During this year’s Super Bowl, a two-minute advertisement for Ram Trucks featured excerpts from a Paul Harvey 1978 address to the Future Farmers of America Convention, along with still photos of farmers and farming. I think it was one of the most memorable ads among a plethora of forgettable and annoying commercials.
A New York Times obituary said of Paul Harvey, “In his heyday, which lasted from the 1950s through the 1990s, Mr. Harvey’s twice-daily soapbox-on-the-air was one of the most popular programs on radio. Audiences of as many as 22 million people tuned in on 1,300 stations to a voice that had been an American institution for as long as most of them could remember.”
I’m one of those who remember. I bet many of you remember his introduction each day, “Hello, Americans, This is Paul Harvey! Stand byyy for Newwws!”
In case some of you aren’t familiar with this wonderful piece, here's the full text of Paul Harvey’s 1978 ‘So God Made a Farmer’ speech:
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 and 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 and 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. And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, 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’d 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 he wants to spend his life ‘doing what dad does.’” So God made a farmer.
“And that’s the rest of the story. Paul Harvey… good dayyy!”
Paul Harvey pretty much summed it up in that speech, “So God made a farmer.” He made a lot of them, and he’s still making them. This world needs farmers if people want to eat and survive. That food you buy in the supermarket doesn’t just miraculously appear on the shelves. Farmers are working from before dawn ‘til after dark to see that those shelves remain full. It’s not an easy job. You have to know a little bit about everything if you’re going to be a farmer.
When I was young, just about everyone I knew was a farmer. My parents were farmers. My grandparents were farmers. Most of my relatives were farmers. All my friend’s parents were farmers. It was the only way of life we knew. Our immediate world pretty much ended at the line fence around our farm. Beyond the line fence our world included the community that attended our rural one-room school. It was the hub that tied each farming community together.
For the farmers and their family members within that community, farming was not a 40-hour a week job. The norm was 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. There were no paid vacations. For most farmers there were NO vacations.
Like everything else that once was, the face of the American farmer is changing. Farming is a scientific, high-tech, big business. Many tractors and machinery can cost more than a house. Computer technology has become as big a part of farming as the plow. You better thank God for continuing to make new farmers who’ve been able to adjust to the changing times. Without them we’d all be starving.
I’m glad I had the opportunity to be raised on a farm. I look back at those years as something to be proud of.
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