The 41-Page Application and the Hungry Heifers
My neighbor finished a 41-page loan application, set it on a fence post, and the heifers had other ideas about page order.
My neighbor Dub Cockrell came by one spring morning with a stack of paper as thick as a hay bale slice. It was his loan application, forty-one pages, filled in by hand over three weekends at his kitchen table. He had paper clipped it, tabbed it in four colors, and he wanted a former loan man to give it a once over before he turned it in.
I told him to leave it on the fence post by the lane while I fetched my reading glasses. That is where I made my mistake. A bunch of my yearling heifers had gotten curious about the color tabs, and heifers do not respect an orderly submission. By the time I came back out, the yellow tabs were gone and the pages were rearranged in a way I can only call creative.
Dub stood there with his hat in his hand. I picked up page nineteen, which had a perfectly good balance sheet on it and a perfectly round hoofprint in the corner. Then I picked up page six, which had been folded into a sort of little hat by a very patient calf. We sorted the stack into piles on the hood of my truck, and the wind did its part by lifting the income statement all the way to the pond.
We got it back in order eventually, mostly by following the page numbers Dub had written in the corners. The only thing missing was the page where he listed his cash flow assumptions, and by then I figured the heifers had read it and were not impressed. We retyped it that night at my house, and the next week Dub turned the thing in at the bank.
The loan officer asked about the hoofprint. Dub told her it was his signature mark of authenticity. She laughed so hard she needed a minute, then stamped the page approved. I use that story whenever someone tells me their paperwork is too messy to submit, and if you want the cleaner version of how to prepare one, there is a good explainer from farm money guides, and plenty of messier tales at farm.FM.