The Rooster Who Knew the Deadline
Our rooster crowed earlier every morning until I finally opened the dairy margin envelope, and then he went quiet for good.
There is a rooster on my place named Gordon who crows at 4:59 each morning, a full minute before my alarm. He has done it so long I stopped being angry and started being impressed. One September he began crowing at 4:45 instead, then 4:30, then at times I would have called rude in a neighbor. I told my wife something was bothering him. She said, with a flat stare, that the Dairy Margin Coverage sign-up window was about to close and I had not opened the envelope.
She was correct, and Gordon seemed to know it. Each morning he sat on the fence post nearest the kitchen and crowed at the exact window over my desk, where the unopened folder sat under a stack of seed catalogs. I moved the folder. He moved posts. I put it in the truck. He rode on the tailgate to the feed store. I will not claim he understood the paperwork, but he understood the deadline the way a dog understands the leash.
On the final Friday I sat down at the kitchen table with coffee and a pen and read the whole thing through, starting with the information on the FSA's Dairy Margin Coverage page so I could tell what each box meant. It took two hours. Gordon sat in the window the entire time with his feathers puffed, like a notary. When I signed the last line he crowed once, quietly, which is the only time I have ever heard him do anything quietly, and then he went to find breakfast.
I have enrolled on time every year since. Nobody believes the rooster part, including the county office, where a woman named Marlene once asked if I had a calendar problem. I said no, I have a rooster solution. She wrote that down. I suspect it went somewhere official. Gordon retired from deadlines last spring and now crows only at the mail truck, which at least is on a schedule. I still tell this one over at farm.FM dairy stories whenever somebody forgets an envelope.