Fungus. Blight. Weather. Pests. Parasites. Disease.

Farming is the act of living every day with the goal of keeping other things — plants and animals — alive.

It may not be the fast-paced, dramatic lifesaving work of ER personnel, but it is work nonetheless. And it’s a daily task. We don’t take off a couple of days a week and decided that the plants and the animals will be fine on their own for a while. If we don’t water, feed, weed, control pests — things die. And sometimes even when we do water, feed, weed, try to control pests and disease — things still die.

It’s the hardest part.

It’s the part, I think, that makes most people quit. It’s the part that makes me think about quitting. It’s the part that we ultimately have no control over but to do all we can and hope and pray that things work out. But sometimes they don’t, and like the poem says, all we can do is dry our eyes and say, “maybe next year.”

That’s life on the farm.

It’s not easy. We romanticize the idyllic small farm where everything is beautiful and rosy. The tomatoes grow as big as your head and the watermelon is sweet as sugar. There are no weeds in the garden, no fungus, no squash bugs, no blight. The corn grows six feet tall and no summer storms ever blow it over. Weather cooperates all year. The livestock are meticulously clean and effortlessly healthy. The cows and goats stand perfectly still to be milked. Foxes never get in the chicken coop. Crickets chirp at nightfall under a clear sky with a perfect view of countless stars, and the people wake to the cheerful crow of their friendly rooster in the morning — the rooster who would never think to spur a child.

Norman Rockwell couldn’t paint a prettier scene than our picturesque visions of life on the farm.

But that ain’t it, folks.

Some days are like that. Some days all is right and you look out your window and wonder what you did to deserve such a wonderful life. But other days things go wrong. You have to replant an entire crop because of the weather. Pests or disease slowly kill off your plants — particularly those ‘soft’ plants like pumpkins, tomatoes, and squash. The goats eat your carrot bed. You spill your bucket of milk all over the place. Your livestock gets sick and sometimes they don’t get better. Sometimes you have to make the call to humanely end their suffering, sometimes they decide for you.

The problem is that weeds, diseases, parasites, pests, predators, dangerous bacteria — all of these things want to live and they are terribly good at doing so at the expense of the things we want to live.

Farming is full of hard work and disappointments. I can promise you with 100% certainty that if you homestead long enough you will have failures and you will have death. You will have weeds and you will have frustration. You will have predators and you will have parasites. You will have exhaustion and you will have doubts.

You will also have bumper crops and watermelons that taste like sugar. You will have playful baby animals and beautiful springs. You will have tiny birds bathing in your pasture where the water hose ran over and frogs hanging out by the water troughs at night. You will have sweet and funny animals that brighten your day. You will have honey bees and bumble bees and butterflies and dragonflies. You will have lightning bugs, and yes, you will even have those crickets. You will have a rewarding, fulfilling, blessed, and wonderful life.

But it will still be hard sometimes.

This is one of my favorite poems, and one of the most accurate about farming, even if it does specifically speak about male farmers. It applies to farmHERs, too.

So God Made a Farmer by Paul Harvey

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, 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, then 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; who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, and 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 would 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 that he wants to spend his life “doing what dad does”

— so God made a Farmer.

Cheers