The last time I filled my 2500 up, I groaned. If you’re buying diesel anywhere, you probably are too.

From empty to full at $5.99/gallon at Kickstart in Sturgis this week, it’s over $215 to fill my Chevy. That’s one pickup. 

For a guy getting ready to harvest this fall with a 300-plus-gallon tank in his combine, add a zero. Close to two grand to fill one machine to harvest $5.30 corn.

The math is tight. Especially if you’re not “farming with the government.”

If you told the 80-year-old farmer with a cigar hanging out of his mouth, getting ready for his 75th harvest, that a contested ocean passage on the other side of the world and a fight with an Islamic theocracy was impacting his bottom line, he’d tell you how stupid it was that we were screwing around over there at all.

But we are.

Diesel hit a record Friday at $5.85 a gallon, beating the 2022 high, not because of a refinery fire in Texas, but because of the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty percent of the world’s oil goes through a ditch 21 miles wide. Iran knows it. We know it. When Iran shoots at a tanker, or the Houthis shoot a drone, or we drop bombs, and the administration tells us we’ve “won” against Iran again, the price at the pump in Sturgis jumps 40 cents overnight.

We are not energy independent when our diesel price depends on whether a speedboat in the Persian Gulf had a good day.

Next week, September 15th and 16th, the Federal Reserve will meet and likely raise interest rates. Again. UBS, Citi, all of them now say two hikes this year. Why? Because the jobs report was too good. Americans went to work. 162,000 jobs were added in August.

So the reward for working is a higher interest rate on your operating loan.

You are paying record diesel, driven up by a war on the other side of the planet, to harvest a crop that pays prices from a few years ago, with borrowed money that just got more expensive because your neighbor got a job, and that borrowed money loses value to inflation every day, and your equipment will be more expensive next year.

You can’t tell a combine to use less fuel. You can’t tell the bank you don’t want the higher rate. You can’t tell the elevator you want $7 corn. You pay it and hope it doesn’t break down the same week.

For three years, we’ve been told inflation is transitory, then cooling, then contained. Diesel at an all-time high is not contained. That’s a fire, set by foreign policy that doesn’t even aim for regime change, to make this a temporary problem.

The people who set this policy will not feel it. They don’t fill a 36-gallon tank with their own card. They don’t have a $500,000 operating note that just went from 7.5% to 8%. They’re not watching the futures in the cab of a tractor.

There is a fix, but it’s not a new program. It’s less of what got us here.

Stop pricing American work off a chokepoint we don’t control. Drill, refine, and move our own oil without apologizing for it. If we are going to be the world’s superpower, we shouldn’t be begging for calm in the Strait of Hormuz to keep a combine running in Meade County.

If we’re not going to be energy independent, and we’re going to be beggar lords hoping for the kindness of foreign powers, then make the foreign policy moves to be allies with those who run those vital chokepoints… or make the moves necessary to change enemy leadership into regimes that will provide stability to their people and preference to American business.

At home, we need to stop punishing work. Raising rates because Americans got jobs is a Wall Street solution to a Main Street problem. A rancher doesn’t raise the price of hay because he had a good day. He is just glad he had the extra hay to sell.

But somewhere between that 80-year-old farmer on his 75th harvest and my generation on maybe our 25th, we have to ask — how many more times are we going to be told this is as good as it gets?

Because $6 diesel, $5 corn, and 300,000 tons of foreign mystery meat isn’t as good as it gets, it’s as bad as it can get without people quitting.

But in South Dakota, people don’t quit. They groan at the pump and get back to work. Our Statewide unemployment numbers prove we’re not quitters.

If all else fails, maybe change the name of that Middle Eastern ditch to the Strait of America, since random name changes seem to be the kind of policy this administration really finds important. People like to get upset and debate about those while everything else burns.

Then again, maybe the goal is to keep us distracted from actual problems a couple of months before the election.

And we can’t even blame Iran for that.

Collin Duprel is a guest columnist for the Rapid City Post. Opinions expressed may not necessarily represent the views of the Rapid City Post, its affiliates, or advertisers.