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When I worked at TechSmith, I remember Bill Hamilton mentioning during a meeting that he liked to pick up magazines he'd never seen before, to learn more about subjects he knew nothing about.

A friend who lives in North Carolina recently texted me from her doctor's waiting room to ask if I'd ever seen the magazine she was looking at: Garden & Gun: Soul of the South. I hadn't. But I bet there was a lot we didn't know in that too ... like how those two subjects mesh.

The amount of farming magazines? Staggering. We get Hoard's Dairyman, which recently celebrated its 125th year of publishing. The Progressive Farmer. Successful Farming. Farm Journal. Pioneer Growing Point. Some we pay for, tons we get free. We even get one in Spanish. Even though the most either of us can do in Spanish is count to ten. With a terrible accent.

Of course, magazines are written to sell magazines, but a lot of it is interesting. They cover a lot of dairy-specific political news and university studies that relate to farming practices.

And there's always something new to learn. One day, Kris showed me an ad with an illustration:



"What does that mean?" I asked him. "It won't cause your bulls to have ... intestional difficulties?" But it was in an ad for a barn builder. I didn't get it.

"It means they won't give you any B.S." Kris laughed. It seemed so ... blunt. Yet not quite blunt enough, since I needed it explained to me.

So whether it's about farming current events or a new symbol, there's something to learn in every magazine. Maybe the next one will teach me how to say that word in Spanish.