10. Late for your anniversary dinner or let the down-hay get wet — either way you lose.

10. Most of his time is spent taking ‘selfies’ — him and the cows, him and the tractor, him and the 40 rods of electric fence he rolled up in the rotary mower.

10. He acts like he’s never seen a spittoon in a fine restaurant before.

10. The neighbor’s ex-bucket calf yearling bull of unknown heritage is way too puny to settle the heifers he jumped in with last week.

10. Four neighbors immediately remove you from their Christmas card lists.

10. He frequently rehearses his excuse speeches for his wife — I missed our anniversary because ..., I was late for supper because …, etc.

10. Instead of “recalculating, recalculating,” your GPS says, “Wrong-turn dumb*##!”

10. The guy bidding against you at the farm sale is stricken with a weird temporary paralysis.

10. Feed’s a bargain because they seem to be putting more than 50 pounds in those 50-pound sacks.

10. Pie sales in the sale barn café go up when your calves enter the ring.

10. While combining, he calculates acres per coffee mug.

10. As you’re driving it away, the farmer you bought it from high-fives his son.

10. “Cow blight” occurs when poor fences and vegetables with insufficient hoof resistance collide.

10. Yeah, pretty sure those cows off in the distance are on this side of the fence.

10. The first of 10,000 potentially yield-crushing diseases shows up in someone’s wheat.

10. There’s a man laying beneath some sort of farm equipment and — goodness — the language he’s using!

The Top 10 best auctioneer lines

10.  His lender has said, ‘Are you crazy?’ so many times that he’s beginning to wonder.

10.  So how come my friend in Iowa rents his farm for twice as much and his place doesn’t even have shade or blackberries?

10. Wrenches lie rusting in the grass 20 yards from where he was working on the planter.

10. Cows hungry enough to be suckered out of the brush, brambles and blackjack by a half-bale of hay on the back of a pickup.

10. There’s a pecan tree growing up through a disc in the machine shed which makes it tough to gather nuts.

10. I will take my wife out to dinner somewhere other than the sale barn cafe or an animal health/seed/chemical meeting.

10. Headgates — ‘nuff said.

10. A thank you card for the neighbor who outbid him on those long-haul tail-draggers that sold right before the weather turned cold, wet and nasty.

10. When buying clothes for your wife, steal tags from her closet — don’t try to describe her size with hand gestures.

10.  The classic “bull stuck in a hay ring.”

10. Mixing up the herbicides for your herbicide-tolerant soybeans — yeah, the field right by the road.

10. You’d swear he’s been drinking but he’s probably just checking the crops.

10. Being over-run with rodents because they have rights even if they don’t pay rent.

10. He misses the niece’s recital because of feeding hay rather than baling it.

10. The preacher has to explain to the farmer that, no, it’s not exactly like forward contracting.

10. The two-track path across the pasture is now a four-lane.

10. He’s 20 years younger so his place is never coming up for sale.

10. Wildlife: You may not have time to deer hunt but you could assemble a skeleton from the pieces your dog has dragged into the front yard.

10. Recall notice: Semen you used a few months back was actually from an easy-calving Corriente bull.

10. A three-year old will repeat “Dad’s words” during those moments when all goes quiet in a public place.

10. Some call it inefficient reproduction, you call it year-round cash flow.

10. Depending on their age, they are absolutely fascinated, or totally grossed out, by the dead possum in the yard.

10. So you fired a shotgun over their heads — they could’ve been terrorists instead of people collecting for the United Way.

10. Discuss reward for whomever gets the neighbor’s Jersey X Mexican fighting bull out of the heifer pasture (dead or alive?).

10. They navigate roads containing everything from riding lawn mowers and renegade 4-wheelers to impenetrable cattle drives and impassable combines.

10. Your neighbor took one look at him and immediately began fixing the border fence.

10. Three-thousand acres of dirt and his wife buys potting soil at the farm store.

10. Armadillo blight: possums on the half-shell rooting up your pasture.

10. County 4-H agent has breakdown; joins carnival; never heard from again.

10. There’s not a bull in the county that’s better at trespasser control.

10. Deluxe easy chair with built-in mini-fridge and remote control zip-tied to the arm.