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DOGS AND PUNS ARE two of my favorite things, and Joelle Zimmerman gave us a little bit of both in our newest feature, A Dog’s Life, on page 22. Joelle wrote to us about her dog, Gouda Boy, who serves as a greeter and tagalong at the family’s dairy, September Farm, in Honey Brook, Pennsylvania. You’ll also notice a dog alongside Briley Bunn on the cover of this issue. Briley’s father, Marcus, chronicles the many challenges that go into managing a group of California ranches—Marcus is into everything from driving cattle to allocating water rights. He even puts on a fun community rodeo. The Bunns’ story begins on page 34. Jeff Goldberg is another father featured in this issue. His wife, Sue, writes about the nearly 50-foot-long bridge he built…
Dynamic Dads It’s time to celebrate all that our dads do and have done. A father’s love and wisdom shape his kids for a lifetime, but we’ll always remember the bad jokes. Write your best story about dad, goofy or heartfelt, and send it with a picture of you and your dad. A Helping Hand What was the best advice you ever received when you started farming? Who gave it to you? What do you wish you had known from the very beginning? Help the next generation of farmers and ranchers by sharing your experience with the world. Party Time Weddings, festivals, barn dances—there’s nothing quite like summer fun on the farm. We want to share all of those good times. Gather up your best party pics and send them…
A Father’s Greatest Gift BY BELINDA MOLINA HEBBRONVILLE, TEXAS Our son, Elian, is 9 years old and loves to help out at our south Texas ranch every chance he gets. Elian was born three months premature and weighed only 2 pounds at birth. Doctors told us he might never walk or talk, but today he is a happy, active third-grade student. His favorite things to do on the ranch are feeding the cows and spending time with the Angus bull he named Charlie. My husband, Rene, owns a water well business that services and drills wells in our area, but his biggest passion has always been the cow-calf ranch we own in Duval County. Ever since Elian beat all the odds against him early in life, Rene has…
All the hours of hard work and training, wishing just for once I could win the fit and show title, and here it was! To have my name among other champions was truly an honor. I was born to be a farm girl. My adventures as a kid included raising chicks, playing in mud puddles, and tagging along behind my older sister in the 4-H dairy program. Now I’m about to head to college, but raising cows with 4-H has been one of the best parts of growing up. It wasn’t until I was 10, in August 2008, that I got my own calf. Our family’s cow Daisy Mae delivered a beautiful calf with big brown eyes, and a fawn-colored coat with a little speckling of white on both flanks.…
I am a firm believer that darn near everything you need to know in life can be learned on the farm. Mixing a bottle of milk replacer at 2 a.m. teaches fractions, decimals and volume. And it teaches more than a little bit of patience. Getting up at 5 a.m. to do chores, take something out for supper, and get the hay out of your hair before heading to work is a great way to learn time management. Calculating how much money you earned from your 4-H premium check after feed and expenses is all about profit and loss ratios. Is that new tractor actually worth the money you’re about to spend on it? Time to figure out your return on investment. The list of farm-life lessons goes on. Now,…
When our oldest daughter and her fiance were looking for a wedding venue, Jeff and I offered one of our pastures. Chantal and James thought it was perfect, so we set to clearing the site of blackberries and poison oak. The only other problem was the creek. Elgarose Creek runs right through the middle of our farm, and the state protects it as an essential salmon habitat. Coho salmon and steelhead trout travel up the Umpqua River for more than 100 miles to spawn in the creek’s gravel beds. But it isn’t unusual for us to get 2 inches of rain in a single day in the winter, and the creek can rise up to 12 feet during those storms. The former owners often considered building a bridge across it…
