The Heifers I Named After Interest Rates
After a career of explaining rates to ranchers, I named my first six heifers Prime, Fixed, Variable, Balloon, Term and Spread.
When a man leaves banking for a ranch, he takes certain habits with him. I could not stop saying the word amortize at the supper table. My wife asked if I wanted to see a doctor. So when my first six heifers arrived on a gooseneck trailer from a sale in Fort Collins, I decided to channel the habit into something useful, and I gave each of them a name from my old life. There was Prime, a tall red cow with a white face. There was Fixed, who never moved from the one spot in the pasture.
Variable was my favorite, a flighty little black heifer who changed her mind every ten minutes about where she wanted to graze. Then came Balloon, who was round and enormous and showed up at the feed bunk with a certain finality. Term was dependable, always at the gate at the same time every morning. And Spread, the sixth, could somehow stand in two places at once, or at least took up so much room that it seemed so.
The trouble came when the vet visited. She is a no-nonsense woman from Windsor, and she looked at my chart with the names on it and asked me what was wrong with me. I explained the system. She was quiet for a moment and then said she would prefer not to hear that Balloon was due in April. I told her that was the whole point of Balloon. The ranch hand, Teodoro, started calling them by their numbers, because he said he could not take a cow named Spread seriously.
But the names stuck, and they even helped. When Variable broke through a fence one windy morning, I could tell the neighbor, with accuracy, that Variable was out again. He nodded, because he knew exactly what that meant. I have a customer's patience for rates now, and a rancher's patience for heifers, and I can say they are more alike than the textbooks claim. For the real numbers on current lending, I check FSA farm loans and read what the experts say. My heifers are still the best explainers I know, and a beef cattle guide would back me up on their temperaments. A reader of farm.FM jokes suggested I name the bull Compound, and so I did.