Why My New Book Celebrates Farmers

There is a strong, instant connection when you meet other people who grew up on the family farm.

Even if you’re just briefly acquainted with haying, shucking sweet corn or feeling the thrum of a tractor under your hindquarters, farming sticks to you like meadow muffins on your barn boots.

When I hear the phrase “work ethic”, I can’t help but think of a plaid flannel shirt hanging on a wooden hook; or maybe I picture a crate of homegrown tomatoes, oddly shaped and impossibly sweet. I see Ford flatbed trucks and John Deere mowers, worn suspenders and Carhart jackets.

I see knit hats pulled down over sleepy eyes in crazy hours of the night, preparing to assist a mare in foal.

It’s ingrained in my very skin, this legacy of farming. When I drive past a newly turned field, I feel a swell of pride. In my county, I know every hamlet, ditch and pond where the peepers sing their noisy anthems to welcome the growing season.

After settling in for some ag research, I felt uneasy about the current plight of the farmer – particularly the dairy farmer. For instance, for every dollar spent on a grocery item, the farmer behind that produce or milk is earning six cents of that dollar. That’s why buying directly from the farmer is so very important to the financial health of the farmers; the middle men suck up all the profits.

It jolted me in my gut to learn the rate of farmers committing suicide is more than double that of war veterans.

It’s sad to imagine that kids born in rural communities today will, less and less, be immersed in farm life. Our pastoral landscape, once dotted with barns, silos and grazing cattle, will be replaced with more industrial behemoths called CAFOs.  It’s a whole new type of livestock farm: the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. 

In a heartbreaking blog titled “ On the Death of My Family’s Dairy Farm” Abe Voelker writes, “This probably shouldn’t be a huge shock. Ever since I can remember there has always been a steady drumbeat of family farms going bust. Sometimes the tempo would increase, when milk and/or crop prices would hit new lows, but the drum has always beat on as the industry never seemed to turn a corner”.

Abe refers to his family farm’s demise as “the end of a long battle”.

But I don’t want to end on a gloomy note. As long as there are seedlings in sunny windows, there will be hope for agriculture on some level.

As long as there are red geraniums spilling out of loamy clay pots at Home Depot, there is hope.

As long as the purple sky darkens over a silhouetted tractor driver on a breathtaking June evening, there is hope.

As for me, I will always roll down my window when motoring through my beloved Warren County and beyond – drinking in the smells and sounds and the altogether satisfying buzz of activity that heralds this season of new life.

www.capturemebooks.com/breath-of-joy

https://booksforbondinghearts.com/shop/