Barack Obama is tasking his new economic team with figuring out how to create 2.5 million new jobs in his first two years in office. As Peter Cohan commented, much of this new work will likely involve construction: building (and rebuilding) roads, bridges, schools, and wind farms, among other infrastructure-focused initiatives.

I was struck with how this news coincided with news that prices were dropping in American commodity crops -- wheat, corn and soybeans. As I was mulling this over I was chatting with a friend who's on the board of my city's farmer's market. The vendors reported that what they desperately needed was help: workers who understood their products to help sell them in the many local markets, and most of all, more farmers to grow produce and make dairy products and preserves, more farmers to raise and cure meats. And I thought of Michael Pollan, and his call for the President-Elect to encourage millions more Americans to become farmers.

Why not combine these great ideas?

Farmers whose families have been working the land for generations should be called in to advise new Wall Street traders every year. Because in farm life is the hardscrabble reality of boom-and-bust cycles. When prices went sky-high for wheat, corn and soybeans over the past years, you did not see growers spending their wealth on fast pickup trucks and fancy overalls; no, they kept telling reporters and economists that this wasn't going to last.

They were right. Wheat, which had hovered for years around $4 a bushel, had risen to $10 and is now flattening at $5; less than the current cost in fuel, seed and fertilizer to grow it. Farmers like Jimmy Wayne Kinder, who held back their wheat hoping to sell at the top of the market, are "kicking" themselves, and demonstrating that they, too, have an emotional connection to their holdings and have trouble letting go even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it's time to sell. As the prices fell, farmers waited for a rebound that never came.

Farmland was hot, too, with speculative buyers purchasing Midwest real estate for prices nearing $1,000 an acre, the record set in the 1970s. Now they're back around $500 and farmers are recalling lessons the traders never have time to learn: patience. If automakers, mortgage lenders, and Wall Street firms could learn this lesson; scrimping and saving in the down economies but not behaving like kings in the boom times; perhaps bailouts wouldn't be required.

It's interesting, too, that the article doesn't mention another reality of the farmers' market forces; as demand for conventionally-grown wheat, corn and soy drops, demand for organically- and sustainably-grown meats, produce and grains is rising. I plan to stand in line at 9 a.m. Sunday morning with my three boys for the chance at paying $60 for an heirloom turkey raised by a farmer I know; I've cut out breakfast cereal and alcohol from my budget so I can pay more at the farmer's market. Perhaps the American economy isn't collapsing, but returning back to a more sensible place; where friendly, interdependent, local, sustainable economies thrive and the global economy is a distant memory.

While the stock market is going strong right now, I'm not as hopeful about its prospects as this year moves forward. I think we're starting to see what will be serious fallout from the subprime market collapse. That said, I have been researching and searching for unique opportunities in 2007 where we can find undervalued companies serving niche markets that won't dip -- even with a market dip. What sectors are less impacted? How about things like institutional coffee?

Hotels still need to offer it, delis will still sell it, offices supply it. This is why when there seems to be rocky times ahead, I look to companies like Farmer Brothers Co. (NASDAQ: FARM) to make a buck.

An institutional coffee roaster that sells a variety of coffee, spices, flavored drinks, soup bases and related products like filters, creamers, teas, and cups to restaurants, hotel/motels, convenience stores, healthcare facilities, and offices in 28 states, Farmer Brothers is family run and has been around since 1912. It knows its business inside and out, and 60% of it comes from coffee sales. When the economy takes a hit, people may tighten their wallets in terms of high-end coffee purchases --perhaps the $4 lattes will go -- but institutions still need to provide the requisite thermos of coffee with the accompanying creamers and cups. While Farmer has been underperforming of late, it has hired a new COO, Roger M. Laverty III, and is investing in a big brand-awareness push this year.

In April, FARM bought Coffee Bean International (CBI), a specialty coffee roaster in Oregon, for about $22 million in cash, with promised near-term investments to ramp up CBI's production. CBI will continue to be a separate company under its current management, but its synergistic overlap with FARM will allow it to improve its margins while retaining an artisan feel. This is a smart purchase in my opinion, one that allows FARM greater growth and improves its reach, pushing it into the fastest growing segment in the coffee market -- that of specialty coffees -- while at the margins enjoyed by its larger scale production and distribution mechanisms of its institutional, traditional coffee sales.

Of course, I like a dividend, too. Farmer Brothers has paid a dividend to its shareholders every year since 1953.

Type of stock: A small-cap niche stock in the food manufacturing industry, FARM dreives 60% of its revenues from coffee sales to institutional outfits, and recently bought specialty coffee roaster, Coffee Bean International.

Stock Price: Currently trading at $21.14, with solid fundamentals, I don't think FARM will be negatively affected by any market dip. Hotels and hospitals still need to offer coffee, after all. We could see this one hit $30 by year's end.

Hilary Kramer is a financial editor and money coach for AOL and an authority on investing. Visit her at www.hilarykramer.com.

A big crop report released this morning is once again bringing a lot of attention to corn and the global demand for ethanol. It all makes sense. With democracy and capitalism flourishing around the world, the demand for energy will boom and ethanol is a viable way to provide lower emissions fuel.

Even President Bush in his State of the Union address called for the United States to become less dependent on foreign oil. His solution: corn-based Ethanol?

However, as a reminder, investing is about "skating where the puck is going to be" as hockey great Wayne Gretsky used to say. Or as legendary John Templeton would say, look for points of "maximum pessimism."

There is little that is pessimistic about the outlook for corn today. Farmers throughout the U.S. are going to be planting it this season. Why? Because corn prices are approaching 10-year highs and the wide-spread belief is there is money to be made.

Conversely, the argument to invest in cotton might be more compelling. In a Barron's interview (subscription required) in January, Art Samberg of Pequot Capital said while cotton consumption in the US has been in decline, China's consumption, which has been growing nicely, is picking up more steam. Cotton consumption in the U.S. has fallen from 12 million to 5 million bales a year due to the growth of polyester and other materials. However, Textile spending is on a big upswing in China -- up 27% in '06, after jumping 36% in '05. Chinese consumption, which had been growing 4% to 6% per year, is now growing 15% per year.

Samberg said go long the December '07 cotton contract. Strong corn and soybean prices means U.S. farmers are going to remove acreage from cotton to earn better profits in corn and soybeans.

Supposedly, there have only been four times since 1913 when cotton was this cheap relative to grains like corn and wheat, with the last time being 1974. From 1974 to 1976, cotton tripled in price.

I'm a libraphile (is that the word?) and I began filling my children's shelves with books years before I had even purchased my first pregnancy test. By far my favorite image in any book is the overleaf of Blueberries for Sal, a bucolic and all-blue illustration of Sal and her mother. They are canning blueberries in a 40s-era kitchen, complete with hand-cranked egg beater, polka-dot curtains, and a cast-iron wood cooking stove. Every time I gaze at that picture I believe for a second that I will go downstairs and preserve something in one of the old-fashioned Ball jars I found at a garage sale.

Alas, it never quite happens that way, but just reading the book makes me feel connected to the farm-wife ideal. Much like a wander through today's grocery store aisles. As Kim Severson mentions in today's New York Times, she feels smug when she puts a bag of Cascadian Farm organic French fries in her grocery cart (she calls is "greenwashing" and the marketers call it "an authentic narrative"): "a gentle image of a field or a farm ... suggest[s] an ample harvest gathered by an honest, hard-working family." And in creating these images for us, in selling us the hard-working farm family, marketers know that just for a minute we've left our wired, fossil-fuel-guzzling lives for a hand-hewn pine kitchen table in that log house in Maine.

In short, we're being sold our ideal lifestyle in a box, bag or can.

Investing in organics has been a hot trend in the past few years. Demand for organic products is so high that some companies, like Stonyfield Farms, can't find enough organic milk to deliver on its organic yogurt orders. Organic farmers are doing well and news that even Wal-Mart would offer organic produce has inspired headlines that queried, will organics soon be everywhere?

In a word, no. And what's more, it's looking like betting on organics is bad for you, financially. Whole Foods Market, Inc. (NASDAQ:WFMI), long the darling of healthy-minded investors, isn't growing fast enough. The stock is down 27% since last week. This, coupled with news that Wal-Mart might be struggling with its organics goals, has us all wondering if we should just embrace pesticides after all.

As Alyce Lomax points out and we've mentioned a number of times here on BloggingStocks, the true irony about all this is that truly faithful organics fans are almost angrily opposed to large, industrial farms. So that, by embracing this positive, healthy movement -- by making organic Rice Krispies, of all things -- in the blindly optimistic American way, which is by standardizing, industrializing, making really really big ... American businesses are perverting everything that is organic. [The Onion made hilarious fun of this trend in a satire here.] It's just not "sustainable" if it's done in tons for the Kellogg Company (NYSE:K). As BusinessWeek says so eloquently, it's "the organic paradox: The movement's adherents have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but success has imperiled their ideals."

Not only have ideals been imperiled, but also: profit. See here's the thing.