A farm lad going to the nearby land-grant university wuz majoring in agribusiness and marketing. He earned an internship at a well-known implement dealership on his first day and wuz placed with the company’s finance manager to learn the ropes about financing and collections. The finance manager told the kid, “The fastest way to learn is to get right into the middle of collections. Collections is the only way our financing plans work. I like you and your grade point indicates that you’ve got smarts, so I’ll make you a deal. Here’s the address and phone number for one of our roughest past due accounts. He’s way behind on his payments. If you can collect on this one, I’ll let you spend the rest of your internship helping me make loans. That’s a lot more fun than collections.”
So, the manager tossed the kid the keys to a company pickup and said, “Good luck. Come talk to me when you get back.”
Three hours later the kid came back and reported to the finance manager, “I got him to pay his entire back bills in full. Here’s the certified check.”
The amazed finance manager said, “Just how in the heck did you do that? I’ve tried every trick in the book and made every kind of threat on that deadbeat — to no avail.
“Easy,” the kid replied. “I told him that if he didn’t pay up, I’d tell all his other creditors that he paid us!”
A kindly reader from Colorado helped me out with this column. She ranches somewhere in the Rockies and she sent me a list of the ways “a wife knows she’s married to a rancher when ….”
Here’s her list:
You know you are married to a rancher when a stranger comes to ask directions and the stranger is now a friend who sits at the table for supper.
You open the door in the truck and even the dog dashes for the middle seat — and you are left to open the gates.
Your husband has the car, gets home late, and you have to get to town before the bank closes and pick up a few things at the grocery store. So you jump in the car before he can say a word, and off to town you go, but when you open the trunk to put in the groceries you find a road kill that hubby plans to skin and sell the hide.
After a hard spring day of stone picking, as he dozes off to sleep you ask, “Do you have a suggestion for a name when the new baby arrives. He sleepily answers, “Rocky for a boy and Pebbles for a girl.”
Your gifts are all useful and all tax deductible, too.
You send your daughter down to the freezer for the frozen orange juice you froze in the pop bottle and she thaws the colostrum for supper.
Your kitchen utensils disappear one by one.
You find the slow cooker in the mud room warming up the colostrum.
You find the hand cleaner for the kitchen sink in the sink downstairs.
You put up the back seat of your little car, but it just doesn’t fit right and you find out it’s because of the oxygen tank that hubby decided to pick up in town.
You can never find the car seat for the little one. It’s either in the 4230 or the ATV.
While mowing the grass in our yard and around my gardens, I’ve come to realize the awesome powers of giant foxtail.
First, it thrives in drought
Second, it also thrives in saturated soil.
Third, it grows as fast as asparagus.
Fourth, it never needs fertilization and will flourish in any soil.
Fifth, it has astonishing reproductive powers — producing heavy seed heads at least bi-weekly.
Sixth, it must be highly nutritious because I’ve cleaned wild turkeys with their craws filled with foxtail seed and I’ve watched geese and their goslings gobble up foxtail by stripping the seed heads with their bills.
And, seventh, by letting giant foxtail go to seed before frost, it very predictably re-seeds itself every year and isn’t fazed by repeat harvests on the same soil.
So , then I got to thinking how modern agriculture could harness all those magnificent giant foxtail traits to benefit farmers and consumers.
With all the successful genetic manipulations of plants I read about regularly, why can’t some genetic research team slice the good genes from giant foxtail and splice them into wheat?
What we’d end up with is wheat varieties that have multiple harvests each season, that produce in both drought and wet periods, is highly nutritious, re-seeds itself every year, and eliminates the need for crop rotation. It would be the perfect profitable crop for farmers that helps feed a hungry world, too.
Words of wisdom for the week: “Ya gotta do what ya’ gotta do now to eventually do what ya’ wanna do.”
Take care. be safe. And have a good ‘un.
