Blogs

There’s a fad occurring in the Western world I’d like to encourage. Ranch people are naming their kids with rodeo-inspired words. I’m not talking about names like Freckles, Ote, Tibbs, Ty, Tuff, Trevor, Tomkins, Luke, Lane, Beaver, Monty, Mahan, Shoulders, Charmayne, Ace, Jake or Walt.

Good ideas don’t always take root the first time around. Nowhere is this truer than with the returning debate over traceability and animal ID in the beef industry.

Atop his bay gelding, the cowboy rides through the undulating hills one last time in search of the missing calf. He is rather certain he knows the calf’s location, but the sheer pleasure of such a ride, in such a place, is worthy of the excuse.

Our oldest child is 17. What if she wants to come back to the ranch after college? What if our other kids do too?

“Get Your Kicks on Route 66” was a popular song composed in 1946, and the boots at NCBA’s 2018 convention kicked the heck out of that theme in Phoenix, Arizona.

It was a scene straight out of a 1950s western. Tall saguaro cacti stood guarding the vast desert just outside of the booming metropolitan area of Phoenix. Sprinkled few and far between were what I believed to be olive and mesquite trees, and sand, lots and lots of sand.