The Rooster Who Rang the Dinner Bell
A Rhode Island Red named Pastor Dwight learned my loan officer's visit schedule and rang the old dinner bell for every single one of them.
Most ranches have a dinner bell. Ours hangs on the porch post, an old iron cast piece my grandfather bought off a retired railroad man, and it has been rung by hand at noon for as long as anybody remembers. That is, until a rooster named Pastor Dwight got involved.
Pastor Dwight was a Rhode Island Red with opinions. He liked the porch rail, he liked looking important, and one afternoon he flew onto the bell's crossbar to get a better view of a grasshopper. The bell rang. The hens came running. The dogs came running. A farm hand named Cecil, who had just sat down, got back up. Dwight, delighted at the attention, did it again the next day.
Within a month he had worked out something I never would have noticed. Every time a pickup I did not recognize came up the lane, the dust got his attention first, and he rang the bell. My neighbors learned it. The feed deliveryman learned it. The one time a loan officer from the county office drove out to do a site visit, a lovely man in a clean white truck, Pastor Dwight rang that bell nine times and then stood on the rail with his chest out.
The officer was very polite about it. He asked whether we always greeted guests with a bell, and I said it was a long tradition. He asked whether the rooster was part of the farm's operating plan, and I said he was a key piece of the early warning system. He wrote it down. I would like to think it counted somewhere on the FSA loan paperwork under management practices.
Dwight has since been retired from bell duty, mostly because he started ringing it for the mailman, the propane truck and once, memorably, a large cloud. But the bell still hangs there, and some evenings it clangs on its own when the wind is right, and I swear I hear him crowing from the coop. I tell the whole tale on farm.FM when anyone asks how a ranch earns its reputation.
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