I slipped my husband’s boots on to grab the mail this week. It was cold and wet outside, and I didn’t want to go through the effort of digging mine out of the closet, so I grabbed his that were sitting next to the door. As I shuffled his size 11s down the street to our mailbox, I smiled remembering the many times I ran out of my house with my dad’s boots on. Something about wearing shoes way too big for you can throw you back in time. I found a lot of similarities between my husband’s and dad’s Georgia boots as I walked: scratches, cracks and creases. Grease stains, unidentifiable substances stuck to the side, worn down a little more in some places than others. Both pair have seen some long, hard days: pulling electrical wire through an old attic, working ground from dawn to dusk, chasing Angus around a field or pushing Holsteins into the parlor. A quote from Dale Woerner during the Dairy Cattle Reproduction Council’s annual meeting in November came to mind: “Beef-on-dairy, where cowboy boots meet rubber boots.”
That comment made the whole room chuckle, and as I walked down the lane I thought about the value in that statement. In the agriculture industry as a whole, I’ve often found we like to separate ourselves into sectors. You’re a dairy producer, beef producer, pork producer, crop farmer, etc. Even within those sectors, there are separations – and we often stay in our lane and look down at others whose operation is run differently from ours. The cowboy boots meeting the rubber boots is a bit of a monumental event, considering we typically don’t run in the same crowds. But it got me thinking …
As we begin 2023, I’ve challenged myself to have more of an open mind and not be so dang stubborn. We never know what we might learn or enjoy – and hey, we might make new friends with a few different types of shoes.
