Dear county agent guy
Subtitle: calf pulling, husband training, and other dispatches from the heart of the Midwest
By: Jerry Nelson
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 209
ISBN-13: 9780761187271
Subjects: Correspondence; Social life and customs; Community life; Dairy farming; Farm life; Dairy farmers; Biography
Description: "In the tradition of Mark Twain and Jean Shepherd, Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor, Jerry Nelson is a humorist whose beat is the American heartland, a small-town world of pickup trucks and Sunday night pancake dinners, dropping in on neighbors and complaining to the country agent. A fourth-generation dairy farmer, Jerry Nelson discovered his voice after he wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to his county agent for advice on what to do, after a period of heavy rain, about the ducks and Jet Skiers frolicking in his cornfields. From then on Jerry had a new calling to go along with his day job-writing a humorous column called "Dear County Agent Guy." Jerry's depictions of daily life, from the point of view of a taciturn husband with a twinkle in his eye, are read by 250,000 people a week--and occasionally woven into A Prairie Home Companion scripts. These are stories of courtship (Jerry refers to himself as a Norwegian bachelor farmer); childbirth (he offers the delivery room doctor the use of his calf puller); family (he beautifully describes rummaging with his sons through an abandoned family homestead); the duties of a husband (exactly why is it that a man who spends his days in cow manure can't change a baby's diaper?); the days of chores (never will the reader look at a grain silo the same way again). Knee-slappingly funny one moment, poignant the next, it's a very special look at a distinctly American way of life"--
Table of contents: title: Living the country life, or why "let's get plowed!" doesn't mean the same thing to city folks as it does to farmers. A Norwegian bachelor dairy farmer finds a wife!; title: The throwback; title: Silo time; title: That old house; title: The modern marvel; title: Adventures in cow herding; title: Domestic lessons; title: My new address; title: Old Frank; title: The lady vet; title: Don Quixote, tax reformer; title: Farm supply stories; title: Lutefisk season; title: Dear county agent guy; title: How to raise farm-fresh kids in twenty-five years or less! Labor and delivery; title: Electric fencing 101; title: Christmas shopping with a caveman; title: Never sleep with a baby chick; title: Surviving parenthood; title: The ghosts of horses past; title: Deep diaper doo-doo; title: Uncle Wilmer; title: Husband training made easy; title: Monkey business; title: I'm gonna marry Mrs. Mortimer!; title: Staying married to a dairy farmer; title: Hawaii boy; title: Never kick a fresh cow pie: lessons learned from a lifetime of dairy farming. A dairy farmer's vacation; title: My shameful affair with the farm program; title: Out in the trees; title: Of silos and learjets; title: What's in a cow's name?; title: A dog named Sam; title: Farm corporate jargon; title: A lesson in organic chemistry; title: You stinker!; title: Experiments in fermentation; title: Winter storm stories; title: Visiting; title: The four seasons of farming.