Hard Times in the Fields

The equipment is ready. After months of down time through the Winter, after endless hours spent going over every disc blade, every field cultivator shovel, the bill hooks on the baler, all the sprayer nozzles and hoses, the sickle sections of the windrower, servicing the tractors, turning the points on the chisel plow, checking the planter and calibrating the monitoring equipment, stock-piling the necessary seeds and insecticides, making sure the combine is ready for wheat harvest which inevitably happens either on the heels of, or in the midst of, planting, and going over the trucks, trailers and wagons necessary to make the entire operation portable, nearly every farmer in the region is poised at the back door of their homes, waiting for the fields to dry and the work to begin in earnest. The refrain for this particular song, which is being sung quite frequently this year is, "Last year this time, we were already planting corn. This year nothing has been done yet."

Add to the angst the highest petroleum prices our country has ever seen, which in turn has created much higher fertilizer and anhydrous prices, pushing up per acre tillage costs, increasing the cost of seed being delivered, and quickly eating up any additional profitability recent grain prices might have provided, and what you have is a recipe for deep despair and disaster. The humbling thing to me, though, has always been the resiliency of the farmer in the face of all that would crush others.

Perhaps our nation's most current pure minority, farmers constitute approximately one percent of our population, yet feed the world. Farmers sow in hope and reap in reality. Farmers tend to the soil and are rewarded or punished by the weather. Farmers pray over their seed in planting and the sweat of their brow is the moisture which wills the growth. Farmers sell wholesale and buy retail. Farmers work hand-in-hand with the God of all creation, yet their livelihood is controlled and manipulated by strangers negotiating the Board of Trade. Farmers are incredibly communal in the care for the greater good of the vocation and the land, yet are pitted one-against-the-other by absentee landlords who care more for profitability than with stewardship. Still, in the midst of it all, farmers continue to plan, to work, to till, to plant, to cultivate, to mow, to listen, to watch, to harvest, and . . . perhaps most of all . . . to pray.

The higher free market economics builds the wall of improbability for making a life, the more likely it is that the farmer will effectively find a way, not only to scale the wall, but to articulate God's faithfulness in achieving success. Consequently, the better the farmer does in meeting the challenge, the more likely it is that a very hungry world will be fed and the American 'way of life' will be given hope for another day. The local family farm has more on the ball in continuing to exist than Donald Trump or Bill Gates could ever muster in all of the golden cities they could hope to build.

Sound romantic or idealistic? It isn't. There is nothing romantic or idealistic about paying 5$ or more for a 60 pound bale of alfalfa hay to feed a cow who will consume it in minutes, while the farmer prays she produces enough milk to pay for it and all of the other grain and dietary supplements necessary to make dairying viable. There is nothing romantic or idealistic about forward contracting and/or paying for fuels, fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, seed, and equipment parts, months before the first furrow is opened in any field. There is nothing romantic or idealistic about standing at the back door of the house or next to the open shed door watching flood waters cover your land and the winds of tornadoes tear apart your dreams, while whispering a silent prayer that tomorrow will be better and another chance to farm will be yours.

Farming is a vocation, a calling, a sacred trust. Those who live to farm do not farm to live, they farm for life, your life and my life. Our faces are in their eyes as they kneel down next to a newly planted row of soybeans, scratching away the soil to reach the bean and visually confirm the depth and accuracy of the planting. Our children's faces are in their dreams at the end of a long Summer's day of work under the sweltering sun moving bales from wagon to shed. Our children's children's faces are in the planning they do each day, the details negotiated in each moment, as the stamp of this world's success or failure stands imminently ready to judge their work by standards their hearts just cannot understand or accept.

There are hard times in the fields today, but I am grateful that the fields of my future are in the hands of the ones called to farm and whose life is lived in an intimate partnership with God. I am grateful to God that the soul of a farmer is not measured by the number of acres they own or till, but by their capacity to participate faithfully in the sharing of all that is good, right, and holy of God's abundance. I am grateful for the lessons we are taught by the ones who are fewest in number and greatest in service among us, for in their example our world finds continued reason to hope, to dream, to pray.

This day I stand at the back door of the house with them and pray for the sun to shine and the ground to dry. It is all in God's time, I'm sure, but there is much to learn in standing in solidarity with the ones whose steadfast love feeds the world. Thank you, my farming family, for allowing me to stand with you in the hard times, and may the good times for which we pray be made better by the unity we practice today.

Your servant in Christ,

Pastor Don

Church Sign for the Week:

OIL COMPANIES GOT YOU

BY THE GAS? KICK THEIR

CAN, SHARE THE JOURNEY.