Put Your Faith in Your Local Farmer.
We live in a demanding world- it seems like all our time is spent working, taking care of our kids, or somehow otherwise expending energy on something else other than ourselves. When is the last time we made a home cooked meal or truly felt good about what we ate for dinner? It’s time to give back to ourselves, to spend more time listening to our bodies, our minds, and our taste buds.
It’s easy to get caught up in the ease of convenience food, buying already prepared foods for the sake of time, trusting that it’s fresh, full of nutrients, or prepared with the right about of love and care that we deserve. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case, especially with vegetables. Transit, processing, and packaging all take a toll on the integrity of our food.
But what can we do to change that? To ensure that we take the time to properly feed ourselves and our families? To give our bodies the fuel they deserve and to spoil our taste buds with quality? To buy fresh- truly fresh food?
It starts with a farmer. Your local farmer. It starts with finding the closest farm to your home and entrusting them to grow your food. That is what a farmer is good at; that is what generations of farmers teach their children and their children’s children. A farmer’s pride is his/her ability to serve family, community, and environment through an act of sustaining nature itself.
Farmers are a unique breed – they are honest, humble, and reliable. They are the most consistent, hard working, and optimistic people you will ever meet. They speak truth and wisdom shared from years of experience of uniting faith and reason in a balanced way. And they love to talk.
So if we want to to give back to ourselves, to spend more time listening to our bodies, our minds, and our taste buds, we need to start with a visit to our local farm. We need to experience true quality and freshness with produce that hasn’t spent days in transit or at the distribution center. We need to ask questions – not of google, but of our local farmer. We need to ask how things are grown, how we can promote sustainability, how we can eat seasonally, how we can take time to prepare delicious and nutritious foods for ourselves and our families.
Food For Thought:
“So God Made a Farmer” was a speech given by radio broadcaster Paul Harvey at the 1978 Future Farmers of America convention.
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.