Northern Farmer

This has to be one of my favorite times of the year. The garden is producing heavily providing our family with meals that just can’t be bought in stores. Eating “fresh” chicken and enjoying the tail end of the rasberry crop. The grain fields are golden and being swathed, oats, barley, and wheat all grow well here. I’ve come to enjoy working with small grains more and more every year. It’s as old of an agrarian task that there can be. The way it’s harvested is different now than countless generations before me, but the end result is the same. All of our oats is in winrows now waiting for combining next week. Yesterday swathing it was on my mind about how many generations of my family worked planting and harvesting small grains of one kind or another. I never thought about this before and it dawned on me that the line has probobly never been broken to this day. Since God created man, and man took to tilling the earth, it is possible that the line has been unbroken to this very day in my family. I’m 49 years old and never thought of this before! As far back as I can trace it, this family has been farmers, on both sides. And before that it’s my guess they were farmers too, because in Europe back then things didn’t change very much from generation to generation. These are humbling thoughts. Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, my family lived on the land, tilled the soil, tended livestock of on kind or another. All the generations before me lived an agrarian life. These thoughts have given me more responsibility to pass this down the generations, to see our family continue to tend the land and livestock, and keep our faith in God.

I wonder what the generations before me would say if they could see the results of how humanity is acting in this present age. I’ll admit it was no piece of cake years ago with wars and the like ravishing the old country, but the country people always picked up the pieces and went on tending the earth not paying to much attention to what the “important” people were doing with the world. The only way the “important” people could even have anything was because of the people in the countryside putting everything back in order. No country can survive without a healthy farm culture, it’s impossible. Being the poor writer that I am , I’m having some difficulty putting these thoughts down, but I have to say, I’m overwhelmed by this. I pray our family can continue to hold together this responsibility and be there when a Christian agrarian society is once again the way of life. Generations from now, I pray, they can say the line has been unbroken since the begining.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.