Nebraska Farmers

I have lived next to a farm my entire life. I’ve seen my uncle go through the fields in a combine. I’ve gotten lost in a field of corn. However, I’ve never given this farming thing a second thought. It seems simple, right? You plant, you let it grow, and then you harvest. You would think that having close family members involved in the business that I would actually know something about it, and I do know some things. I know the old saying about corn: “knee high by the fourth of July.” I know that rain is good. Really good. And that drought is really bad.
There’s another thing I learned from growing up around farmers: farmers are rarely optimistic. Whether its drought, plague, locusts, or any other sort of crop endangerment, farmers always have a lot to worry about. It seems that no matter how much rain there is, they still are worried about the outcome. There is some sense to this because the farmer is so dependent on uncontrollable forces that there is always something that could come up to greatly change the product. This year, though, with so much rain, the farmers are really optimistic about this years crop turn out.
At the Husker Harvest Days, a yearly get together of farmers from around Nebraska for farmers to look at the newest in farm equipment, apparently the biggest thing going around is not the newest combine, but, as Art Hovey reports, is the optimism. Living in a time when everyone is so pessimistic about the weather with global warming and things of that sort, it is actually encouraging to hear from those who are so dependent on the ever changing weather, that this year actually turned out better than normal. The crop looks abundant, the price of corn is high, and, for this year at least, the farmers seems to have a smile on their faces.