Blogs

There are plenty of hay producers I’ve visited this year who, although they’re concerned with export tariffs, congressional partisanship and immigration wars, are still taking care of individual customers – every day. They still put their boots on and go to work. They still provide the product and service their customers require. Although global chaos may reign, they’re still taking care of business at home.

As any producer would tell you, sometimes the only way to get a job done is to pull on your boots and get to work.

We have a yearling heifer that always finds the hole in the fence. As a calf, she would snuggle next to the fence for a sunny nap and wake up on the other side. She would bellow and holler at her mama, who would in turn bellow and holler at us.

‘Finish the job’ heart

It was the summer my brother Neal was my main hay bale-throwing helper. He was the only one of us to whom football was important. (This good-sized kid, almost as big as me, was infuriated he was not quite big enough for a serious college football career.)

I was sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop open, completely focused on the information in front of me. We had scheduled a couple of loads of fat cattle to be shipped later that week and, with the razor-thin margins, I was ever so interested in what the market was telling me that morning.

It’s my professional duty to pry.

Quite often, someone will say, “You’ve got to come see my …” – meaning their new invention, their operation, their business model or their product. It runs against my editorial grain to promote any element, so we (as an editorial team) are pretty careful in the writing approach to these “front” stories, as I call them.