Breaking News

Local Columns

They are calling to you

Have you noticed them calling to you? It is such an enriching time of the year. There's new growth all around us. In the last week, plants are finding the courage to pop above ground. Soon the fields around us will be planted and we'll be surrounded by growing greenness. The trees are absolutely bursting with new growth, and to go back to that initial question, have you noticed them calling to you? What are those referenced callers? The flocks of songbirds that have returned to provide us with their melodious songs. As I hike along various paths, I look for them in the budding trees ...

Working on the waterworks

The word “plumbing” comes from “plumbum,” the Latin word for lead. That’s a load of hooey. “Plumbum” clearly denotes someone who has a bum crack that is precisely vertical. If you’re the type of person who enjoys perpetual torment, then repairing the plumbing in an old farmhouse is a gift that keeps on giving. After my brother Les and his son Dustin installed new sewer lines in our family’s ancestral farmhouse, I thought that everything was both hunky and dory. Wrong-o, moose face! The house’s plumbing seemed to work as intended. Nothing leaked, including ...

Just another ‘left-wing farmer’ with Trump derangement

Last October, we were into soybean harvest, when I got a call from Fritz Busch. Fritz is a friend and a reporter for The Journal. Every so often he calls to see what’s going on with farmers. Right then, the destruction of our soybean market by the Trump administration was newsy. Fritz came out, we talked, and he took picture of me unloading beans. Next day that was on the front page under a headline, “Farmers fear they have soybeans nobody wants.” I thought I looked rather jaunty in the picture leaning against a tire. Fritz talked to a few other farmers for the article who had ...

Volunteers help local non-profits fulfill their missions

Volunteers are seldom seen and rarely heard from, but they make an enormous difference for many local non-profit organizations. Any amount of time someone donates is helpful. Just an hour a week doing a simple task might help to create possibilities. It might lead to accomplishments that wouldn’t happen otherwise. April is a time in which we recognize all volunteers for their contributions. Some organizations plan meals or recognition programs to thank everyone for serving. There are many factors that can keep people from donating their time. Some are just very busy with work and ...

On the Porch

The following excerpt is from a bound book, “I Remember: Decade by Decade” by World War I veteran and one-time editor of the Marshall Messenger, Wilbur Peterson. Peterson was born in Marshall in 1898 and passed away in Nevada in 1988. Peterson also published his stories and letters from ...