Editorial / Opinions

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...

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.

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...

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.

I love trees and I love history. So it is no surprise that I am retelling these two great, historic tree tales.

Do you happen to belong to one of those families that has a problem with cattle?  By a problem I mean, no matter how bad the market, the weather, the finances or the morale, you still keep raising cattle.

Two subjects command attention today.
Whopping amounts of rainwater...
And the Fed rides again.

I love trees and I love history. So it is no surprise that I am retelling these two great, historic tree tales.