by Co-Director and Co-Producer Kevin H. Jeanes

Growing up in suburbia, it is hard to understand the difficulty of farming and agriculture.  In the early 19th century farming must have been ten-fold the difficulty today.  The mere fact of having to survive the winters in log cabins with no central heating is an astonishing thought.  I need my queen sized, double mattress, and heavy-duty comforter with my tide fabric softener.  I need my central heated two-thousand square foot house.  I most certainly need my eight frozen pizzas in my freezer to eat in twenty minutes.  I want to say that to an early settler surviving in the blizzard of the deep snow.  What would they say?  That is so over the top that a laugh would not even be appropriate. 

The early farmers survived more than I will ever accomplish with less than what I had when before I was even born.   Farmers back then farmed merely to survive, not for profit.  The thought of only 3% of today’s population sustaining our food supply is worrisome.  If our country loses one more percent we may begin a food shortage in our already downward spiraling slippery slope. 

In writing, farming just to survive does not seem that difficult of a task.  Farmer plants his seeds, they grow.  Farmer harvests the plants, and the family eats.  However, when one simple weather phenomena occurs or alters the climate, a likely chance of the plants not growing may be in store.  Then what would you do?  When the settlers left their corn outside only to get buried in the several feet of snow and ice, they have no food to feed their family. 

Today farmers have ways of preserving the food.  They keep them in bins or barrels until they are transported to markets, stores, or other outlets.  I have never actually spoken to a veteran farmer about his or her career, but I can imagine it is not an easy task.  I am also not sure of how much money they are making, but I know that if they were not getting paid, they would just farm for themselves just as the early settlers did; except the early settlers were content with that because everyone did it. 

Today the term “we take everything for granted” is used so loosely with a dead meaning.  Very little people actually sit down to think about all we have.  It is hard to realize because everything to us is our norm.  We grew up around it all.  The way I think about it is people hundreds of years ago thought the same way we do today.  It is all relative.  The early settlers thought they had it easy until the deep snow or one hundred years later in the dust bowl.  With each difficult event we overcome we come out stronger and more aware of how to assess future situations.  We now know how to better our agriculture, but we have so many people living on this world with more and more innovative technologies, that nobody wants to fall back on the outdated lifestyle of agriculture and farming.  Our population is growing at an incredible rate.  We tend to think of all the negatives of how people act; but the fact is there are just more people now in the pool that we choose to see in such ways.