Gasper Family Farm: So God Made A Farmer

Here is the speech in its entirety, including the portions left out of the ad:

And on the eighth 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 field, 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 wrestle 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 and newborn colt, and watch it die, then dry his eyes and say, 'Maybe next year.' I need somebody who can shape an axe handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make a harness out of hay wire, feed sacks and shoe scraps, who at planting time and harvest season will finish his forty hour week by Tuesday noon and then pain'n from tractor back put in another 72 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 midfield and race to help when he sees first smoke from a neighbor's place. So God made a Farmer.

God said, "I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to yean lambs and wean pigs and tend to pink combed pullets; who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadowlark."

It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners; somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed, and rake and disk 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.

Its hard to describe how those words touch my soul. Its a feeling born of the blood, sweat and tears that seeps into your innermost being. Those who have farmed will know what I'm talking about. His words describe the life I live, at times a hard hard life.

Paradise Lost

But while So God Made A Farmer deeply resonates with farmers, and anyone who eats really, there is also in it a deep depressing sadness. A lot has changed since Harvey made that speech to the FFA National Convention in 1978. It well describes countless generations of hardworking farmers but it is increasingly a portrait of history, disconnected from the modern reality of factory farms.

The planned paradise is lost. This land which we made the breadbasket of the world is at deaths door due to unsustainable farming practices. We keep our crops productive only by massive inputs of increasingly rare fertilizer and irreplaceable ancient water. Half of our irreplaceable topsoil is gone down the river taking with it a toxic soup of chemicals that is killing the Gulf.

The dairy barns are empty and falling down, replaced by massive confinement dairies staffed by almost a million illegal immigrants who don't even speak our language. All the while new farmers struggle to find opportunity to get into farming and our economy struggles to add even a few thousand jobs.

No longer are our children born in the calming comfort of home surrounded by loving and skilled family and mid-wives but in interventionist minded hospitals that cause more problems than they prevent. We are increasingly divorced from nature and from one another as electronics become our medium of exchange.

The colts are gone, replaced by debt inducing heavy machinery that depends on a cheap supply of oil from places which increasingly hate us. The horses are being abandoned as new generations of city folk who've never birthed a horse outlawed horse slaughter, dropping the bottom out of the horse market. Now a weaned colt won't even bring enough money to feed his mother for a month, much less an 11 month gestation. And soon even the farmer won't be needed, replaced by computerized machinery.

Where farmers once spent their lives for their livestock, businesses now treat animals as little more than cogs in an industrial machine; nothing more than a part to be used and abused and then thrown away and not something living to be respected and cared for.

The countryside once teaming with diversified family farms filled with the voices of children, cows, horses, pigs, sheep and chickens has gone silent as the homesteads have been abandoned and consolidated into massive commodity farms growing just one or two crops. Most farmers now produce commodities not food, grow corn destined to be turned into auto fuel, and plant crops in places and years they have no business doing so because they're just farming for subsidies not food.

The song birds are disappearing. Populations of most species are just a fraction of what they once were as the land is poisoned with chemicals and the habitat destroyed by fence-row to fence-row farming looking to mine every last bit of fertility out of the land. And our people are dieing of cancer and a myriad of other chemical induced diseases which have turned our life-giving food into poison.

The schools are closing and the children gone. No more do large farm families gather for dinner nor neighbors gather at a local barn or hall for a dance. The rural countryside which used to be the lifeblood of our nation and culture it is now desolate and filled with hopelessness as the average farmer is nearing the retirement age. Most farmers would starve if not for off the farm jobs and the profits are all sucked up by multi-national corporations who've monopolized the seed, feed, and fertilizer supplies. Farming used to be the health of our communities but now it's the colonial slave-master siphoning off our wealth.

The son doesn't want to do what is father did and the father agrees, urging him to seek a job in the city, as there is no hope for the future in industrial commodity farming.

The paradise Paul Harvey describes is paradise lost. The land is dieing, the animals are made to suffer, and our neighbors are getting sick from the food.

The young boys Harvey spoke those words to are now about 53 years old. With the average farmer being 57 years old they essentially represent the farmers we have today: the last generation to go into farming. It was that generation which would go through the farm crisis of the 80's which would rock the rural countryside and who would witness massive changes in agriculture practices and demographics as countless farms were taken by banks or the IRS and family farms were replaced by corporations.

Paradise Restored

But I will not end this on a sad note for there is hope for the future.

For people are waking up to what they have lost; realizing that the farms of yesteryear they thought were producing our food are but a memory, replaced by grueling factories and desolate fields. Shocked out of their stupor they are demanding and clamoring for real food from real farms.

For the first time in decades the number of farms is increasing. People all across this nation with no connection to farming or the rural countryside are starting farms. They are farming with nature instead of against it. They are forming diversified farms that are bringing livestock back into the picture as they grow nutrient dense food with ancient methods rediscovered which build soil and soil fertility.

They treat animals with respect and honor as they farm with methods which heal the land, restore animal health, and produce health building food which reverses the degenerative diseases caused by nutritionless, chemically contaminated food. They are throwing off the chains of bankers and corporate middlemen, selling real food directly to the people who eat it and reestablishing that sacred connection to the land to our city brethren.

And yet as I look down on my own son, growing up so strong and smart I wonder, will he want to be like his dad? We could not have given them any better raising; but will they choose this way or the deceptive comforts of city life? I can talk about calling and restoration but at the end of the day more than anyone he sees the trials and struggles we endure to make a go of this.

We work long hours for little pay, and there is never enough hours in the day nor financing for the task at hand. And the whole world seems stacked against us. The corporations try to co-opt our market and the corporate PR machine is ramping up while governments are fighting back by passing new regulations, arresting raw milk farmers serving the new markets, and making it a terrorist crime to expose the criminal animal abuse and environmental destruction wrought by factory farms.

But there is hope for the future. While the paradise God made was lost, it can be restored. The battle is joined, but it is not yet won. We have our calling and we will not back down. But we can't do it alone. We are only just beginning and your farmer cannot do it alone, we need your help.

In the coming weeks in our newsletter we'll talk more about our story of how we came to farming, our vision for what we're doing here, and ways you can join the battle and help restore paradise.