At the outset, let me use a common term in today’s vernacular to describe the experience: Amazing! Absolutely amazing! All you want to know and are not afraid to ask. The fruit of scientific discovery, the best practices and the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s best thinkers is accessible to us.
Editor’s note: This column was originally published on Nov. 1, 2004.
I have a confession to make: I do not follow social media, but I do some doomscrolling.
Editor’s note: This was originally published May 30, 2005.
Some time back I saw a bumper sticker that read, “If you can read this, thank a teacher.” I quietly mumbled, “Amen.”
Jeepers Creepers, where’d ya get those peepers?” Now there’s a phrase you probably haven’t heard for a while. Perhaps you’ve never heard it. The line is from a song recorded by Louis Armstrong in the late 1930s.
As a twice-married man and a father, I have been made fully aware of all my faults. One of those faults is my temper. Over the years, I have learned to control that temper… until someone pushes all the right buttons.
As a mere lad of 60 years with some semblance of youth, or as some would say “denial,” I wrote about meeting the challenges of growing old in a column entitled “Seven Ways to Grow Old Gracefully.”
Fitting the pieces of a farm transition puzzle together can be challenging. Like a puzzle, you need to find the corner pieces first, then the outer straight edges to frame up the foundation.
David and his two grandsons decided to take the afternoon off and go to the county fair.
People who study those things tell us that the sense of smell is most closely related to our memory. An odor or fragrance can trigger a memory more quickly, they say, than sound, sight, touch or taste.
Unless the spigot shuts off in July, this ought to be a banner hay season across the upper Midwest.
The morning sun shined brightly through the front window of a newer house on the corner of a city block. Herman and his wife had moved there less than a year ago.
You may have heard the latest buzz about a technology that will forever change the worlds of business, communication, entertainment, education and … agriculture. We’re talking about massive advancements in artificial intelligence or “AI.”
When I was about 11 years old, I subscribed to Boy’s Life magazine, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. I was not a member of the Boy Scouts, but I enjoyed the magazine.
Editor’s note: Today’s Farm and Ranch Life article is written by a guest author in Montana, Darla Tyler McSherry. She founded the Ask in Earnest initiative to provide resources about preventing suicide.
My Saturday nights in the late 1950s were unexciting. Pre-pubescent me turned 10 years old in January 1958, so Saturday nights were spent at home with my parents and three younger brothers (two sisters came later).
Albert Einstein once profoundly stated, “I fear the day that technology will surpass human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”
It was the same story repeated over and over again. The successful older farmer, who is now between 60 and 65, looking to see if there is a way to continue the farming operation with one of his children.
As Julie’s family opened gifts on the most recent Christmas Eve, I was delighted to watch 13-year-old granddaughter Eliza open her gift from us. She told Julie earlier in the year that she wanted a phonograph and two long-play albums for Christmas.
During a January blizzard, a farmer whom I didn’t know called me. He said he reads my columns regularly.
Thanks to ever-expanding farms and ever-tighter planting windows, wide-working, acre-devouring planters have become the norm. In fact, a new generation of 120-foot 48-row planters can knock out up to 800 acres a day or better when conditions are right and everything’s clicking.
Years ago I considered writing a book about funny things that happen in church. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven” would make a good title, I thought. Of course, I never got around to writing it.
Two years ago, I wrote a column about the “smorgasbord of options” for farmland transition. That column compared the smorgasbord in my childhood at Dickey’s Prairie Home restaurant in Packwood, Iowa, to the options in land transition.
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