Sorry for such a long title. I just read an article written by Fox New reporter, Tyler Olson that was published today (Februaru 17, 2020). In the article, Michael Bloomberg was quoted as saying: “The agrarian society lasted 3,000 years and we could teach processes. I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.” He continued, “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then w had 300 ears of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal o the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture, not it’s 2 percent in the United States.”
Oh boy! I could go in a million different directions and write a book in response to this man’s arrogance and ignorance about agriculture. For instance, the farmer no longer has to dig a hole to plant corn, the lathe operators, welders and engineers have developed things called tractors & planters that are more high tech than cars and a lot of the GPS information that the farmer has to interpret on his farm fields requires more than just being told how to do things. We even use drones & soil chemical reports to help determine where our fertilizers need to be put to maximize our fertilizer capabilities and maximize our investments. Farmers must also know how to market crops, understand how to hedge and how to sell short, we are investors, inventors, we understand how to manipulate genetics and breeding cycles. We spend more time in fields and pastures than we do inside.
Farmers and Ranchers have developed technology and utilize science to produce the safest and healthiest food in the world! We are conservationists because if the land isn’t sound, we can’t produce good food. We set up areas for wildlife to thrive, we are great stewards of the land and city politicians have NO CLUE. Most people think their food comes from the grocery store and can’t understand why we think differently than the east or west coast. We WORK for a living and the gas we pass after eating beans has more muscle than their whole body will ever have. We have calloused hands, feet, sore backs and many of us walk with a limp or are missing a finger, toe or hand. We are lucky to see our families during harvest, kidding, calving or lambing. We pull 18-23 hour days, milking cows twice a day, riding pens and pastures in blizzards to make sure our animals are safe, forgetting about our own safety. We are caregivers of livestock, birthing coaches to cows, sheep, pigs and goats, we are tough and well leathered from the sun. We are the Farmers and Ranchers of America, Proud and Strong but much unappreciated.
Many of us work two or three jobs just to keep farming and ranching. We are perpetual optimists who struggle on when prices don’t cover input costs and ride short waves of prosperity between droughts, floods, fires and other natural disasters. Yet we feed over 150 people plus ourselves. We are so good at producing that sometimes we produce so much that we produce ourselves in to low prices. WE are too efficient yet the world would be in a pickle if the American farmers stopped producing and selling our products.
We believe in working hard for what we earn and we don’t believe in welfare. Some may say farm subsidies are welfare but there is no other industry in the USA that has to deal with Mother Nature like we do. We are at her mercy and she is a violent lady, sending floods down the Missouri that still haven’t gone down from the Spring of 2019 and she may hit us again in the Spring of 2020 thaw. She throws hail the size of dimes to grapefruit that strip our crops right before harvest and she bakes the land in droughts that turn the green to dust. Yet rich career politicians think we are ignorant people. He doesn’t have the testicles God gave a frog to come to Middle America to meet the people who proudly produce his meals. His insults to the factory workers is just as offensive because there will come times when technology will fail and the human who has the skills will fix the problem. Just look no further than NASA and John Glenn’s first flight in space. It took a human calculator to do the math. So too, it will take farmers and ranchers who pass down those things that can’t be taught in colleges, to make things right. We are America’s Farmers and Ranchers, WE ARE AGRICULTURALISTS!
Educated Cowpuncher 