Editorial / Opinions

It's garden season! For those of you who followed my gardening experiences last year, I started the growing season of 2007 with the idea of planting my great-grandmother’s heirloom tomatoes, but was unsuccessful at getting seeds to start. So instead I planted a few baby tomato plants in a small garden in my backyard.

The good news is that our nation is better off today than perhaps ever before.
The bad news is that the United States is deeper in debt than ever before. And that is ominous to the dangerous degree.

The only times in my life when I have lived anywhere other than the wide-open spaces of rural America were the few short years I attended college. I didn't enjoy the constraints of urban life then, and I sure haven't mellowed with age, but for the past week (and probably for some time longer) I have become an urban dweller as I stay with my oldest son who is hospitalized out of state with a serious infection.

As a freshman in high school, I was fortunate to be selected to attend the National FFA Convention in Kansas City, Mo.  I had rarely been outside the Ozarks and had certainly never eaten in a fancy restaurant – unless you count the local Dairy Princess Drive-In – which you shouldn’t.  So, a gift from one of the local insurance firms in my hometown allowed our FFA Advisor to treat the five other boys and me to the experience of eating at the Golden Ox, one of the Midwest’s finest dining establishments. 

Every month I attend the Oklahoma Electric Coop State wide Association meeting in Okie City.  Since Ozarks Electric, where I am a director, serves a couple of counties in Oklahoma I’m their rep over there.  At a meeting earlier in the year a man came up to me asking about a horse and mule sale in Berryville, Ark.  His name is David Blackburn and he lives in Atoka, Okla.

Ethanol versus cattle, high input costs, high everything. Sometimes my banter of family, history and daily experiences seem to pale as column topics in the stressful climate of our industry. When we first started Ozarks Farm & Neighbor, our goal was to not be like the typical media outlets that tell mostly of the dark and dreary times. We want to tell the stories of hope, of forging ahead, of making a life on the farm work...

Sometimes, in my more somber moods, I wonder if mankind is pleasing to God - or mocking Him as we tinker with our laws of production and reproduction.

Ethanol versus cattle, high input costs, high everything. Sometimes my banter of family, history and daily experiences seem to pale as column topics in the stressful climate of our industry. When we first started Ozarks Farm & Neighbor, our goal was to not be like the typical media outlets that tell mostly of the dark and dreary times. We want to tell the stories of hope, of forging ahead, of making a life on the farm work...

Since August of last year, my part of the world has endured two major floods, four ice storms, a rare January tornado, and almost no measurable snow.  It has been an unusual winter and spring—to say the least.  Yet, when I visit with old-timers, none of them lay the blame on “global warming,” while that seems to be all I hear from the media these days.

Maybe writers know writers without being introduced.  Each spring I try to make a pilgrimage back to the southwest and one place I like to go to is Cochise County, Ariz.  It is the least touched land of the sprawling cities that ate up all the farmland, ranches, citrus orchards and feedlots I knew as a boy.  I visited Benson, Ariz.,  a sleepy town on the almost always dry San Pedro River that runs north—one of the few rivers in this continent that flows north for 100 miles.  Astraddle Interstate 10, this was a stage stop on the Butterfield Stages lines, the same ones rattleddown through northwest Arkansas, Fayetteville to Fort Smith and then across the Arkansas River and south to Fort Worth to end up in San Francisco.