York County Fair

There were new boots at the York County Fair. I can tell you there were because I was just there. I remember the county fair well. Different times. I wasn’t allowed to stray too far from my parents’ side in those days. I guess you could say I was an observer back then, much like today. For various reasons we weren’t a 4-H family, I didn’t even do FFA. That is why it was such a big deal for me when I earned my Honorary State FFA Degree as a professional adult.

I was working for a global seed company then. A global seed company started by Henry A. Wallace, way back when farmers across the land were marveling about the wonders of hybrid corn. I still have a necklace, a simple one I picked up at some department store, with a cheap silver infinity symbol swinging between two chains. The same infinity symbol on the original Pioneer® Seed bags. But while the symbol represents forever, things certainly changed in the seed industry. They changed like the changes I saw at the fair. 

Another hybrid corn leader to know about was Mr. Roswell Garst, the Coon Rapids, Iowa farmer who didn’t let the Cold War stop him from inviting Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to his farm. Garst knew what a full or empty stomach meant to a world that never seems to want to cease the wars. He also knew the great wealth potential ahead and he wasn’t going to let that opportunity pass him by. 

Growing up I knew my only opportunities in agriculture would be through pursuing a higher education. I knew because I watched the farms around me continue to consolidate and I also listened very closely to the adults around me. I listened to talk about the seemingly inevitable trends, that the fence rows and shelter belts were completely on their way out. It was just the way it was going to be, fewer farms and more rows of corn. Still, the highest form of nutrition is within the four-legged beast that is by God’s design, made to graze on forages and grass. Once wild, in herds, they were a mobile and highly efficient creator of calories from a natural cycle. Since then, many have been domesticated and reduced down to a feeding trough.

I spent nearly all my life learning the reasons there were insiders and outsiders in agriculture the world over. Coming home to the county fair now seems like slipping through a wrinkle in time. A wrinkle like the ones I see on faces of families I thought would be raising livestock forever. Forever, like that infinity symbol on a sack of seed. The only thing that guarantees forever on the farm is the pursuit of one’s passions in action. A pursuit I am on, to help people see these farms can go on, and there can be even more of them. But it’s going to take something new to get there. It’s going to take being proud of something that really matters and the wisdom of knowing that it’s not yield and technology. It’s people and precious natural resources. 

Our very lives depend on our ability to see the problems at hand and to change. The very soil beneath our feet and water we can’t drink is dying for us to figure this out. In my favorite novel of all time, Willa Cather’s “O’ Pioneers,” the heroine Alexandra Bergstrom says this, “The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it – for a little while.”

All the people who own it for a little while. That little while is perhaps halfway near its end for me. Tomorrow is promised to no one, not even the next second. I heard someone say this midway point in life was, “halfway to harvest time.” The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. We need new cowboy and cowgirl boots, more workers, more planners and dreamers, more people, that’s what will transform the current farms and envision more of them. 

I think that’s a rightful place to place our prairie pride in, the potential of people, people on the outside looking in with so much to give and people on the inside with so much to give and so much to learn. The next generation of true pioneers that surpasses any infinity symbol, is rooted in a people-centered, not self-centered agriculture that has the wisdom to understand what really has value forever. What really has value is the heart in the heartland. That’s where we start so the land can be fruitful again.