Respect Is Earned . . .

If there’s one thing I learned growing up on a farm in Daniels County, it’s that respect is earned. If the boss said we needed to be up at 5am every summer morning for weeks so we could avoid the mid-day winds and still get the new quonset up, we were up at 5am every day. We were teenage boys, mind you, with a profound propensity for sleeping until noon given the chance, so being up at 5am was darn near heroic to us.

In a good year, summer would also bring nearly 10,000 50-pound hay bales the boss said we needed to stack for the winter livestock feeding. One brother hauled ‘em and the other two of us stacked ‘em. Okay, so maybe my older brother stacked 7000-8000 of those bales but, hey, they could count on me for my 2000 or so. I earned my respect where I could.

Respect is a word learned by Montana’s dry land farmers down to their bones. There are so many things which a farmer must learn and respect, else they’ll not be able to call themselves a farmer for very long. Nowadays, a...