By Curt Arens
Ag Edition, Northeast Nebraska News Agency, Hartington, NE
March 23, 2005
Dear Friends,
In 1856, before surveyors made it this far north, a couple of farmers -Colonel C.C. Van and Moses H. Deming - laid out Cedar County's first settlement, Old St. James, located about a mile and a half north of the present townsite.
Henson Wiseman came too, preparing his place so he could move his family here from Virginia the following year. Saby Strahm, a farmer and early livestock breeder, passed through St. James, but he didn't stay, opting instead to settle upriver, directly along the Missouri at a place that eventually became ill-fated Green Island.
Some of the folks who settled knew little of farming. Others, like Van, were farmers and engineers. Utilizing their knowledge and resources, Van and Deming for instance, started a sawmill, helping erect the first frame houses.
But everyone in those days, no matter what other trade they might have practiced, based their livelihood on farming, milking some cows, raising pigs and horses, grain and gardens and cutting timber, out of necessity to feed, clothe and shelter their families.
Why even a well known circuit lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who was busy riding from town to town across the Illinois prairie for court cases when Cedar County was first being settled, kept and fed his own horses and milked his own cow at his Springfield, Illinois home. Lincoln grew up on a farm and was always a country boy at heart, even as President.
Like the family farmers of today who often use their talents for complimentary jobs to make ends meet, folks back then were tough, resilient, self-reliant survivors. We should be thankful that we were preceded here by such hearty stock.
Once in a while you hear about folks who embrace a pretty narrow definition of what it means to be a farmer. They think that if you don't work absolutely full-time on the farm and garner all of your wages there, that you aren't a farmer. These same folks might also believe that you must raise corn, soybeans, alfalfa, cattle or hogs, all under conventional systems - to be a "real" farmer.
Of course, if these folks are right, most people who lived and worked the farms of my grandparents and great-grandparents' day were not officially "farmers" by this narrow definition.
But we here in Northeast Nebraska hopefully take a little more open-minded view of what makes a farm family. Because in our own region, we have other crops like oats for instance, that is so widely planted here that we are the number one oats producing counties in Nebraska.
As far as I know, farmers in our region are growing other neat crops like wheat, barley, rye, sunflowers, trees, grapes, fruit, vegetables, herbs, cut flowers, nursery plants and others. Farmers are raising buffalo, elk, ostrich, fallow deer, turkeys, chickens and eggs and cornfed, grassfed, organic or natural beef and pork.
Other systems are applied to area farms as well including organic, grassfed, natural, conservation-till, ridge-till, no-till with cover crops, pulse crops, grazing crops, nurse crops and forage crops.
We are as diverse as they come and I believe that we as farmers are learning something our grandparents knew - diversity on the farm is good for your family, for your land, for our environment and communities.
As we celebrate this National Agriculture Week, let's celebrate not only our honored heritage in agriculture and rural life. Let's celebrate the diversity of our farming landscape and the blessed fruits that come from it.
Happy National Ag Week.