The Cavalier Chronicle

I was just reading the home county newspaper, The Cavalier Chronicle, the 6-4-2014 edition. The front page article shows a picture of Chris Puppe, a husky young German-American farmer, filling the 24 row drill with soybeans while his dad Les, checks the buckets.

God bless farmers and veterans. We that live in urban areas are totally cut off from those that respectively feed us and protect us. The fall out of cold wet weather in the Red River valley and the difficulty that they are experiencing getting their crops in impacts every consumer and eater, here and around the globe.

I hope and pray that they get their crops in. I would like to see them make a profit and have bumper crops to feed America and the world with. May Americans once again work like farmers work. May America once again spur innovative technology for the future as farmer and agribusiness do.

May farmers come to love trees and not let the land blow and erode. May they do it without the EPA carbon-emission madness, and feds forcing them to create wetlands.

My wife, family and I just spent the weekend up at our lake cabin in central Minnesota. A huge potato company bulldozed 80 acres a mile west of the lake. It looks butt ugly. They want to grow soybeans there.

I want things done through the private market, but an environmentally sound and balanced approach to nature needs to be maintained too. We loved the forest that was bulldozed. Deer and wild turkeys frolicked and meandered along its edges. I believe it was a marten that I saw come out of those woods two years ago.

We need to support and appreciate our farmers. The growth of cities and the sustainability of large populations of people could not occur until women taught men to farm, beyond hunting and gathering, beyond subsistence living. We must cherish, admire and make sure that farmers make a good living. Otherwise, corporate farmers will hurt consumers.

And those in the cities and in the suburbs can grow their own food, more than they would have thought possible.