I just noticed that our kitchen stove is a Frigidaire. I sat down with my “cuppa’” and scratching what’s now left of my hair, I puzzled over that. Frigid air Cooketh not! Just another one of those things called oxymorons, like jumbo shrimp, or military intelligence. Then I got to thinking about other terms, like “cow boy”. In a recent agricultural meeting in our county there must’ve been hundreds of men and women. The speaker asked for all those under thirty to stand. Out of the hundreds, fewer than twenty stood. Then he asked for the under fifty five to stand, and got about 30 more. That left hundreds still seated. He said to those seated “you are the future of agriculture.” I got to thinking that at age seventy one I am neither cow nor boy, and if I am the future of agriculture what are the nine billion going to eat in thirty years when we are gone? The point he wanted to make was that we need to encourage young people to enter agriculture as their life’s work. This needs to happen at a very young age. For instance my father persisted and putting me on horses before I started school, and I was driving tractors before I was old enough to have a driver’s license (which was then only fourteen in Texas). However the federal government’s new laws would make it a crime for anyone under eighteen to do any form of ranch work! You do the math.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Giving Directions Country Style
There is a well-known old Louisiana Hayride routine that goes something like this. Tourist asks hillbilly, “how do I get to Little Rock? “After a series of “smart” answers Mr. tourist says, “you don’t know much, do you.” Whereupon the former retorts “I know I ain’t lost!” Country folks often have interesting if not peculiar ways of giving directions. We were in Louisiana some years back, looking for a friend’s horse operation. The “local” said “Go down to the Dummyline Road, turn right on the Chicken Farm road and it’s the first lane on your right.” None of the roads had signs with these names on them, you were just supposed to know, the local folks all did! Then there’s the Texas style “you go down this road about a mile and a half (it’s actually four) (and it feels like ten if you’ve never been there) and when you get to the end of the oil top (That’s pavement) there’s a white house with a red roof, where the black dog used to be. Well, you don’t turn there… ” Or, “at the fork in the road take the more used one, not the one with the grass down the middle.”
Where most folks would use terms like almost or approximately, In the country you hear “Purt nat but not plumb,” “purt’n’ly”, “near about” and “Plum Nelly”. But the all-time champion was the fella who said “go down the highway to the Red Hollow Road and take a left. No, that don’t work. OK, go down Frenstat road to 127 and turn… No, that don’t work neither.”
He paused and thought for a minute, then said,
“Well, you just can’t get there from here!”
Converting Farmland to Range
“The first sunny day after a rain may be the first day of the next drought ” – Jack Dunn of Circle Dot Ranch, Agua Dulce, Texas
I see now why Warren Hilliard decided to convert the place we now call home into a ranch in 1936. In those days much of our country was farmland, predominantly upland cotton, with some corn and milo maize thrown in the rotation. Hilliard was at that time the county judge, but also a cotton farmer, or overseer landowner. In the spring of ‘36 another citizen asked him “Warren, what are you putting out?” Curious to know if he planned to put out cotton or corn. Hilliard replied “I am putting out cropland into grazing land!”
This week we saw the first flood of 2017. Last year we counted nine floods. Much of this ranch is alluvial bottom land bordered by two creeks. So, when the county gets over four inches of rain on saturated soil, the creeks are inclined to “come out,” and half our land is underwater. If we had it laid open by plowing for crops, much of our soil would be on its way to the gulf of Mexico each spring.
Cattle seem to have a sixth sense about flooding, and in forty years we’ve never lost a single head from floods. Right now they’re up on top of the hill munching round bales.
The good news is that the rains make the grass grow, as well as weeds and brush and wildflowers. This means that our grazing and browsing Corriente cattle will get fat and make a lot of babies. Dad always said “basically as ranchers, we’re grass farmers.” This year already promises a bumper crop.
Almost Cabin Fever
There are no leaves on the trees. The blackbirds are in flocks of thousands. The stock tank out front has a flotilla of ducks. Horses and cows are standing with backs to the wind, chewing. The sky is gray, and the wind whips around the corner of the house with hat snatching ferocity. The short days are filled with feeding animals, putting out hay, repairing broken water pipes, unstopping clogged drains, and putting on and taking off layers of winter clothing. So this is what we were praying for in September when it seemed that Summer would never end? Someone commented the other day that Texas weather is bipolar. We have gone from temperatures in the teens to well into the 80’s and back down to the teens again in less than a week. I wonder sometimes how nature deals with it? We have fireplaces, heaters, air-conditioners, walls and roofs. The trees, the birds, the critters, they only have bark, hair and feathers. But they seem to survive. This is a time for indoor activities, so my wife is re-organizing the house. I can’t find anything anymore. We read a lot, and take naps. Then when the sun comes out, and the wind dies down, we saddle a couple of horses and go check the cows. All in all, it’s a good life, even in the winter.