If you have moment, I ask that you read something I recently came across in one of my farm magazines, Progressive Forage Grower. The author is Baxter Black, an American cowboy, poet, philosopher, former large-animal veterinarian, and radio commentator. His works include writing a column titled On the Edge of Common Sense and I found this writing fits that bill. Here goes:
Baxter Black: Thanksgiving thoughts
Not everyone has a car, owns a home, carries a cell phone, can swim, knows the 18th president and can hum “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain.”
But everyone in this country — rich or homeless, conservative, liberal, gray, green, black, white, brown or yellow — eats what we in agriculture produce; everyone, no exceptions.
Do those of you who farm and ranch think about the lives you touch? Steve Jobs invented Apple computers, Oprah Winfrey had a talk show that reached 7.4 million people five days a week, J.K. Rowling sold 450 million Harry Potter books, and 111 million watched Superbowl XLV. Talk about reaching out.
But every day, every person eats something you produce. Your contribution to their well being exceeds Hollywood, the Nobel Prize or their psychiatrist. The public’s dependence on your ability to keep them fed is deeper than their need to text, jog, work, play golf or go to school.
You are more essential to their lives than their bookie, their broker, their drug dealer, their teacher, their boss or even their best friend.
This week we celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s still a real holiday — you can tell because most of the work force gets the day off. I think of it as a time when we thank God for the blessings we have been given. Usually the Thanksgiving table is covered with food — food that we in agriculture produced.
Even the needy in soup kitchens, home-alone bachelors, single mothers, on-duty soldiers and orbiting astronauts will eat something we grew; a piece of ham, canned peas, a drumstick, a Happy Meal or pumpkin pie. Regardless of what is on their plate, it started in some farmer’s pasture or plowed field.
I don’t mean to be boastful. I don’t even expect the average urban Thanksgiving diner to remember the farmer’s contribution to their day. Many praises will fall upon the one who cooked the meal.
That is due, but without mentioning the farmers who grow it is like praising the painter of the bridge while the man who designed and constructed it, stands in the shadows.
It is common to hear that farming is a “noble calling.” That is flattering but its importance is much more profound. I agree that what we who work the land do is noble, but more, it is as vital to their lives as air and water.
What they eat is the gift of our labors, and somewhere down deep as they sit down to Thanksgiving dinner Thursday, they might conjure up a picture of a farmer leaning on a hoe or a cowboy on a horse. That thought might just be the connection that helps them understand where their food comes from: real people.
Happy Thanksgiving to all! May the tryptophan in the turkey not cause you to dose off while the Packers are beating the Lions on their way to 11-0! Go Pack Go!!
