hi-ho silver!

I should've been a cowboy.

Other than a line from a great country song, I often feel that this is the truth.

Some of the more astute of you may have noticed that, during all this talk about farming, I rarely speak about the joys of growing grain. There is a simple explanation for this - I find very little joy in dirt-farming.

Now, I can't write off grain farming as complete torture - I love combining in the fall and seeing that grain pour into the hopper - but in general I find grain to be a dirty, machine-infested business that I would prefer to avoid.

I am, at heart, a cattleman. I belong on the back of a horse loping across the prairie in pursuit of escaped cattle. And I look really good in giant hats.

There is, of course, more to it than my love of headwear. Grain-farming is about changing the land and making it work for you, and sometimes that land comes back for revenge: ranching, or at least some forms of it, requires you to work with nature and make concessions from time to time.

But the real reason may be that, in my experience, scratch a cowboy and you find a guy or gal working hard at something they enjoy. I have a lot of respect for that.

There are, of course, a few things preventing me from turning cowboy right now. Number 1 - I am suffering a lack of horse at the moment and refuse to be one of these pick-up truck bound cowpunchers; Number 2 - my hat is a bit too big and keeps blowing off; Number 3 - I specialize in roping fence posts and empty oil barrels, both of which are known to behave differently from cattle on the range.

I guess that for now I'll content myself by going to horse sales, listening to Corb Lund and dreaming of the day that I'll have a fine string of horses out back, some longhorns out on the prairies, and a whole day of cowboying ahead of me.

Regards from the brush plain.