When I was 6 years old, we got a pair of lambs. My dad built them a special shelter. I petted them, bottle fed them, put on little collars and broke them to lead. I would have slept with them if I could have snuck them past my mother and into the bedroom.

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world. —John Milton

People like to say experience is the best teacher. Growing up on a ranch with a yard full of trees and pastures full of animals willing and able to both insult and injure my body, experience often came in the form of a good wreck.

Welcome to the random ramblings and humble thoughts from an addled producer and agricultural advocate. I am a farmer and rancher from the northern Flint Hills in Pottawatomie County, Kansas, and a former county extension agent.

If you really want to know what people think, ask a child. Children have a unique way of being brutally frank because they haven’t been schooled in the art of filtering their thoughts. Ask any fourth grader and they will tell you that farmers are older, male, Caucasian, poor, dirty and uneducated.

Runners often rhapsodize about something called an “endorphin high,” which apparently occurs when you punish your body until it begins to crank out its own painkillers in self-defense. As thrilling as that sounds, I usually pass. My lungs are not meant to bleed.

For sake of clarity, in my part of the world, ranchers raise cattle and farmers raise crops. I am not a farmer. My husband can testify that I never will be, no matter how often he is forced to stuff me in a tractor.

A few years ago, my husband and I made a rodeo swing through Idaho that involved starting on the southern end of the state then traveling most of the night to the northern end.