The finest compliment you can pay a farmer is that he adapts. Not that he’s rich, or that his crop came in heavy, or that he’s got a new tractor in the shed. Just that he adapts. It’s the one thing every farmer I’ve known has been proud of, and the one thing nobody has ever managed to take away from him.
A cotton man I know near Lubbock told me about his year while we stood leaning on his pickup. Seed costs more. Fuel costs more. Fertilizer costs more. The buyers overseas come and go depending on arguments he doesn’t get a say in, and he hears about it the same way I do, on the radio. His son took a job in town. He told me all of this without once raising his voice, and I admired him so much I never thought to ask what he needed.
That’s the thing about farmers. They don’t ask, and I think we ought to honor that by not offering. A man who has spent his life at the mercy of the weather has a kind of strength the rest of us only read about. If you steadied his prices and his markets and made sure he could count on next year, you would be taking away the very thing that made him who he is. I don’t want a farmer who’s comfortable. I want one who adapts.
Around here a family sells out now and then, and some people call that the family farm disappearing. I’d put it differently. It’s adapting. When a family sells out to a bigger outfit, or to a developer who puts up a row of nice houses, that isn’t failure. That’s a family that read the land and made a decision. The son gets a steady paycheck. The grandchildren grow up in town near a good school. The land goes on under new owners, the way land always has.
Scripture tells us Joseph saw the lean years coming and filled the storehouses before they arrived. I have always admired him for that. He didn’t wait on anybody to rescue Egypt. He just got ready. That is a farmer’s virtue, and I’d hate to see us trade it for a program.
There are people who will tell you we owe farmers more than admiration. I don’t disagree that we owe them. I just believe admiration is the most honest thing I have to give, and I give it freely and often. I’ll vote for the Republican for Senate this fall so that admiration stays the main thing we give. I’ve gathered the other side would like to steady those prices and markets, and I’ve explained why I don’t want the cotton man comfortable.
I do most of my grocery shopping at the big store out by the highway now. The produce comes from all over. I like to think some of it was grown by men who adapted.
D. M.