Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Summer is a favorite of so many for one obvious reason: it is the one season when total disintegration of social mores is completely acceptable.

Our family had a good laugh recently. Several of us allowed ourselves to be prospective credit applicants when Josie's college friends did a fundraiser for an on-campus organization.

A recent article in another farm publication reminded me of some of the issues facing Columbiana County land owners.

Sometime in the early summer of 1965 I migrated from my mother's hot kitchen and the family's enormous garden to our farm's sweltering hayfields and crowded milking parlor.

Do you know what rattle fatigue is? There are no Census Bureau statistics available regarding this, but I'd be willing to bet that nearly 90 percent of all farmers have experienced it at one time.

"What does it take to earn a living on the farm?" Good question. What's the answer? Actually, the question was the title of a report from a Minnesota Extension educator (we used to call them 'agents,' remember?).

In an effort to offset some of the eventual bad habits our children might learn from us, such as muttering unkind and possibly impure thoughts under their breaths while driving, or wearing white shoes after Labor Day, we're trying to raise them to become productive and law-abiding citizens of the world.

With a year of college behind her, Josie moved her stuff back home (it's always more than you start out with) and jumped with both feet into the job market.

With the school year coming to a close in the next few weeks, many students will be looking for employment on farms to do a variety of tasks ranging from baling hay to milking cows to operating machinery.

America's food industry, like the nation's church leaders, spent much of May wringing its hands over, by all accounts, pieces of poorly written, poorly acted fiction.