Editorial / Opinions

"EPA can not stand for END PRODUCTION AGRICULTURE,” by far my favorite quote by Senator Roy Blunt during the 2012 Missouri State University Collegiate Farm Bureau Agricultural Forum.

It’s tornado season again in the Midwest. Actually, it’s tornado season year-round in my part of the world, but right now the storms are much more numerous, frequent and intense. Tornados activate different senses for different people. For some, fear is the primary feeling. Others experience tension, angst, elevated heart rate and blood pressure, increased sense of hearing, optical illusions as they gaze into the western sky, or all of the above. For me, the tornado warning brings on the smells of kerosene, oil cloth and canned peaches.

Has anyone ever touched your life in a positive life changing way? Is it possible to repay them? Or maybe the only way to do so is pay-it forward?

Who invented the combine? Hiram Moor did in 1834. I thought it was a man named McCormick who founded International Harvester Tractor and later also a truck company. Anyhow, Google can straighten it all out. The reciprocal mowing machine was a great invention. It replaced the sickle which many people called, “The Missouri Back Buster.” It had a crooked handle and you swung it two handed. That was what farmers used to cut wheat, rye, barley and hay with before the mowing machine.

As I was browsing through some obscure news stories last week, I stumbled across one from San Francisco that both interested and infuriated me. It seems that our government (you and me, the taxpayers) recently spent more than $200,000 of our money to transplant a single shrub from the path of a proposed superhighway to an undisclosed plant sanctuary where, mind you, tens of thousands more dollars will be spent to assure it lives the rest of its life in secret safety.

You know you’re getting old when you were thrown from a horse nearly a month ago and can still feel the affects. Don’t worry I’m all right, just not a spring chicken anymore despite how much I try to ignore it.

As I was browsing through some obscure news stories last week, I stumbled across one from San Francisco that both interested and infuriated me. It seems that our government (you and me, the taxpayers) recently spent more than $200,000 of our money to transplant a single shrub from the path of a proposed superhighway to an undisclosed plant sanctuary where, mind you, tens of thousands more dollars will be spent to assure it lives the rest of its life in secret safety.

Cattle theft reports are in the news nonstop in Missouri and even in Oklahoma and Arkansas as cattle prices continue to rise in the Ozarks. In March alone, the Livestock Marketing Association has listed six reports in Missouri, two in Oklahoma and one in Arkansas. And that doesn’t include the thefts that go without being reported. What can we do to prevent this from happening on our farms?

A couple of years ago we built on to our house and had a sand pile in the front yard. Some of the biggest cat tracks were seen in that sand pile and my brother-in-law who has hunted all his life said he thought I had a cougar passing through. I’ve given you my opinion on why the Arkansas Fish and Game won’t admit there are wild cougars or mountain lions in the state because if they did, they’d have to count and protect them since the eastern cougar is an endangered species. That would cost millions of dollars and they won’t bite on the bait.

   

I admit that I’m more than a little superstitious. I’ve been known to turn around in the middle of the road and take another route to my destination just to avoid the path of that black cat that had scampered across the highway ahead of me and I try to avoid any important plans whenever Friday the 13th rolls around. As far as stepladders and umbrellas go – they scare the heck out of me. It’s precisely because of these phobias that I knew I’d made a major blunder a couple of weeks ago when a neighbor asked, “How’s your calving season going, Jerry?”