It is a rare blessing indeed to be able to work across the generations. Over twenty five years ago, our son and daughter-in-law and their three children joined us on the farm. We saw the need of a marketing arm for our products to collect more of the income we were being denied in the conventional markets, so we started a meat sales company, which today markets our pork, beef and eggs. Our farming children were intimately involved with this new venture, and in fact provided much of the drive for it.
As that generation saw the opportunity in marketing, one of their children, my grandson, has demonstrated a real interest in helping the farm succeed on its own merits. His brother and sister are deeply involved in agriculture too, one on the supply side and the other with quality control in meats processing for one of our processors.
This is important to me. I see around me numerous examples of people my age whose only possibility of continuing connection with farming is in renting their land out, driving someone's truck at harvest, and watching the changes in agriculture, most of which do not benefit them. I am grateful not to be one of that number.
This year, as I built the road mentioned earlier that I thought we needed, I could pretty easily keep up with what was going on with the combining, corn stalk baling and tillage. The machines are familiar from my farming, so is the routine. The startling part is my not being first hand involved with it.
We can aim our children where we think they ought to go. But at a certain age, we need to let go, stand back and hope for the best. Hard to do but so necessary.
If I can pass on one piece of advice to the younger ones, it would be to take the past, what you remember, what has been told to you, what has been passed down as tradition, or "how we always did it" with a goodly grain of salt. Things are changing fast. Change is beginning to look like an avalanche. If you are to survive, you will need to be light on your feet.
Remember that much of the change coming is the result of what farming in the past has done and what it has not done. It is yours not to resent the change, but not to wholeheartedly sign on either. Your own judgment is going to need to be your closest friend and advisor. What the crowd is doing is apt to be short sighted and sometimes just wrong.
You will need to do better than we have done in terms of caring for land, people and community and to do so in the midst of turmoil that only the very oldest among us has any experience with.
Good luck! You do the most important-and least recognized-work in the world.
