Why do people spend their lives trying to preserve and protect America’s vanishing farmland?  To those of us laboring in the vineyard it may come as a surprise that to many the answer is not obvious.  It is a question worth answering.  Let me give one of the many answers.

I want to mention something that motivates many of us to do this work – the love of the farm.  Now, this is hard to describe; but if you feel it, you’ll know what I mean.  There’s just something about a farm.  The growing crops, the animals grazing in the fields, the chickens clucking in the houses, the farmer going out at the break of dawn and climbing onto a tractor – all of it is, well, wonderful!  It doesn’t matter what part of the country, what the crops, what the animals – it’s just magical.  There is a beauty and peace and satisfaction in looking across a plowed field or waving grain or ripening vegetables and knowing it will be that way forever.  This feeling goes beyond the food, or the balance sheet, or the temporary pleasure of ownership – it is transcendent and touches some of the deepest chords in the human psyche.  We who have a hand in preserving these farms can reap a satisfaction that few people can ever feel in a mere “job.”  We are involved in keeping in this country one of the real touchstones of our civilization.  Daniel Webster once said in a speech, “When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.”  If he was correct, and I believe he was, then we who toil in the vineyard of preservation are the “protectors of human civilization.”  That should make it easy to get up tomorrow and go to work!