Soft Hands. Hard Job
In 1978, radio personality Paul Harvey gave a speech to the Future Farmers of America entitled, “So God Made a Farmer.” In 2013, Dodge used an excerpt of the speech in their Super Bowl commercial, and farm families everywhere sat on the edge of their seats. The impact of Harvey’s speech is still felt in farm families today and can be seen in all the hard work farmers do, not only for their families, but for their community and country as well. Personally, I experience this pride and feeling of helpfulness every day when I remember how hard my dad and so many others work to provide for their communities. Right now, in late September and early October is peak harvest season for peanuts and cotton, bringing long nights and even longer days of working to bring in this year’s crop.
“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. … Someone who’d 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 he wants to spend his life ‘doing what dad does.’ So God made a farmer.”
1. “And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, then, pain’n from ‘tractor back,’ put in another seventy-two hours. So God made a farmer.”
2. Checking the first plow of the season.
3. A day in the life – time to work on some machinery.
4. “‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.’ So God made a farmer.”
5. 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.
6. “It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners.”
7. “Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing…”
