WE'RE DONE SEEDING!!!

 Hi everyone,

I decided after that sad post last time, we all needed something to laugh about.  I didn't grow up with all of the funny farm slogans I shared below but many of them are familiar to me.

Robert and I have been farmers all of our lives except for our years in collage and 4 years of living in the city.  Those were looooong years when we tried to forget that we're farmers.  

It truly is in one's blood, though. When the soil in the Spring warms up and animal babies start arriving on the Earth, we MUST plant seeds!! 

Our guys finished planting in the fields yesterday.  Now that I'm done running for parts; packing lunches; helping move equipment around, I can FINALLY turn my attention to my garden.  YAY.

Here's to rains coming at the right times and great prices for what we produce here on our farm.  

Dawn

PS.  That extra seat is sure nice for Grandmas and Littles to catch a ride comfortably!

75 Funny Farmer Slogans and Sayings

Nov 8, 2018 by Brandon Gaille

Farmers are the backbone to any nations food supply. These great funny farmer slogans and sayings highlight the invaluable contributions and hard work of the agriculture industry.

A decision for nature.
A Hard Row to Plow.
Acres or inches? Size matters.
Agriculture is the most healthful, most useful and most noble employment of man.
Agriculture looks different today – our farmers are using GPS and you can monitor your irrigation systems over the Internet.
Agriculture: You Can’t Live Without It!
As a farmer, I am simple outstanding in my field.
Be natural.
Bringing growth, ingenuity, and experience to market.
Does your soil have what it takes?
Don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes.
Eat Clean And Green. Eat Organic.
Factory farming came about from a moral race to the bottom, with corporations vying against each other to produce more and bigger animals with less care at lower cost.
Farm = Fiber + Food + Fuel Series.
Farm Rule #1: Feed The People.
Farmer: We Feed The World.
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
Farmers are the founders of human civilization.
Farming Is A Profession Of Hope.
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.
Farming with live animals is a 7 day a week, legal form of slavery.
Farming: The Original Survivor
Feeding the world, caring for the Earth.
Fences should be horse-high, pig tight, and bull-strong.
Food, water, and energy for a hungry world.
Getting Our Hands Dirty; Putting Food in Yours.
Good for nature, good for you.
Good health and conscious living.
Grab a sheep.
Grass fed beef, the new old – fashioned way.
Growing Community By Inspiring Healthy, Whole, Abundant Living.
Growing Green Fields And A Green Environment.
Grown By Nature.
Hungry. Naked. Where Did All The Farmers Go?
Hungry? Why Wait?
I Farm, You Eat.
I Live My Life By The Seeds Of My Plants.
I Ranch for You.
If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.
If you ate today, thank a farmer.
If you tickle the earth with a hoe she laughs with a harvest.
Improving agriculture, improving lives.
In goodness we trust.
In Nature We Trust.
It is thus with farming, if you do one thing late, you will be late in all your work.
It never rains in a dry time.
It’s in our nature.
Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food.
Life on a farm is a school of patience; you can’t hurry the crops or make an ox in two days.
Like a gardener I believe what goes down must come up.
Local. Natural. Sustainable.
Make hay when the sun shines.
My Tractor Costs More Than Your Beemer.
Never answer a question from a farmer.
Old Farmers never die, they just go to seed.
Our farmers round, well pleased with constant gain, like other farmers, flourish and complain.
Producing more. Conserving more. Improving lives.
Providing the finest products to the best feed suppliers.
Putting Mother Nature In A Better Mood.
Re-imagine farming.
Simply good.
So organic farming practices are something that, to me, are interlinked with the idea of using biodiesel.
Solutions for the growing world.
Sowing is not as difficult as reaping.
The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn’t still be a farmer.
The leader in the field.
The natural choice.
The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.
There are only three seasons for farmers: before harvest, harvest and after harvest.
To make agriculture sustainable, the grower has got to be able to make a profit.
Trespassers will be shot, survivors will be prosecuted.
Urban farming is not only possible, it is crucial. But it can’t be like the farming techniques of yore.
We have used cows for sale !
Wickedly good.
You can make a small fortune in farming-provided you start with a large one.

Are you sad today too?

 

The Glorious Sadness Of Mother’s Day

Posted on Sunday, May 12, 2024

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by David P. Deavel

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2 Comments

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AMAC EXCLUSIVE

Holidays have the potential to be sad affairs. None more so than the days dedicated to loved ones. Memory is a gift but can be an emotional peril. St. Augustine said it can be a tomb in which we are buried. He was mostly talking about our memories of sin, but even our memories of goodness can overwhelm us with a sense of loss. Mother’s Day is such a day. Yet even the sadness brought about by our memories is a gift, for it testifies to the glorious reality of love that was and is real. 

Since the loss of my own mother to cancer at the too-young age of 63 twenty-one years ago, Mother’s Day has always been emotionally difficult. I’m writing this column before the day arrives, but I know it will be so again. On Friday morning, Houston-area talk radio host Michael Berry did his special Mother’s Day show. He read messages, played short recordings, and took calls from listeners about their own mothers. He encouraged his audience, rightly, to call their mothers that day—“Don’t wait for Mother’s Day!” As I often do, I wanted to take Berry’s advice, for it is sound. But the realization hit me yet again: I can’t do so.   

You’d think I would have adjusted after all these years. When Mom died, my cousin Jennifer—having lost her mother, my aunt, nine years before—said that I would always want to call my mom up. She was exactly right. And yet it strikes me every time I realize it.

What is it that strikes me? Many people talk about a mother’s love in terms of “comfort,” but they forget the older meaning of comfort: “with strength.” C. S. Lewis experienced that loss very early, when he lost his mother at the age of nine. He wrote in his memoir, Surprised by Joy: “With my mother’s death, all settled happiness disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of joy; but no more of the old security.” “Her absence,” he said, “is like the sky, spread over everything.”

Indeed, mothers, it is said, are “Mama Bears” who will defend, rightly or wrongly, their brood and fight for and with them. Writing about his mother’s death, the journalist Mitch Albom observed that the true effect of the death of one’s parents is a feeling of being truly “alone” and “without backup” in one’s “battles.”

Mom’s “backup” was perhaps most obvious in my brother’s and my sports events, of which she missed precious few that I can never remember. She was always rooting for me. My own kids get embarrassed when I shout too loudly at sporting events; but I don’t think I hold a candle to my own mom. She was a much gentler soul than I. Nevertheless, I also think I yell at umpires and referees less than she did.

And when it came to school itself, she was similarly always there—literally. Once both my brother and I were in school, she got jobs there, first in the cafeteria and then doing secretarial and accounting jobs in order to be near us and keep the same hours. If I forgot something, she would be willing to drive home and get it. And she would also be there to talk to if things went completely awry. She did the same for other kids, too. She would keep a tin of candies on her desk to give to those for whom a hug was just not enough. She was the back-up in battle, the provider of security for a lot of kids and even some of the adults there.

Of course, my mother would not defend me if I were being punished with just cause. I spent my share of time in the principal’s office, sometimes getting paddled, when I was younger. But she would move heaven and earth if I were being treated unfairly.

The main way, however, that my mother gave me strength was in her talking to me. Perhaps I was weird, but as I got older, I would often come in and sit on the floor by her bed after being out late with friends. This was ostensibly to let her know I made it home alive, but the real reason was that I could share what was happening with her and get her take on things and how I’d reacted to them. And she just loved being part of my brother’s and my lives.

When I left home for college, I would talk to her at least several times a week for the same reason. When I was sick, just as when I was a small child, I always felt better when her voice was in my ears. Oddly enough, she would often call me, having intuited from one-hundred-plus miles away that I was sick. But she could also tell when I was down and just needed cheering up.

After I was married, and especially after our first son was born, Mom and I talked on the phone even more. You don’t realize how wise and wonderful your parents are until you’re married with children. At that point, she was several years into her battle with the ovarian cancer that would kill her. I wanted to take in as much of her wisdom as possible as well as keep talking to her forever. That she would die only a little more than a year after her first grandchild was born seemed profoundly unfair to her—but also to me.

That sensation of aloneness, that awful absence, was indeed everywhere. As the years have passed, I have often asked God why he took her so early, when she could have both enjoyed the grandchildren she never met and also helped us with them. There are answers I could probably hazard, but they never seem quite right. God’s ways are indeed unsearchable.

And yet, for those who, like this writer, find Mother’s Day difficult, there is still a great deal to be said. The grief we feel for our lost mothers has a cause. The love of a mother is itself something truly great for which we can be thankful. God explains his own love to the prophet Isaiah by analogy to the secure love of a mother. “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?” The sadness of all those who have lost their mother is a glorious one. Its shadows are so deep because the light that was covered is so very strong. To have experienced that love at all is a great, great gift.

 But, as a Christian, there is more. I do believe that that love was indeed covered up but not snuffed out. I may not perceive it, but it is still there. Those who are “away from the body,” as St. Paul put it, are “at home with the Lord.” I trust that my mother, whose faith, hope, and love were shining beacons for me, dwells with Christ where her love has been brought to fulfillment. As I thank God for her today with teary eyes, I hope that I may see her again one day in the city in which every tear has been wiped away.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.