Dairy Grants for Small Farms

Dairy Grants for Small Farms

If you own a dairy with fewer than 300 cows and you can’t expand, you may be seeking ways to keep the farm in the family through cheese making or other value-added dairy products. The Dairy Business Builder grant could help you pay up to $100,000.00 in reimbursement funds for planning, construction, equipment, packaging, marketing materials, and even to reimburse you for labor. This link to the web page at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin explains this program.

This is a reimbursement grant, so you have to spend the money AFTER you receive notice you got the grant and receive reimbursement AFTER you have spent the money. But it’s worth it for a lot of farmers, since banks feel secure knowing that you will get the money to pay off any loan you might need to take to start the project.

Projects might include:

  • Feasibility study and business plan to decide what type of value-added milk product to make and what consulting and equipment will be needed.
  • Marketing study to decide where and how to sell your new products.
  • Reimbursement for cheese, ice cream, or other dairy product-making equipment.
  • Reimbursement for cold-room kits, construction, refrigeration units, etc.
  • Reimbursement for labor expenses while you learn how to make your new product and as you begin production.
  • Reimbursement for designing your logo, labeling, packaging, signage, website, and the packaging itself.

Your point of contact for this grant program is Emily Slatter: eslatter@cdr.wisc.edu. Another great contact there is Vic Grassman, vgrassman@cdr.wisc.edu. Please watch the recorded webinars on the website, which should answer almost all your questions.

I recently helped a small Missouri creamery get this grant through writing their proposal, crafting the required project business plan, and submitting the grant for them. This creamery will be reimbursed for expanding their cheese production into a new type of cheese that they have not made before. 

If you would like advice about this grant, or help with your proposal, email me through my contact form at https://lisadstewart.com,  and I will be happy to get you off on the right foot. I can advise you on an hourly basis or mange the whole grant application process. It is always helpful to read all the information in the link to the web page that tells about this relatively new grant program. Don’t worry if it says, “This grant is closed.” Read up anyway, because this grant will reopen, and you will have time to prepare.

If you already are a dairy product manufacturer, you might want to explore the Dairy Industry Impact Grant. Here is the link to this program:  https://www.cdr.wisc.edu/dbia-industry-impact-grant .  This grant is for dairy product manufacturers that want help developing an innovative idea or tackling a challenge that has the potential to advance the dairy industry if it is solved. The Dairy Industry Impact grant pays between $50,000 and $250,000 for eligible expenses. Remember, this is reimbursement money, not up-front money. But, being a grant, it does not have to be paid back

Missouri Agriculture Grants Help Farmers

Missouri Agriculture Grants Help Farmers

MASBDA Grants

The Missouri Agricultural Small Business Development Authority offers 14 grants to farmers and agriculture businesses, and these grants have helped farmers keep the farm in the family. The state provides the most comprehensive support for farmers of any other state I have researched. Since 2000, I have helped farmers apply for and obtain Missouri Value-Added Agriculture Grants, among others. These grants provide up to $200,000.00 to plan diversification, expansion, and new agriculture-based business concepts. They pay for feasibility studies, marketing studies, business plans, legal assistance, operational consulting, technical consulting, food-safety certification, and prospectus development for cooperatives. The grant requires a 10-percent cash match by the farmer, based on the amount of money requested. The total $200,000 can, and often is, spread over more than one project or part of a project. The MASBDA grants are so worthwhile, I am telling you about them now so you can be prepared to apply in the fall of 2023. 

Two important grants, the Value-Added Grant and the Farm-to-Table Grant are on hold for 2023, while MASBDA reviews and updates the program guidelines, following the exciting and long-awaited decision by the State of Missouri to renew this program over the next six years. These two grants are tentatively scheduled to reopen in the fall of 2023. MASBDA grants are paid for through the sale of tax credits, and that is what the State approved (more on this in a future article). 

 

Pecans:  A brand is born with a MASBDA Value-Added Grant

The first such project I worked on was in 2000. I discovered this grant and was hired to apply for the Missouri Northern Pecan Growers in Nevada, Mo. This LLC comprised a small group of farmers who all had pecan groves on their land in addition to their other farming operations. They were the first to try to mass-market the small, native pecans that grow in their latitude of the Midwest. “The pecans were washing down the ditches with the rain. We thought we ought to be able to sell them,” said Drew Kimmell, a member at the time. Native pecans are different from large hybrid pecans grown in the South and elsewhere. Testing shows they are higher in monounsaturated fat and sweetness. 

The Missouri Northern Pecan Growers received funding through the grant to hire me to perform a feasibility study, marketing study, business plan, and develop branding and packaging design. I was thrilled to be able to provide the research that supported selling their packaged pecans to supermarket produce departments throughout the Midwest in the fall, rather than merely sell them from a small, retail outlet on Interstate 49 near Nevada, Mo. 

I interviewed produce department managers to establish the right packaging and price point, and I developed a wood point-of-purchase display that came with $1,200.00 worth of pecans for each store. We had the point-of-purchase displays and signage made at a sheltered workshop located right next door. I developed a “program” or “package,” which was what produce buyers were accustomed to being presented with. We also used a cross-docking strategy, which meant that the produce managers said “yes” to a one-time purchase of our “pecan program.”  The product (pecans) for each store chain was sent to its distribution center. Each produce manager signed a purchase order, which I sent to the distribution center. The product was never “slotted” into the warehouse. The cross-docking arrangement meant that the crates of pecans went from our truck to the warehouse loading dock, and from the warehouse loading dock into trucks waiting to take it to stores. Getting an item slotted into a warehouse meant that there would be added cost, and a required guarantee that the product would sell through year-round. We knew our pecans were seasonal (for the holiday season). The in-out scenario worked for everyone. Pecan trees dump at one time of the year, and most of the pecans are purchased by consumers at one time of the year (fall-Christmas).

To prove the idea was feasible, I obtained signed purchase orders for their entire first crop (which was waiting in freezer storage in caves in Kansas City) to more than 100 Hy-Vee supermarkets, Cosentino’s chain in Kansas City, Schnuck’s supermarkets in St. Louis, and another chain in central Missouri. 

 

The crucial distinction:

From my point of view, that’s what feasibility looks like—when you have signed purchase orders. Feasibility isn’t a two-inch-thick report compiling secondary research (from other people’s research). It’s primary research—talking to the buyers and getting commitments. Feasibility isn’t saying that something is feasible IF, a), b), and c) happen. A positive feasibility study states how a project will pay for itself and make money, with proof in the form of commitments.

I’ll talk more about the other 13 MASBDA grants in future blogs, and I look forward to 2024 when the MASBDA grants are all back online. If you’re smart, you’ll need months to prepare a winning proposal. Giving yourself a year to get ready for these and other grants is essential. If you’d like to know more about how I might help you find grants, write grants, and perform the research needed to create a business plan that banks or investors will fund, reach out through my contact page, and we’ll have a chat.

 

A Horse and Saddle of One’s Own

A Horse and Saddle of One’s Own

October 17, 2019 | Lisa’s Horseback Trip 2012
Caption #1: None

Caption # 2: My first saddle at 8. A 16″ Hereford, which I rode on my 1982, 3,000-mile horseback trek.

I saw a video today of girls competing in a stick horse competition, racing, jumping, prancing. I longed for a horse from the first time I saw a picture of one. At age eight, I finally got my dream–an aged mare Honey. Six months later my dad’s job moved us away from her, and for four years, she stood among cattle on the high Oklahoma plains, while my family moved twice more. Please comment or email me through this website if you have had this experience or this longing. I want to hear your story. Below is an excerpt from my book about those girlhood days, missing Honey.

“I dreamed of owning a saddle when I was six, in Detroit. I imagined myself an adult, driving down the highway with my saddle in the back seat, or in the back of a pickup, and people who passed by would see that I had a saddle—I must own a horse. I was eight when Honey—a fresh-cut-hay-and-merlot-fragranced apparition came into my life. Dad bought me a man-sized, 42-pound saddle from a Sears and Roebuck catalog. He reasoned I eventually would grow into it, which I never did. On the rare occasions my parents had to transport my saddle in our car, and if we chanced to stop at a service station, I would stand beside the car near my saddle in the back seat, my face stiff with self-consciousness, averting my eyes from people who must be staring at me, a horsewoman.

Only a year after Dad bought me Honey, he moved us away, to Lynnfield, Massachusetts, and then to Cincinnati for his work. In the four years that separated me from Honey, while she lived on a friend’s farm in Oklahoma, I sometimes descended the basement stairs to clean my saddle with linseed oil or saddle soap. I massaged its leather-covered horn, wide at the top with a two-inch-high neck made to anchor a rope with a calf on the end. I worked oil into the fork, whose swells someday would keep me from spilling over the front. I oiled the seat jockeys where my thighs would grip when I got big, and the fenders that would protect my calves from Honey’s sweat—if I ever rode her again. I dusted the Cheyenne roll—the top of the cantle where I would push back my seat if she ever took off fast. I would never learn to barrel race or rope a calf. You would have to be born into a family that did that. Maybe I could show, I dreamed. I had read stories about city girls who worked at stables for free, and learned to ride, and one day were asked to ride the best horse in the biggest show, ever.

Meanwhile, Honey grazed with cattle a thousand miles away in horizontal wind that pealed up hanks of hair on her rump—as if I never existed. In summers while I was away, I wrenched my saddle onto a deck rail and mounted it from a lawn chair. I positioned my legs under me: ankles, hips, shoulders, ears aligned vertically. I held twine for reins, fists lightly closed, backs of my hands to the sky, as I had seen in books.”

 

From Vulnerability to Confidence: Long-riding on Horseback

From Vulnerability to Confidence: Long-riding on Horseback

Leaving Chief’s pasture near Edgerton, Kansas, on a trip that would last 3 months, three weeks, or if we failed, three days. May 16, 2012

For the month preceding my departure on a solo horseback ride through Kansas and Missouri, May 16, 2012–a girlhood dream that I no longer could suppress–I had to take a half tablet of Benadryl each night to help me go to sleep. Would I be safe? Would some nice family’s drunk uncle come over late one night and attack me in my tent, where I camped in their pasture? I knew from past experience (a much longer ride I took with my former husband when I was 23–more on that later) people wherever we rode were heartbreakingly kind. But I had a man with me then. Thirty years later, would I be safe?

Here is the foreword of my forthcoming memoir, tentatively titled “Circling Home–one woman’s horseback ride into the heart of America.” I hope you like it, and I hope you will comment:

The Man Pulling Radishes/Pointed My Way with a Radish
(excerpt from 300 miles into our ride)

“We took right turns north and left turns west to follow our fine blue lines over hills, into bottoms, through dense growth, far away from any highway. We might have been riding closer to Kansas City, but we were riding deeper into the country, farther from Springfield and Branson, still more than 200 miles from a major city. Our gravel road became more powder and less gravel, narrower, and with no ditch, but rusty fences abutting it, slack with unemployment, because there were no cattle to contain on this lowland that floods in spring and fall. Birds zipped through it, and deer sprang or glided in our farthest periphery. My ears buzzed with silence that was faintly disturbed by a thousand insects touching dead leaves, and leaves above lifted by a breeze penetrating in random breaths. If you weren’t from here, you’d never be here.

When I was ten, I had crashed through an Oklahoma wind on my aged mare, Honey, bareback, galloping. Before responsibility—other than mother’s call to dinner, homework, bed—and without a father to comfort or boyfriend or husbands in succession to consider, I lived in my skin at ten, melded by sweat to my horse.

In decades since, with every life passage—two marriages, two births and a stillbirth, a husband’s head injury, loss of business and home—one vision recurred: A country road flowing under me and my horse, alone. This could never happen, I knew. I had lived in the home of a father or husband for all of my 54 years.

This day, I rode alone across the countryside, no one to consider, not even the wise, third husband, who had sent me on my way. My horse, Chief, and I scribed a 500-mile loop through Kansas and Missouri, the summer of 2012.

For me, nothing existed but this road. I belonged here as much as anyone, and in this land, my new kin: grey squirrels and buff deer, coyotes at night, the Wallen family who fed me three days ago; and the next family up the road. Nobody else counted, because my life depended on strangers. My own family never would find me. It would take me nearly two weeks to reach a symphony at Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City; then where would I tie my horse? These Cedar County folks knew the way, and for now, the way was my truth and life. I would take on this tribe’s language and law and religion if need be, one step at a time, pausing to eat and sleep and pee on their land. I passed into and out of worlds in the form of sections where people lived who knew the way and pointed me to it. As 18th-century Japanese poet Issa wrote, The man pulling radishes/pointed my way/with a radish.

For the first time since I was ten, I felt grounded as a bolt of lightning, and just as live.

 

Endurance on a Long-distance Ride

Endurance on a Long-distance Ride

It was the second week of my 500-mile horseback trip the summer of 2012, and I was in the depths of my endurance—the only way I know to put it. We were approaching a couple’s home in rural Vernon County, Missouri. Harmon and Lanie would graciously put us up for the night, one of only two prearranged stops on our 29-day ride during the hottest summer on record in Missouri, in 2012. Harmon was known as one of the best cutting horse trainers in the Midwest.

(An excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Big Quiet–A Ride Home. I had to cut this section for length, so I wanted to share it with you here. Names are changed to respect privacy.)

After the shock of my first 95-degree day earlier that week, I was reminded of the endurance this trip would demand. Notwithstanding the cutting cold and brilliant heat of my 3,000-mile trip 30 years ago with my former husband, Len, we never had to face the Midwest’s humid heat. I’d grown up in it, but there was a big difference between gathering cattle half a day (followed by an air-conditioned lunch) and riding from point A to point B eight hours with only the radiator of an overheated pasture for reward. So, I formed a plan:

  • Start early and stop no later than 3:00, if I could find a place.
  • Whenever I watered Chief, saturate my hair with cold water from a faucet or hose.
  • Look how pretty everything is.
  • Brush my teeth often.
  • Look forward to my bath (taken from Chief’s bucket) first thing when I stopped.
  • Make as many miles as quickly as possible the first four hours. Tough it out the last four. I wouldn’t die of the heat as long as I could drink and stay damp.
  • Remain alert for exploding deer or turkey (hence, exploding horse).
  • Buck up.
  • Look how pretty everything is.
  • Talk to strangers. Everyone is a genius at something. (Jerry, near Drexel, built antique tractors and collected model ones. The Schmidts’ were farmers, missionaries, built churches. John Ness knew more about training coon hounds than maybe anyone. Marilyn Ness showed me the patience of a daughter corralling her father on the farm he built, while his wandering mind took him off on unexpected forays on heavy equipment.)
  •  If I let the heat beat me, I wouldn’t get to meet the next person who would crack open my world a little wider.

I felt silly and insane sometimes and inexplicably mesmerized by the next beautiful scene, the rock of my horse between my legs, the grunting effort at the close of day. I was learning to endure. Armies had ridden a thousand miles to battle, three horses to a man, switching from horse to horse, sleeping astride. I had a plan—to make my own miles, in my own time, see what was over that rise. My body could do more. My mind could handle more. My horse needed more. I craved more of this mystery. Soon enough, I would be back in my office, staring at another federal grant. The heat and fatigue hurt as much as they ever did, but with my plan, they didn’t have to bother me.

So, Chief and I dug deeper when we reached a barricade blocking our road and a detour around a bridge that was out. We must ride four miles out of our way, a heartbreak, knowing otherwise we were only one mile from a home where people expected us, and cold water, and a stall for Chief. The woods and fields on what I sensed was the backside of Harmon and Lanie’s property hummed with three or more layers of bird sounds and bugs sounds. We were absorbed into these sounds, and the crunch of Chief’s hooves, and puffs of dust rising and coating his road-hardened hooves, when not eight feet away from us in the ditch a full-grown doe jumped up from her nap. Chief dropped into a crouch. My heart emptied itself. The doe took two leaps in front of us and sailed into the dark of the woods. Her smashing and crashing stopped. Then silence (a relative term in nature). She blasted her nose twice. Chief was glued in place. He shot back a blast of air. She crashed away. The snapping and breaking faded to nothing. For the next ten minutes, Chief peered into the woods, and every so often an electric shock would go up one of his legs and put a momentary hitch in his gait.

Chief and I at last strode into Harmon and Lanie’s drive between their arena and barns (that turned my Chief from Don Quixote’s toe-dragging Rosinante to Triple Crown winner American Pharaoh). All I wanted was to get him rinsed and fly-doped, me clean, wolf some tuna and dried fruit, and lie down in my tent. I released Chief to the custody of Lanie and Harmon’s grandson who placed him in a stall in a darkened barn, open on the ends for air flow with aid of a fan. Dustin seemed not to know I was coming. He was a handsome, sandy-haired, grown young man whose cheeks I wanted to squeeze, because he seemed to be my own son’s age, and just as kind. He lived here and took care of the horses and drove 50 miles, one way, to Joplin to work in construction. The barn in which Chief stood was mostly arena. Running the length of the long side was a mechanical calf that zipped back and forth along the wall to teach a cutting horse to match its ducks and rolls.

Lanie met me in the drive before I could unload and insisted I take a real shower, which I did, as always breaking the manners I was raised with not to every put anyone out. Lanie’s hair reached below her bottom in a slender ponytail gathered into colorful stretchy hair bands every four inches or so. Her gray was beginning to mix evenly throughout. She wore bangs. She must be 10 or 15 years younger than Harmon, but I am a bad judge of age. He must be near 70 and walked like a man who had broken hundreds of colts and trained them up, which is to say, he walked with arthritis. He and Lanie both had round, clear, blue eyes.

At last, I crawled into my tent. I lay flat, far more tired than justified by riding only 17.5 miles. I had by chance positioned my tent so I could turn my head and look out the screen toward the barn. In time, I recognized a black outline against the light coming in the far side of the barn. A rise, a gentle dip, a rise and a straight line—Chief’s topline. It was motionless. He was sound asleep. My tent breathed in and out. My freshly washed panties and bra hung from wires on the arena fence. I hoped they wouldn’t fall in the dirt. The home, barns, buildings reminded me of construction workers standing around, muscular and trim, waiting for the foreman. A well-drained arena of deep-sand footing said a professional trainer works here. A voluptuous stallion paced a large paddock beside the barn where an open doorway gave the monarch access to his roomy stall.

I awoke myself a dozen times with loud snores for the first time in my life. I felt paralyzed, I was so luxuriously trapped between waking and dreaming. I could not move, but I heard a horse’s hooves thud the ground beneath my pad.

An hour or more later, I was able to get up and check on Chief. Lanie caught me and invited me to dinner. I mourned that I had already eaten some of my own food, instead of saving it. I was still hungry.

Their large, oak, oblong dining table sat in front of a bank of windows in this open-concept space. Lanie had Harmon wore horseshoe rings studded with nice-sized diamonds. Their vehicles were well-coated with dust and for the most part, new. The home was outfitted with furnishings the quality of their horses. Accoutrements included metal stars, patriotic paraphernalia, Indian wind catchers, geometric patterns, horseshoes made into useful things, everything western that reflected the lives of real horse people, not wannabes. They had just lost their best brood mare. She wasn’t old, didn’t colic. Heart attack they think. I’d come at a hard time. Horses die. It’s usually more an emotional than financial hole they leave, and this time, it was both.

It’s hard-to-impossible to make money with horses, unless you’re as good and honest as Harmon and Lanie. You buy the right horses, build the right herd of mares, and keep the stallion that can throw colts built to win. Then you have to teach them the moves, stay in the business long enough, produce winners year after year, stay healthy, always treat everyone right, and don’t let anyone take you for a ride. That’s all you have to do to be successful raising horses.

Lanie passed between her kitchen counters and table with the efficiency of a woman who daily alternated between feeding horses and peeling potatoes; between riding and taking the casserole out of the oven.

At dinner, Harmon didn’t ask me much about my ride other than saying he nearly rode over me in my tent. News of my arrival here must not have spread like wildfire. Obviously my trip was a bigger deal to me than anyone else, and I knew this, which is why I suffered bouts of embarrassment over riding into people’s lives sweaty and hot for no good reason. Or maybe Harmon just didn’t know where I’d pitched my tent until he came around the corner of the outbuilding.

I had overheard Lanie say to Dustin outside, “He looks good,” referring to Chief. A higher compliment could not be earned from people like this. “Look how muscled he is,” Dustin said. Was he serious? I began to feel proud of my horse.

I wanted Harmon’s advice. Was I babying Chief too much, and that’s why he was still so spooky?

“A big, strong gelding like that can hurt you.”

I was stunned. Harmon thought Chief was big and strong? Chief was shorter than nearly every horse I ever owned. He was leaner than the Pettits’ Quarter Horses.

“I know,” I said, pointing to my bandaged arm. On the second day of my trip, I had received my first stitches ever when I was dismounting at the same time a horned bull rushed the fence at us and Chief blasted off. “I don’t know if I should be trying to force him more. So far, I’ve been letting him look at things, but I make him go where I want. I don’t think he’s the kind of horse you can thump on. It just makes him worse.”

“The right rider can get him over that.”

“What would the wrong rider do?”

“People who think they have to get off and lead them.”

Was Harmon psychic?

“I used to be a lot harder on horses,” Harmon said. “They had to do exactly what I said, right when I said. I’ve eased up.”

I remembered Jan, a mutual friend I stayed with earlier on my ride, telling me about Harmon and Lanie, from whom they’d bought many horses. Jan told me a story about a horse Harmon trained. Harmon hated it when a horse screamed at other horses while he was riding it, she said. The horse in question was particularly prone to inappropriate vocals. When he did it, Harmon would gig it with his spurs and spin it as a way of spanking the horse. “After that, every time the horse whinnied, he’d spank himself—he’d spin around and wring his tail, no matter who was riding him,” she laughed.

What I heard from Harmon (whether I heard it right or not) was to keep doing what I was doing: be persistent, let him look at what he’s scared of, but make him go where he’s supposed to, and never, ever, get off again.

“He looks like he could do 50 miles tomorrow,” Harmon said. “Be good for him.” Another compliment for Chief and a word to the wise for me: Wear him down.

After dinner, we spread my maps on their table. They suggested I spend the next night on Bill Garrett’s place who bales hay for everyone in the country (“the country” meaning within reasonable driving distance; “everyone” meaning the majority).

“It’s 25, 26 miles,” Harmon said, glancing up for my response.

“Sounds good,” I said. Chief needed a 26-mile day. It would be our sixth day of travel this week. I’d arbitrarily decided we would ride six days straight, rest one day, and repeat until my trip was done. Maybe Mr. Garrett would let us stay two nights.

After dinner, Lanie carried an extra coffee pot from the house to the tack room that doubled as an office in the barn. “We don’t get up that early,” she said when I told her I’d be up at 5:30. She prepped it and showed me how to turn it on. Lanie returned with sugar, creamer, and stir sticks, as if she’d done this many times, which I realized she had, hosting folks who came to buy horses, or bring their mares to be bred, or train with Harmon. After I hugged her svelte frame and was reassured by her casual smile, she left. I wandered around the silent tack room. The desk appeared to be used only occasionally. Saddles too numerous to ride, some dusty from disuse, some trophy saddles, some clearly ridden every week if not every day, lined two walls on saddle racks bolted into the studs. Bridles hung from brackets the shape of a horse’s poll holding bits of varying widths, some aluminum, some copper, grazing curb bits, broken bits, bitless headstalls, high-port spades—whatever might be needed for a particular horse at a given point in its training that only an experienced trainer could divine.

Kids grow up with parents who train horses. Some ride and learn the craft; others hate horses. Those who stay learn by osmosis how to feel where a horse’s feet are; how to position its shoulders and hips so it can roll back and follow a calf. People like Lanie and Harmon have more knowledge about horses in their thumb nails than I will ever learn. I may have ridden since I was eight, had dozens of precious lessons, read lots of books, and travelled 3,000 miles across the country, but I’m a novice for life. At 54, there’s no way to catch up, any more than I can catch up with Bob’s or his colleagues’ knowledge of literature. They’ve all been teaching for 25 years what I have yet to learn.

Writing, riding, and literature always have been my first loves, equally impractical, to my mind. I have published more magazine articles (if not literary works) than any of Bob’s colleagues at the university. I have been memorizing great poems since high school. I thought if I got them inside me, their rhythm and syntax and tone would show up in my writing. I memorized horses by riding long distance. I hoped such familiarity would count for something when I mounted up. Chief couldn’t wait to see me each morning, no matter how hard I worked him the day before. That must count for something.

I shut out the 9 p.m. daylight with my satin eye mask. The earth seemed to try to drag me into itself. A thought brought me back to the surface. I chuckled to myself. The white five-gallon buckets I had noticed earlier, rolling around the grounds, must be for Harmon. He could turn them over and more easily step in the stirrup from an overturned bucket. He was retired. He didn’t have to ride any more, but he mounted up every day. He wanted to learn what the next horse had for him. We’re all a novice to next new horse. Or poem. Or book. Or day.