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The outside circle is an old cowhand reference. As the crew musters first thing in the morning, the cow boss will ask, “Who wants the outside circle?” In any pasture, there will be a far corner that requires a horse and rider to travel farther than the rest. Gus Bracket often volunteers for the outside circle – where there is nothing to distract him from pondering life’s big (and not so big) questions.
So the question you are all asking: What is a tail on a calf
worth? The answer was surprising; a tail is worth $400. At least the
calf without a tail was worth $400 less than the other misfits.
I had a friend in college who felt lethargic and fatigued. She went to the voodoo village, which was our nickname for the student health center, and the “doctor” diagnosed a vitamin C deficiency.
I run on Three Creek time. Few people run on Three Creek time, but only because there are just a few Three Creekers. We all run on Three Creek time. This time system is not unique, some of you reading this article live on – insert your redneck town here – time. I see some of you nodding in agreement, the rest of you are normal.
My wife learned to make this fudge and I begged her to stop. In the same
way a heroin addict is found dead with the needle still in their arm, I
was destined for death with my chubby cheeks stuffed with white fudge.
For most, their coffee is so foul-tasting that a double shot of cream and sugar is required as flavoring. As my grandmother would say, “If you waste your time with cream and sugar, why don’t you just drink hot chocolate with the children?” She would then smile a yellow-toothed grin and laugh with the breath of a not-yet-warm diesel engine.
My favorite ag-related cliché is, “Make hay when the sun shines.” I use this phrase to encourage my children to complete a task when the opportunity is ripe. I also use this phrase to encourage my baler operator to plant his keister in the seat of a tractor when the weather is prime. Ag clichés have a poignant meaning both on the farm and in polite society.
“I believe in the future of farming.” If you are an over-50-year-old FFA alumni, you recognize this as the first line in the FFA Creed. If you are a younger FFA alumni, like myself, you learned “I believe in the future of agriculture.” I know this distinction because I lived the transition.
Imagine the solutions a trained civil engineer could brainstorm if they
actually valued farmland as farmland. Folks from the rural parts of
Idaho and America must continually convince city planners of the
intrinsic value of farmland. We must maintain farming systems as they are …
as dirt.
With the holiday season approaching, I have created a list of the gifts that are wasted on me. First up … hair tonic. If you don’t know me well, I am so completely bald that I make bowling balls jealous. I can talk about the hair on my head in the singular rather than the plural. Obviously, hair tonic is a gift wasted on me.
I hate peas. It’s not the taste, it’s the texture. When I was a child, I would dutifully eat my peas. However, they would lodge in my gullet, my throat reflexively rejecting the fluorescent squishy spheres. I would chase the peas around my plate hoping, in vain, that the peas would tire of my harassment and evaporate from my plate.
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