There’s a push to get back to the farm
- Bryan Schaaf
- August 30, 2018
- 1636
For the past eight months, I’ve been part of a crew visiting farms across the country as part of a nationwide barn-painting tour to celebrate 40 years since the birth of my employer, Certified Angus Beef.
As a whole, the 40-barns project started in January in Ocala, Florida (if you take I-75 south toward Disney World, just look to your left and you can’t miss it) and is set to culminate here near Wooster in mid-October.
And while I’ve not been present for each and every stop of the first 30 or so that we’ve completed, I have been a part of a good number, checking off visits to remote locations like Bern, Kansas; Hereford, Texas; Lowell, Michigan; and Lavaca, Arkansas from my bucket list.
Along the way each stop is a new opportunity to meet farm families and hear their stories, some going back over centuries on the same piece of land.
But over the past year, something occurred to me. While often it seems like the rest of the world is going mad, farmers, pretty much everywhere you find them, are mostly the same as they’ve always been.
Sure, technologies have come about to help them be more efficient and resourceful and maybe not have to go see a chiropractor as often, but at the end of the day, these are the same honest, decent, hard-working folks they’ve always been.
Farm work, in addition to being great for staying fit and providing that perfect tan before heading back to school at the end of summer, is good for the soul. It allows time for reflection and provides a chance to reset the brain in ways nothing else really can.
In a world where we’re bombarded with screens telling us where to buy, what to think, what to eat and where we should visit, a few hours of uncomfortable manual labor with only one’s thoughts to accompany them is how we stay human. It’s how we remember what’s important.
But in today’s day and age with farms growing fewer in number pretty much everywhere you look and even the laborious tasks dwindling around the houses of folks who live in the city (see many push mowers out there?), the growing issues surrounding us don’t seem all that surprising.
For many years now, there has been a massive push in the culinary world to get back to the farm, underscoring the importance of understanding where our food comes from.
But to suggest that farms only produce things is far too limiting.
Farms produce people — good people — who learned a long time ago there aren’t enough hours in the day to sweat the small stuff. They produce people who do what they say and say what they do, and if you’re ever in need, well, there’s a farmer nearby who’ll give you the shirt off their back.
Truly our focus should be on getting back to the farm, not just because that’s where our food is grown and raised, but because that’s where the ideals that make us human are planted.