Editorial / Opinions

I made a mistake in my last column. I mentioned a train wreck in Bois D’Arc, Mo., I thought I’d seen in an old picture. Turns out, back in the old days they sold postcards with pictures of train wrecks on them, and Ryan’s great-grandparents had picked those postcards up somewhere along their travels in life. Sorry for the mistake, and the confusion. Clearly I should be more careful when digging through old pictures. But I will remind you, that oh-so-short bull I saw in the photos and mentioned last time? He was real. Can you believe just how much the way we raise cattle, farm, live has changed in the last Century?

Here's an old story of a boy I once knew and identified with. I bet some of you will feel the same about this boy and his adventure.

My wife and I were watching the local news one evening recently when one of those odd “human interest” stories grabbed our attention. A recent immigrant to our country was trying to raise money in order to pay a “dowry” to the father of the woman he was wishing to marry, back in his home country. The “dowry” was what caught our attention, because the groom had to come up with 110 cows in order to receive permission from the father to wed the young lady. My wife and I were appalled, but for very different reasons.

A few weeks ago Ryan was cleaning out the attic in his 100-plus year old house, and found boxes of very old family photos, including a few livestock photos (one of a very muscled, short bull), pictures of a train wreck decades upon decades old, class photos from his great-great grandparents’ school days and more. My, how times have changed. We just have to look to nations like Haiti to see how our advancements have helped us live better, healthier and happier, even in our own times of peril.

Everyone makes jokes about rural fire departments, like the one about how 'the old boys go by and polish the red truck every Saturday night, and polish off a few six packs, too.' Or, 'they’ve never lost a concrete foundation yet...' But when it comes down to push and shove over fires, I hope you have as good a rural fire department as I do.

It has been a daily adventure getting around the farm over the past month, considering we went almost 30 days with the temperature rarely getting above the freezing mark and nightly lows in the single digits or lower. Then, throw in about a foot of snow during that same period of time, along with a howling north wind and a little freezing rain for good measure, and the old farm truck seemed to be permanently locked in four-wheel drive. I thought I surely had slipped and slid as much as in the past five winters combined, and things couldn’t get much worse… and then came “the January thaw.”

A few weeks ago Ryan was cleaning out the attic in his 100-plus year old house, and found boxes of very old family photos, including a few livestock photos (one of a very muscled, short bull), pictures of a train wreck near Bois D’Arc (decades upon decades old), class photos from his great-great grandparents’ school days and more. My, how times have changed. We just have to look to nations like Haiti to see how our advancements have helped us live better, healthier and happier, even in our own times of peril.

"When I grow up,” grumbled the kid, “I’m gonna live in the city.”

One of the toughest challenges I faced during our recent bout of “global warming” was to keep the ponds open enough for the cattle to have fresh water. The first morning wasn’t too bad when I chopped a roughly four foot by six foot hole in the ice, but after more than two weeks of near-zero morning temps, the hole had become not much more than a one by one indentation that allowed one cow a time to quench her thirst. It made me wonder if there wasn’t an easier way to get the job done, when I remembered a couple of stories from neighbors and friends.

How about this weather? Do these record-setting, freezing temps mean we’re experiencing “global cooling” now? The new verbiage I hear on the radio has been “climate change,” since newscasters can’t talk with a straight face about “global warming” when Florida’s winter crops of strawberries and oranges are threatened with record lows.