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.
