A corn leaf skittered across the farmyard early this morning as a cool spring breeze gusted a reminder that the time for planting this year’s crops isn’t quite here in west-central Wisconsin. The soil that was ever-drying beneath the wind continued to give hope that this planting season will be much better than the last, which had produced that gust-riding leaf.
Hope, as is so often repeated, is a strong force across the land. That hope is held even in desperate times, when processing plants are closed and markets have crashed and supply-chains have broken.
But it isn’t only a wishful hope where farmers are concerned. Their hope seems so often to hinge on the fact that they go ahead and do something about things when challenges stand between them and successes.
Farmers crush long hours of work into short periods when rains persist during the cropping season.
Farmers harvest the last of the corn crop in the spring when conditions don’t allow it in autumn.
Farmers rebuild and move forward when wind or fire steals their barns.
Farmers get up and milk their cows the day after milk prices fall to the floor.
The hope doesn’t always lead to profit, of course, but farmers seem to know more than most groups that little or nothing is possible without such hope.
The greatest examples of the hope are appearing across dairy country, where farm groups — agriculture students, dairy organizations and dairy farmers themselves — are finding ways to purchase dairy products and donate them to food programs during the coronavirus pandemic. They’ve seen milk being dumped and some have been asked to consider leaving the work-life they so love and — with hope — are leading the way to get their precious dairy food into people’s stomachs.
Their work to find ways through these challenging days is the breeze that carries hope across the countryside just as the morning wind carried the corn leaf across our farmyard. And what might have started as a gentle breeze is gaining force and carrying hope on forceful gusts.
— Scott Schultz
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