Here I sit, all covered in shit (And I mean that in the most literal, smelly
way possible) after pressure-washing a manure covered tractor. And it
occurred to me that people don't give farmers the respect they deserve.
Especially considering the fact that they are THE single most important
profession in society, they are the backbone of civilization. Allow me to elaborate.
Most people hold doctors and firefighters and other such professions in high
regard because they save lives. However their scope of positive influence
pales in comparison to what the farmer accomplishes. Simply put, without
food, everybody dies. Doctors benefit the sick and firefighters benifit
the victims of fire. Both of these types of help are direct. A person in
need receives one on one attention from the benificiary, but in the case
of farmers most people have never seen a farmer or a field. Most have
never even seen a cow or chicken in real life, which is why the benificial
influence of the farming comunity is generally overlooked.
But as in all things, bad news travels faster then good news. And in regards
to the media, I suppose you could say "No news is good news, but good
news is bad news" The media is more interested in portraying the negative
aspects of farming, even though many of those negative aspects are either
inherent to the profession, or are made necessary by the same contempt
that cyclicly and progressively requires the farmer to employ more and
more controversial methods in order to make ends meet due to lack of support.
Farmers are also the most important profession in society and the backbone of
civilization. In precivilized times each person/family was required to
provide food for themselves in order to survive. This drastially stunted
the potential of human thought because every person was required to work
in order to survive. There was no time to speciallize, no time to think,
no time to do anything but survive. However as people began to
increase and settle into areas where the ground was good, it took fewer
people to produce the food. This allowed people to not farm and build
carts and other tools in order to make farming easier, thereby producing
more food and allowing even more people to specialize. This process has
repeated over and over again, but now we have come to the point where
farmers are producing SOO much food, that the general populace is no
longer agrarian, but urbanized, specialized. One farmer makes food for
thousands upon thousands of people. Doctors, lawyers, mechanics, and
people who unstick the machines that make little plastic spoons for
children's fake tea sets. The influence and necessity of the farmer has been forgotten.
So there the farmer sits, looked upon with contempt for being what a person
who produces food must be, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt,
with several single pieces of machinery that cost upwards of $250,000, and
all that riding on wether or not it rains the right amount at the right
times. The farmer is required to do so many things in order to be even
remotely successful that it would astound and overwhelm the average
individual. Farmers are business owners. Accountants, bookkeepers,
mechanics, researchers, truckdrivers, manual labourers, welders,
builders, veterinarians.
They must decide what varieties of crops to plant, choosing between hundreds
of different types of a single grain to find one that best suits soil
type, drought resistance, disease resistance, flood resistance,
germination percentage, temperature, height, stem strength, yeild. And
many of those factors can affect other factors if third and even fourth
factors are different. A grain can have good drought resistance, but one
thunderstorm too many in springtime can drastically decrease yields due to disease.
Farmers even have to worry about conditions being too good, because if a
plants grow too much they can strangle themselves and not enough sunlight
gets through, or they can get too heavy and fall over, or to thick for
wind to pass through and get diseased due to too much moisture in the are.
Farming is not as simple as putting seeds in the ground and harvesting them
when its time. Farmers must put enough nutrients into the ground, but not
too many, a quarter inch deviation in depth can dramatically influence yields.
These are but a few examples illustrating the amount of thought and care that
needs to be put into farming. It is not easy. All these things must be
done in order to produce enough yield to sustain the farmer financially,
and more importantly, the very comfort and wealth that is enjoyed by and defines our society.
So please, thank a farmer.