home and make that kind of money instead of working.”

If that’s not obvious, if you can’t admit the fact that government checks paying more than an actual job aren’t a factor in all this mess, you’re lying—either to yourself or to others.

Back to the cost of things… Corn and lumber aren’t the only things going up. The cost of the paper this magazine is printed on has gone up—and keeps going up. Like every business right now, GON is about to have to make some difficult decisions. The cost of this magazine to y’all will likely be affected.

When you buy a bag of potato chips, do you know what it cost last year? Do you know what it cost 15 years ago? Or do you just put the sack of Lays in the cart because you want some chips? I worry that a GON price increase will feel a lot different, and certainly not because folks value GON less than they value a bag of chips. The opposite is true—GON means a heck of a lot to a lot of people. And for 15 years now, the price of GON hasn’t changed. Since 2007, the price for a year’s worth of GON has been $20 bucks. There’s comfort in that continuity.

We mentioned the cost of printing the magazine is going up. Since 2007, the last time the price of GON increased, there have been nine rate increases by the U.S. Postal Service. The cost to mail GON looks dramatically different than it did 15 years ago.

If we raise the price of GON, we have a number in mind, one that makes business sense and that gives us a clear path forward to continue this awesome community. In my opinion, GON will still be a huge value. The difference will be less than 42 cents a month, less than a dime and a penny a week.

There are business experts who might say we’re nuts for letting customers know a price increase might be coming. But y’all aren’t customers. GON is a community. I’d rather let y’all know than it be a surprise. If another 42 cents a month is going to be too painful, please renew now. We will simply add 12 or 24 issues to your account at the current price.

If you love GON as I do, don’t just commit to renewing, please introduce a hunter or fishermen to what this magazine has done and continues to do for sportsmen. There are parts of GON that many people use for free—the website, the Woody’s Forum, the Georgia Deer Records, Lake Records…

But those are not free to produce, far from it. They take time and effort by real people, and without those real people, without GON, none of this continues to exist.