Farmers

This time of the year, in the early fall, I love the sound of the combines taking off the soy bean fields.  Its not that the actual sound of the machines sound like song birds or an angels harp, but still, there is something so soothing and comforting to me in hearing those machines purr, while they carefully go through each row of beans, early in the morning, throughout the day, and  sometimes, even pretty late into the night. I even like seeing their trucks sitting on the sides of the roads, waiting for the farmers to finish up and put more beans in them to be taken on to the grain mills. The now stubbly brown field, freshly cut, left with maybe a few fallen beans, waiting for a hungry deer to come by and gobble them up, look bare, but also like an accomplishment.

I wonder if they ever think about how many products their beans are going to be made into, and where all of these beans will end up. I know I would be thinking about all that, but maybe that’s just me.

And the farmers, oh, how I admire the farmers for doing what they do. Truly unsung heroes in my book!

All farmers are hardworking people, keeping long hours in all weather, at Mother Nature’s mercy, yet, they keep on doing what they do. Some of them make farming their full time job, but many cannot afford to do that, so they keep a regular job, and then farm on the weekends or whenever they can, hoping and praying that the weather, and their equipment will cooperate with them to get the very important job at hand done, in the sometimes very small windows that they have to work with.

 I don’t think that they do it for the money, as many that I know sometimes just break even when all is said and done. No, I think that they do this for the same reasons that I raise a garden each summer, regardless of how exhausting it can be. They do it as a labor of love, a comfort knowing that someone will eat because of what they did.  Strangers from near and far benefit from these hard working, good people that we call farmers.