Northern Farmer

With the week wrapping up things are looking pretty good around here. The house is shingled and we have three days under the belt chopping silage. The corn ranges from poor to excellent, depending if the soil could hold on to some moister during this summer’s heat and drought. It’s cooler here the last couple of days and it sure does feel good when a persons in an old tractor cab, the first day chopping it was in the upper eighties outside and about a hundred and twenty in the cab. Whew, talk about a weight loss plan driving in that tractor. One thing about chopping silage, it’s not like plowing or raking hay or many other field jobs, a person can’t look around to much and enjoy the scenery. It’s more of a high tension job, tractor roaring full bore, chopper just a howling, noisy bugger, and continually looking back to make sure it’s all working OK. But all in all, I do like that job. When I was a teenager I always looked forward to silage time because once other farmers heard that I could help with silage harvest there was no shortage of day jobs helping these folks out. Funny, there was always some farmers ready and willing to hire me when ever I could work for them. Plus it was a nice way for a teenager to make a few dollars, plus get fed by the farmers’ wives. Good food too.

But being it’s Saturday evening and we pulled out of the field early I figured I’d better do some catching up around here. So, what’s to write about? Well, a simple hillbilly Holy Roller ain’t as smart as all the big shot important people but there’s some things even a blind man can see out here on the farm. Some of the farmers around here have been using Roundup ready corn and soybeans since they first came out some years back. So these folks have been serfs for a number of years already. But what I’m seeing and I mean I’m seeing it big time, these fields that have been using these Franken seeds and were fairly clean the last few years are going right down the tubes. Boy, they’re getting weedy. And these weeds are now Roundup Ready too. Sure didn’t take em long to adapt. One field nearby got sprayed twice and is still full of foxtail and ragweed. Heck, we didn’t use any of those big name sprays, and our weeds ain’t any worse than Monsanto’s, oops, I mean the independent American farmers. OK, I’m joking about them farmers being independent, back to the word, serfs. There.

But never fear, some of them important people will figure it out for all these loyal serfs, if there’s a dollar to be bled from farmers, them parasites will go for it. But I figure when farmers started wanting to live with the same moral standards as the rest of society, that’s when the big companies were able to really put the screws to these families. Promises and promises were and are being made on how this will help your farm and that will help your farm. Just buy our stuff, and maybe even have our experts come out to your farm and examine everything and then they’ll tell you what they will sell you, (whether you need it or not), and then you will have “more profit”.

Just like years ago, I remember the countryside was quiet on Sundays. Oh, people did their chores and milkings and all that stuff, but folks very rarely were in the fields on Sundays. That was a day for church and the rest of the day was a family day. The hay could wait for Monday. Now I know some folks think that’s stupid, but I do believe when people had that faith in God and would set aside that day, their families were blessed and their farms were blessed. Kinda simple really. And that doesn’t mean taking the day off and going shopping either. There were no businesses open on Sundays when I was young, and I ain’t all that long of tooth. Sundays were for folks getting together after church, it was common to go out to the chicken coop on Saturday evening and knock off a couple of heads for the Sunday meal. Boy, I remember we were always visiting or being visited on Sunday. It was good for what ails you. Work hard all week, go to church on Sunday and visit with relation and friends the rest of the day. Now folks don’t do that very often, I guess they figure they can buy pleasures, but it never does work out that way in the end. Broken families and all these other social problems are out of control. The big thinkers are trying to figure out answers but never can come up with anything that works. Well, first off, the only answer there is, they deny it flat out. Even out here if a person mentions that they follow Jesus you get some strange looks.

The world around us is going in a downward spin, I don’t think many could honestly disagree with that. It’s crept into the countryside too. There’s no denying it. Just look around and almost every home has a satellite dish, that way even out here anyone can get hundreds of TV channel so their mind can be polluted with every sick and perverted thing that man can dream up. It used to be we were fairly out of range of these influences; the TV signal couldn’t quite make it here from the Twin Cities. There was only one channel that could be had here that a person could actually see. But the last fifteen years or so it’s exploded wide open everywhere and the morals are plummeting everywhere. Evil is now considered good, good is considered hateful. Everything is turning upside down, inside out. Many churches follow the world and even race out ahead promoting the evils. And the folks being brought up in these churches have no idea what the promises of the Word are.

But I do believe there’s hope. In fact I know there’s hope. As bad as it is and as bad as it will get, there’ll be people that will follow the Word. They’ll simplify because it’s darn hard to follow the Word and live a pagan lifestyle. They’ll have strong families; they will see God having huge impacts on their lives. They’ll start to understand the truly important blessings that are being showered on them daily. Instead of living like modern suburbia, they’ll look to simplicity. And the amazing thing is, they’ll discover that they’d never go back to the modern me, me, lifestyle. Going to town will be only for something important, not going just to look for self fulfillment, which just leaves emptiness. And on Sundays after a hard and fulfilling weeks work they’ll go and worship with joy in their heart and afterwards have fun and good times like God intended for His children. What a good countryside this would be. But it starts here, so that’s what we will continue to do.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 8:47 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.