TrulySignificant.com honors Commissioner Sid Miller and his wife Debra ....lifting others up...Texas style

Commissioner Sid Miller and his wife Debra are honored on this special, bonus section to the Truly Significant chapter featuring their journey. 

Enjoy hearing about their journey of serving others and how this rancher means more to us Texans, especially in 2026. 

Here's our original tribute to him ....God made a Rancher.

And on the eighth day… God looked down on His planned paradise and said,
“I need a caretaker.” So God created a rancher. God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before daylight,
check the fences, tend the cattle, then put on a clean shirt and go fight for folks who’ll never know his name.” So God created a rancher. God said, “I need somebody strong enough to ride out droughts and floods, stubborn enough to stand his ground, and humble enough to know the land doesn’t belong to him—
he belongs to it.”

So God created a rancher. God said, “I need somebody who knows the smell of fresh hay,
the weight of responsibility,
and the meaning of a handshake that still counts as a contract.” So God created a rancher. God said, “I need somebody who’ll love Texas not just for its size,
but for its soil… its people…
and the generations who work the land long after the cameras are gone.” So God created Sid Miller. A man who wears a cowboy hat not as a costume,
but as a testimony. A man who understands agriculture isn’t a policy debate—
it’s breakfast on a school tray, livelihoods on family farms, and dignity for rural communities.

God said, “I need somebody who’ll stand up for farmers when it’s unpopular,
push back when Washington forgets where food comes from,
and remind folks that common sense is still a virtue.” So God created a rancher who would become
Texas Commissioner of Agriculture. But not a politician who visited ranches—
a rancher who went to Austin.

God said, “I need somebody who knows that leadership isn’t about polish—
it’s about purpose. That significance isn’t found in titles,
but in lifting others up.” So God created a rancher. One who believes faith belongs in everyday work,
that freedom is worth defending, and that feeding people well is a moral responsibility. God said, “I need somebody who’ll tell the truth plainly, stand tall when criticized,
and go home at night knowing he did right by Texas.”

 So God created Sid Miller. And while the rest of the world argues about trends,
this rancher keeps his boots on the ground, his eyes on the horizon,
and his heart set on service. Because long before the votes were counted,
before the office doors opened,
before the speeches were written— God already knew. Texas needed a rancher.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
This is the bonus section for chapter forty one that's
on Sid Miller. You know, with every chapter that we
write for Truly Significant, there's always additional information behind the scenes,
and this is a bonus that you get as a
part of having purchased the book, So we appreciate you.
If you want to hear other insightful conversations that we have,

(00:31):
you can always go to Truly Significant mom and you
can get connected to all of our podcasts, and you
can also on your smart system you can request success
Made to Last Legends, and you can hear all four
thousand of our episodes if you want to. But here's
the backstory that we learn from Sid Miller that helped

(00:52):
us build his chapter. You might recognize Sid Miller by
the wide brim of his cowboy hat or the unmistakable
of his convictions. You may know him as the Texas
Commissioner of Agriculture, a man who speaks plainly, stands firmly,
and defends rural Texas with resolve shaped by dusk, sweat
and long days under an unforgiving son. But what you

(01:15):
may not know, at least not yet, deserves a closer look.
It's a deeper story the story beneath the title, the
story of a life that reflects true significance, because Sid
Miller is not simply a public official. He's a rancher son,
a servants leader, a church elder, a man of faith,
and at seventy years young, he stands as living proof

(01:35):
that the most powerful season of leadership is not always
behind us. Often it's just the beginning. Sid Miller entered
the world on September the sixth, nineteen fifty five, born
into a family where work was not optional and responsibility
came early. He was the second of five children raised
by Dean and Charlene Miller. His father a farmer and

(01:56):
a rancher, and his mother a stay at home mom
who also taught school when needed. It was a household
that was shaped by land in livestock, by faith and family,
by the quiet understanding that everyone pulled their way. This
was not a childhood observed from a distance. It was
lived hands on hogs and sheep, and goats and cattle,

(02:17):
peanuts and grain, sorghum, haycut and veiled beneath the Texas sky,
chores that began before sunrise and ended only when the
work was done. Sid and his brother took turns milking
a cow morning and evening, gathering eggs, slaughtering hogs, living
the country life in its truest form. Good days on
the ranch began early four o'clock mornings, coffee at the cafe,

(02:40):
where news traveled faster than any wire service, and wisdom
was traded over worn countertops. Then it was back to
the land, moving sheep, goats, and cattle before the heat
set in, because by mid morning, Texas makes the rules.
Sid learned early that timing mattered, that preparation mattered, that
nature did not negotiate. There were hard days, days that

(03:02):
stay with you. One spring, after goats had been sheered,
a helstorm rolled in helstones the size of grapefruit, hundreds
of animals lost in minutes, a devastation. No young man
forgets lessons delivered not gently but honestly, that life is
fragile and resilience is not optional. Sid grew up watching
his father, a man with a gift for animals, horses

(03:24):
and dogs, border collies so skilled that they could do
the work of five men. Dogs that could load cattle,
herd sheep, retrieve ducks from icy water. Animals trained not
just by command but by trust, and in that partnership
between man, animal, and land, Sid learned something lasting. Leadership
is not about force, It is about understanding. This is

(03:46):
where Sid Miller's story begins, not in an office or
on a ballot, but in the early mornings, the hard
losses and the quiet triumphs of ranch life. Long before
titles and politics, there was a boy learning responsibility on
the back of a horse, discovering that character is shaped
not by ease but by endurance. By his own admission,
Sid Miller was bright, but not always focused. School work,

(04:09):
he says, rarely topped the list. Horses did, bucking bulls did,
fast card and the restless pull of motion and risk.
Academics were something to manage, not to master. He did
enough to get by, and for time that was enough.
Then something unexpected happened, something quietly consequential. It came not
from a counselor or an administrator, but from an ag teacher,

(04:32):
a man who saw passed the distractions and into the potential.
Against the odds and perhaps against the transcript, this teacher
secured Sid an academic scholarship to Cisco Junior College for
a B student who had never imagined such a door opening,
it landed like a surprise rain on dry ground, books
paid for, tuition covered a chance. Sid took it that

(04:54):
first semester. His injured leg heeled, his riding sharpened, and
before long, the which has always been a passion, became
a pathway. A full ride followed, room board, books, tuition,
all covered as a member of the rodeo team. College
once a fading idea became reality, and with that came clarity.
If not for that AG teacher, Sid Miller says plainly,

(05:17):
college would never have happened. And somewhere between early mornings,
long rides, and hard earned grades, the course of his
life shift. He no longer wanted to be a veterinarian.
He wanted to be what that teacher had been to him,
an AG teacher, someone who opens doors, someone who notices.
So he left Cisco and headed to Tarleton. He worked
his way through the only way he knew how, shoeing horses,

(05:39):
breaking horses, working cel barns, hustling, always hustling. He and
his wife, high school sweethearts, married while they were juniors.
There were no safety nets, no one paying the bills
for them. She worked at a Safeway grocery store. He
worked wherever he could find work. She finished in three
and a half years, He finished in four. They built
a life the hard way together. Sid taught agriculture in Gustine,

(06:03):
Texas for five years. He loved it, truly loved it.
But love alone doesn't feed a growing family. His annual
salary twelve months of work came to ninety six hundred
dollars a year, not a month a year. With one
son already born and another one on the way, reality
set in. So Sid went into business. He kept shoeing horses,

(06:23):
trainings some and selling others. On weekends. He dug trees
across West Texas and southern New Mexico. Slowly, the business grew,
then grew again. Soon he had a dozen people working
for him. In nineteen eighty five, he bought a nursery
in Stephenville. The timing could not have been worse. The

(06:44):
economy crashed almost immediately, and he nearly lost everything more
than once. But he didn't. He stayed. He endured. Evenville
became home. They raised their family there. Sid kept farming
and ranching feedlock cattle, roping calves, supplying rodeos and associations,
turning calves out on grass, then indefeed lots. It was

(07:07):
a full life of a busy life. Then came another
unexpected knock. He was recruited to run for the Texas Legislature.
He didn't want to. His wife did. She believed long
before he did, that this was part of his calling.
They prayed about it, and they stepped forward. By every
political calculation, he had no chance. He was a third

(07:31):
tier candidate running against an incumbent Democrat. Now Republicans hadn't
held that seat since the Civil War. No one gave
him a path to victory. So Sid and his wife
did what they always have done. They worked. They knocked
on twelve thousand doors together full time, and they won.

(07:52):
Sid Miller served twelve years in the Texas House, then
stepped away, returned to his business, nearly lost to again, rebuilt,
and then once more he was called, this time to
run for the Texas Commissioner of Agriculture. Five candidates, a runoff,
a win, then another, and another elected three times, now

(08:16):
running for a Ford. Through it all, some things remained,
the nursery, the cattle, the horses. Other ventures were let go,
not out of failure, but focus politics. When Dunright is
not part time. It demands the same early mornings, the
same endurance. It's the same willingness to shoulder responsibility. And
through every chapter, one constant presence remains his wife. He

(08:41):
calls her out as the hero of the family, and
he means it. She began as a school teacher, became
a high school counselor, working with the students who needed
help most. Then one day she came home and told
him she had quit her job, not to rest, but
to begin. She opened a high school for at risk students,

(09:05):
the ones falling through the cracks, the ones no longer
welcome elsewhere. She opened another school in a residential treatment
center near Corpus Christi, working with students battling addiction, brokenness,
and despair for twenty years, she gave them a second chance,
sometimes a third. She simply did not leave children behind.

(09:29):
Sid believes now looking back, that God was shaping them
all along, every hardship, every loss, every turn, preparing him,
preparing them for lives not of success, but of service.
Because significance, as Sid Miller's story reminds us, is rarely loud.
At first. It grows quietly in classrooms and pastors in

(09:52):
sacrifices unseen in lives lifted up along the way. Now,
let's talk about Sid Miller as the com Mimissioner of
the Texas Department of Agriculture. It's one thing to talk
about policy. It's another thing entirely to walk into a
school cafeteria and see the truth scraped clean into a

(10:13):
trash can. Sid Miller saw it firsthand. When he became
Texas Commissioner of Agriculture. He inherited one of the largest
responsibilities in state government, food and nutrition. At the heart
of it were school lunches, millions of meals, millions of children,
and at the same time, the system was broken. The
food shipped from Afar ultra process flash frozen, dyed, salted, preserved.

(10:39):
It was barely recognizable as nutrition. Kids weren't eating it,
they were discarding it healthy trash cans, unhealthy children. Sin
didn't come into the job with a manual. There was
no training school for agricultural commissioners, no transition bonder, just

(11:01):
the keys to a seven billion dollar operation and a
quiet expectation to figure it out. So he did what
he has always done. He went to see for himself.
He asked questions, He listened, and then he chose a
different path. Sid Miller does not believe in mandates for
the sake of mandates. He believes in incentives and carrots

(11:22):
instead of sticks. So rather than ordering schools to change,
he challenged them just one day a week, serve them
something local, something fresh, something real. They called it farm
Fresh Fridays. On Fridays, schools were encouraged to buy from
nearby farmers and ranchers, to bring those farmers into the

(11:44):
lunch room to let children hear face to face where
their food came from. That milk came from cows, That
beef was raised right down the road. Suddenly agriculture was
not abstract, it was personal. Then came the guard with
partners like Scott's Miracle Grow. Schools received kits, children put

(12:06):
their heads, put their hands in the soil. They grew
vegetables that they would later eat. Dirt under their fingernails.
Has a way of changing habits. You see, when you
grow food yourself, you respect it, you eat it. Education
followed assemblies programs like Jump with Jill Teams traveling the

(12:29):
state teaching kids about healthy eating, long before it became
fashionable again, what some call new ideas today. Texas schools
were piloting a decade ago. The results speak plainly. More
than eighty percent of Texas schools now participate. Last year alone,
they purchased over three million dollars worth of locally grown food,

(12:51):
never flash frozen, never ultra process cooked from scratch. These
kids eat it and it doesn't go into the trash winds.
Children get healthier meals. Taxpayers stop paying for food that
gets thrown away. Farmers gain new markets. The only ones
who lose of the middlemen and Sid Miller is comfortable

(13:11):
with that math. But leadership, especially in Texas, is not
measured only by good days. It's tested by storms. You
know in Texas, floods, fires, hurricanes, and drought. When disaster strikes,
the Texas Department of Agriculture becomes part of a larger machine,

(13:32):
the Texas Emergency Management sid's role is specific and immediate.
Feed displace people, supply shelters, and just as critically, care
for displace animals horses, cattle, sheep, and goats, but also
pot belly pigs, emuse, ostriches, sometimes even exotic cats. County

(13:53):
fairgrounds turn into lifelines within hours. Fencing, water troughs, feed kennels.
All all must appear. Someone has to organize it. Someone
has to stay, and they do. Inspectors sleeping in trucks,
eating out of coolers, gas stations, clothes, roads, underwater. They
stay anyway because people and animals need help. Then there

(14:16):
is the Star Fund State of Texas Agriculture Belief, No
taxpayer dollars, not a penny, funded entirely by donations. Every
dollar goes directly back into farmers' hands to rebuild fences,
buy feed, buried livestock lost to disaster, get families back
on their feet. Half a million dollars from eight hundred

(14:39):
and fifty thousand from the Houston Livestock Showing Radio rodeo.
Five dollars donations from strangers across the country. Hay trucked
in from North Carolina and Alabama, tens of thousands of bells,
coordinated load by load, mile by mile. It's quiet work,
exhausting work, necessary work, and when as how he does it,

(15:02):
how he stays ready for a weather that changes by
the hour. Sid does not talk about himself. He talks
about his people proudly. He says that they've gotten good
at lifting Texans back up, listening to his entire story,
it becomes hard to believe this path was accidental. A
boy raised on ranches, a teacher shaped by mentor husband,

(15:24):
partner with a woman whose life's work save thousands of children.
A leader forged by loss, labor and faith, trained long
before the title ever came. Sid Millers says his goal
is simple, to be the best agriculture commissioner Texas has
ever had, and to leave the office better than he

(15:46):
found it. He hopes the next one is better. Still, that,
he says, is what Texans deserve. And when history finally
writes its verdict, he does not ask for praise or
monuments for something far the quieter. Just this, he made
a difference for Sid Miller. That is enough. I hope

(16:09):
you enjoyed this extra session and insight into our Commissioner,
Sid Miller, and we appreciate your support of purchasing the
truly significant book by it for your friends and family.
May you live a life of significance, which means lifting
others up, just like our Commissioner Sid Miller does.