State Moves to Subsidize Mustache Wax Crop

(Montrose) The State of Colorado today jumped into the ongoing mustache wax controversy with two feet and a handful of cash. Insisting the industry is on its heels and carefully illustrating the affects of another bad harvest agricultural experts are worried.

“We would come out of this OK with a couple of normal summers,” said Jake Beard, a third-generation mustache wax grower up Peach Valley, “but that still doesn’t pay the bills. It only grows a bigger ball of wax for our kids to handle.”

The United States currently imports some 80% of all mustache wax sold in this country. That represents a major setback since as recently as 1990 American farmers produced over 80% of the mustache wax sold worldwide. The perishable crop demands warm days, cool nights and sandy soil, the kind found in the mountain valleys of Colorado and New Mexico.

“It’s the same as growing grapes,” said Beard. “The conditions must be perfect of the crop falls on its face.”

Although demand for the gourmet, or caviar, wax as it is sometimes called has remained constant in light of changing facial fashion statements. The problem is and has been a steady flow of product from the fields. Consumer advocates say that when the product is not on the shelves the buyer soon forgets about it or realizes he can do without it.

“That is the saga of mustache wax in this country today,” said Beard. “I don’t know how my kids will make a living down the road. Maybe they will open a ski area or go to massage school.”

According to a preliminary plan mustache wax farmers will be eligible for such state relief packages as cheaper fuel allotments, communal labor, free fertilizer drops, irrigation improvements, interior assessment modules, breakthrough insect control techniques and a mule, oxen or water buffalo (one per family please).

“We must rid ourselves of the middle man and deal directly with the mills that produce the wax,” stressed Beard. “As the old saying goes: Give a man a butterfly for lunch and he’ll be back tomorrow looking for an encore; but give a man a butterfly net and he’ll catch his own damn butterflies.”

Beard, who says he never eats butterflies, even on the Fourth of July, has threatened to shave off his mustache in protest until the matter is resolved.

– Dinty Moore