‘So, God made a farmer’

Dear Readers, most of us, whoever we are, and wherever we are located in the world, no doubt live in tumultuous and unprecedented times in the current day and age. Some more so than others, for sure. But still – so do thousands upon thousands of farmers around the world…

So many of our farmers – no matter where they are and in which country they are located and do their best to make a living – they are for the most part struggling to make that living, to carry on doing what most of them love doing most – simply trying their utmost to hang on to their land and their properties and their crops and their livestock just a little longer, in the hope that better times might be around the corner, if at all… That is what farmers do all of the time, right? That is the farmer’s “mindset‘, so to speak.

As an ex-farmer myself, I have so much empathy with them, dear readers? I can sense their anguish, I can emphasize with the despair that many of them experience daily, and surely – I can often feel this during the small hours of the night, when so many of the farmers around the world find it hard to sleep, or to even have any hope of a better future showing up any time soon…

Do I need to remind you of the “survival anxiety” of so many farmers in our own beloved potato industry – those folks who are in dire straits during these times in so many countries around the world? And you might be one of this number, I know…

So, I decided to share with you here a famous speech that some of you might be familiar with. It is titled “So, God made a farmer”.

This decades-old speech from a conservative radio broadcaster in the U.S., Paul Harvey (who passed away in 2009) became a major topic of chatter when it was condensed and delivered as the audio backdrop for a Ram Trucks ad during the second half of the so-called “Super Bowl Sunday” in America so many years ago – in 1978, to be precise.

Here then is the text of his speech as it was published in The Atlantic in 2013. Our sincere thanks for republishing it here (the full article can be found on The Atlantic website):

And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.” So God made a farmer.
“I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife’s done feeding visiting ladies and tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon — and mean it.” So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, ‘Maybe next year.’ I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, then, pain’n from ‘tractor back,’ put in another seventy-two hours.” So God made a farmer.
God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in mid-field and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor’s place. So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark. It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and finish a hard week’s work with a five-mile drive to church.
“Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life ‘doing what dad does.'” So God made a farmer.

Paul Harvey’s delivery of those remarks against a backdrop of images honoring farmers can be watched on this YouTube video: