Paul Harvey’s words still ring true today: God said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So he made a farmer
“So God Made a Farmer” was a speech given by radio broadcaster Paul Harvey at the 1978 Future Farmers of America convention. The speech was first published in 1986 in Harvey’s syndicated column. The speech borrowed a few phrases from a 1975 article written by Harvey in the Gadsden Times, which was itself inspired by parts of a 1940 definition of a dirt farmer published in The Farmer-Stockman. The 1940 article was copied verbatim by Tex Smith in a letter to the editor in the Ellensburg Daily Record in 1949. The speech was given as an extension of the Genesis creation narrative referring to God’s actions on the 8th day of creation. Harvey described the characteristics of a farmer in each phrase, ending them with the recurring “So God Made a Farmer”.
And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the field, milk cows again, eat supper, then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.” So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die, then dry his eyes and say,’Maybe next year,’ I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from an ash tree, shoe a horse with hunk of car tire, who can make a harness out hay wire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. Who, during planting time and harvest season will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon and then, paining from tractor back, put in another 72 hours.” So God made the farmer.
God said, “I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to yean lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-comb pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the leg of a meadowlark.”
It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed, and brake, and disk, and plow, and plant, and tie the fleece and strain the milk, . Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh, and then sigh and then reply with smiling eyes when his son says that he wants to spend his life doing what Dad does. “So God made a farmer.”
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