I’m often asked by young students what they should study in college in order to become a professional writer. If I was one, perhaps I’d know. Other than the four mandatory years of English in high school, I’ve never taken a writing class in my life. Never.

I’m sure you’ve read about the VFD. It’s kind of like BVD, bovine viral diarrhea, only VFD is a disease of the bureaucracy. In my opinion, it’s just another in a long line of regulations to fix something that wasn’t broke.

A rancher must wear proper headgear at all times. He or she only takes off his or her hat in two instances: at a funeral or when soliciting funds from the banker.

My shrewd buddy Everett came by for a visit today. I haven’t seen him for a while because he’s been hauling stock, driving his John Deere and learning how to operate a backhoe.

My nephew and I were in the grocery store the other day when he spied a department store Santa Claus who had just finished his shift. It must have been a hard one, too – because the Santa was buying a bottle of booze.

The time period leading up to Christmas is my favorite time of year, but as for the big day itself, Santa Claus seems to have lost our address. There are fewer packages under the tree with each passing year, and my wife has taken to wrapping boxes and placing them under the tree so there is something to unwrap Christmas morning.

The bull business is very competitive, and purebred people play to win. Because there’s a limited number of buyers, breeders spend a fortune on color ads and hire their own field men to exhort ranchers to come to their sale.

I have an embarrassing admission to make. In my life, I’ve fed, raised and traded thousands of cattle – and yet, as far as I know, I have yet to eat a bite of any of them. I never fed out a home-grown steer or stuffed our freezer with hamburger from an old lump-jaw cow.

In the May 30 edition of the Auction Exchange, there was an ad celebrating the Midwest Auctioneer Roundup contest in Shipshewana, Indiana.

I love feeding animals. No, I’m not talking about absentee feeding, where you pay way too much for a load of hard-doing 8-weight chronic steers, send them to a feedyard, get feed bills and death slips every month and sell them on the rail for less than you paid for them to begin with.