Wednesday, February 6, 2013

To the farmer in all of us

A reader sent me this link to a Ram Truck Superbowl commercial which features the incomparable Paul Harvey speaking at a 1978 Future Farmers of America convention.


Here's the text:

And on the eighth day God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God made a farmer.

God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper, then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.” So God made a farmer.

God said, “I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt, and watch it die, and dry his eyes and say, maybe next year.”

“I need somebody who can shape an axe handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of hay wire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. Who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty hour week by Tuesday noon, and then pain'n from ‘tractor back,’ put in another seventy two hours. So God made a farmer.”

God said, “I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink combed pullets, and who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark.” So God made a farmer.

“It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk. Somebody 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 that he wants to spend his life ‘doing what dad does.’”

So God made a farmer.



Trust Paul Harvey to verbalize in beautiful prose the hundreds of thousands of unsung heroes who bring food to America's tables.


God bless farmers.

19 comments:

  1. My favorite Super Bowl commercial this year. My next choice would be the Military one by Oprah. And then the old folks going to Taco Bell. Didn't watch the half-time show, too much skin and movement for us. And almost cried as the 49ers lost their first Super Bowl

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  2. That was awesome. And to have God mentioned during the superbowl with this commercial is amazing in its self. Yes indeed God made the farmers. He also made the Benewah. :)

    Razor in the Benewah

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  3. Thanks for that. I have heard it, but never read it. And, I did not watch the Superbowl.

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  4. Patrice,

    Talk about a great commercial. Farmers are what makes America!

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  5. That was the best Superbowl ad this year, hands down. Oh, how we miss Paul Harvey.

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  6. Some of his speech was left out for the sake of time. YouTube does show a few videos with all the speech.

    I am married to a full-time farmer, which makes ME a farmer! No one understands the hours they put in (he is STILL working 15 hour days, or longer, in February). This is not an 8 month occupation, with time off in the winter, like so many people think. It is, however, a labor of love. It is in his blood. I applaud Dodge for that ad. It is SO true, even today!

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  7. I thought of my Grampa Frank when I first watched that commercial. He farmed in Kansas while raising my mom.

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  8. Did you see the story that a Latino group is upset and called this commercial racist? Seems as if there were no latino farmer workers in the commercial. The spokesman said that the commercial highlighted a way of life from a by-gone age!

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  9. It was farmers, who know how to do hard, ugly, long work that have won wars for us, like WWII! DWLee3

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  10. I put up with football in my living room once a year. I make food the "boys" will like (this year was pulled pork BBQ sliders, corn-on-the-cob, vegetables, and I indulged in soda pop), and find things to do elsewhere while the game is on.

    In my opinion, most of the ads are little more than porn, and the halftime show ever more so. This year's show was truly debasing to women and next year I may not allow the Superbowl in my living room.

    But, the Dodge ad was awesome! I miss Paul Harvey's radio talks, and truly farmers have always been and will be our nation's backbone. It was great to see that honored.

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  11. Paul Harvey must have met my Grandaddy Joe.


    - Charlie

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  12. I thought the ad was wonderful....I didn't watch any of the SuperBowl, but a friend sent me the ad...The only thing I didn't like about it was that Dodge put it on....That company stinks and we have a Dodge from 1999 an it was nothing but trouble and cost us a ton to repair it....We have Toyota's that have not cost nardly anything to fix and it they are still running...Hubby's truck had 404,660 miles on it when the timing chain broke and then we needed a newer engine...
    But, the ad was WONDERFUL..Thanks to farmers for the hard lives they have to get food to the rest of us..
    Love from NC

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  13. It's just too bad current farming practices are destroying our planet and ourselves. Large scale ag impregnates all of our food with poisons like pesticides, using inanimate fertilizers that destroy the soil web, feeding anything such as poop and entrails to animals in concentrated feed lots that create cesspools of filth and disease that requires anitbiotics to bring to table, which so often infects us with e.coli and salmonella, the horrid conditions animals endure alive and while being slaughtered to provide us with food, the neverending debt cycle required by farmers exploited by large corporations that are not paid well enough to break even for the work they do. Not to mention the extra people modern ag has allowed to be birthed into this world, the people you so detest that feel entitled to your wealth.

    I'm not sorry for my run on sentence, Every facet of modern day living has its downsides. All that matters is what we tell ourselves to let us sleep at night.

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    1. Mr. Miller,

      I am not sure where you get your information... Perhaps the mainstream media? I assure you, from the past 20 years of living on a farm, that NONE of what you wrote it true. Feeding poop and entrails? Shame on you! And I can tell you that the money we bring into this household came from selling the grain and cattle that we lovingly raise and care for. And we make a darn good living, like most people who work from sun up to way past dark. Find a reputable source for your facts before you go badmouthing the very people who put food on your table.

      Farmwife in Missouri

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    2. I do not have first hand knowledge of everything that Mr. Miller is talking about nor do I agree with everything he says but I do have first hand knowledge of the pesticide use. I live on a small farm in South Georgia in a county that has way more cows, chicken farms, plus cotton, peanut, hay, soybean, you name it fields than it has people. Never really understood what GMO really meant until we moved here seven years ago. Imagine it is spring and the crops are just coming up. God's creation is rejoicing in its springtime rebirth and the crops are about 8 inches or a foot high. But wait, what is that brown stuff all around the fields everywhere? It looks like everthing has been killed from a late frost but no it is overspray from the gallons upon gallons of weed killers that have been applied to the fields. Fast forward to the fall. The cotton is beautiful with its white balls of fluff and the wheat and rye are tall and gorgeous, and the blackeyed peas are hanging from the bushes in clusters. Drive by the next day and the cotton has lost all of its leaves, and so have the blackeyed peas. The stalks of wheat and rye are now all brown--so are the edges of the field. This time they have been sprayed with defoliating and ripening agents. Not bad for you? My neighbor had to go to the emergency room and spent a week in bed after she picked okra from her own garden about 500 yards from a neighbor's cotton field. All the trees on her fence line have also died. Overspray!

      By the way--God created the farmer on the 6th day--it is the oldest and should be one of the most revered professions.

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    3. Jeff is more right than wrong, Farmwife in MO. Many animals feeds contain "by-product" which is ground up animal parts, even unwanted rooster chicks that are emacerated when they are identified as such. Fortunately beef parts are NO LONGER supposed to part of cattle feed. That is how Mad Cow disease came about, and when it is identified it is a sure sign that someone has been feeding offal.
      Do you sell your cattle straight to slaughter without them having ever been fed commercial feed that does indeed include GMO grains and antibiotics? If you do, then you are among a growing group of concerned farmers, trying to get a product to the consumer that is the best they can produce. I do understand that much of what is done to get a product to market that is within a price range the consumer to pay is quite a feat and that you make little for all your effort on an hourly basis, anyway.
      Are your crop fields sprayed with herbicides, fertilizers and insecticides? Then Jeff is right again.
      I worked at the extension office in a farm county in MO years ago. The epidemiology report we received monthly was quite disturbing, with brain cancers at an all time high. A local doctor had the water tested at a private facility and it was full of farm chemicals; however, that same water passed the standards for safe consumption as the bacteria levels it was tested for were within the limits.
      I admire the American farmer in the same manner I admire those who serve in the military and those who stand before congregations and preach God's word. All are hard working, salt of the earth and are, by many standards, underpaid. The American consumer would rather be able to afford satellite tv, a new car every few years, the latest fashion, and frequent fast food than to be able and willing to pay for food that is devoid of chemicals and bizarre feed ingredients. Some of us do make those choices to pay the extra to buy the grass fed beef directly from the producer and to buy the organic produce. Farmers have been forced into this corner and I'm unsure how most of them are going to get out unless they can develop their own small markets.

      Thank you Patrice for this fine tribute to the American farmer sponsored by Dodge. We have proudly driven Dodge diesel pickups since 1994 and my current 2500 for 8 years and I average 24 mpg. I hope to own it as long as I can step up into it. I don't have TV so I didn't see the commercial. I was sent a link to the Budweiser commercial, and like the farmer commercial, I had to dry my eyes after both.

      A former farmer's wife--
      sidetracksusie

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  14. Enough said . Yes , GOD bless farmers.

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  15. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUzMPlQb2G4&feature=player_embedded

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  16. As a grandson of farmers and the husband of a farmers daughter, I can attest to the hard work ALL farmers & ranchers put in. God in His infinite wisdom has given (I think) farmers the ONLY ones with the patience and fortitude to put up with the vagarious weather and climate conditions necessary to produce a crop or grow the livestock upon which we feed. Not to mention the governmental "red tape" that is needlessly foisted upon them. NO ONE and I mean NO ONE puts in the hours that they do and for the most part all in love for the land and what it can produce. Indeed God has blessed us with "Farmers" (& Ranchers too)!

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