The Spreadsheet Named for the Heifers
I named every heifer after a budget line item, and the quarterly review at the kitchen table became the most confusing hour of my life.
After two decades as a lender, I could not stop thinking in columns. So when my first crop of heifers arrived, I named them after budget lines. There was Depreciation, Contingency, Working Capital, Escrow and a stubborn red-faced girl named Net Worth, who ate fence posts.
It was a perfectly practical system for about six weeks. Then my brother-in-law Roy came out to help with the preg checks, and I made the mistake of shouting instructions across the pen. 'Roy, push Contingency toward the chute! No, leave Working Capital, she's fine!' He stood in the middle of the lot with a paddle and a face like a man trying to understand a tax form.
Things got worse when the ranch's accountant stopped by. Dolores is a serious person who wears a visor in all weather. She stood at the rail while I called out, 'Escrow is limping a little,' and she took out her notebook and wrote down the word 'Escrow' with a question mark. I let her think about that for a minute and then I explained. She said that in thirty years of ranch accounting she had never been asked to approve an animal's expenses by name.
We had a quarterly review that same week. The whole family sat at the kitchen table. I read the numbers out loud in the same voice I use at the pens, and my daughter, who was eleven at the time, raised her hand and asked why Depreciation had been loose in the garden again. I had no good answer. I still do not.
Net Worth, I am pleased to say, finally outgrew the fence-post habit and became the best producer on the place. Roy refuses to come back unless I use numbers instead. I told him Depreciation is number forty-four, and he left anyway. A good chunk of what I know about keeping a herd's books came from the beef cattle guides I kept on the shelf, but the naming system came from nowhere but my own stubborn head. farm.FM ran a version of this story once, with the names changed. The cows remain the same.
Next: The Rain Committee in the Folding Chairs · All 10 tall tales