A middle-aged man in a light-colored shirt and blue jeans loads hay into a black pickup truck on an overcast day in an open field with dry grass, wire fence, and trees. 2:02
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Paul Harvey on why God made a farmer

On the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." Then Paul Harvey spells out what the job takes. more

The answer is a list, and a long one. God needs 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." Each time the list runs out, the same line comes back. "So God made a farmer."

Some of it is hard to hear. The farmer has to "sit up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die," then dry his eyes and say, "Maybe next year." Harvey doesn't stay there long. There's work to do.

The man also has to be handy. He can shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire and make harness out of hay wire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. At planting time and harvest, he'll "finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon," then put in another 72 hours.

He has to be two men at once, strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, gentle enough to care for lambs and wean pigs. He's the kind of man who "will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadowlark."

The farmer here looks like he could handle all of it. On a gray day in an open field, with dry grass, a wire fence and trees around him, he loads hay into the back of a black Ram pickup. It's a truck ad, technically. Harvey never once mentions the truck.

It has to be somebody who'd "plow deep and straight and not cut corners," Harvey says, and somebody who'll hold a family together. The last picture he paints is a soft one. The farmer laughs, then sighs, then answers "with smiling eyes when his son says that he wants to spend his life doing what Dad does."

A middle-aged man in a light-colored shirt and blue jeans loads hay into a black pickup truck on an overcast day in an open field with dry grass, wire fence, and trees. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
On the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." Then Paul Harvey spells out what the job takes.

So God made a farmer. And by the sound of it, another one is coming up right behind him.