Down on the Farm

Dad
May 23, 2003

DO 19494/85

1. PEOPLE SEEM TO HAVE A FUNNY IDEA ABOUT FARMING, that it's the simplest thing in the World & that farmers are a bunch of dumb clucks! That's the average opinion city people have of farmers, right? But the truth of the matter is that a farmer has to know just about everything about everything!

2. SO HERE ARE ALL THESE SMART-ALECKY CITY PEOPLE WHO HAD GOOD JOBS IN THE CITY, MADE BIG MONEY, ENOUGH MONEY TO BUY UP A FARM, & decided they'd move out there & become farmers! But they just failed because they didn't know anything about animals, they didn't know anything about crops‚ they didn't know anything about farming! You've got to do most of your own work, you can't hire a lot of people, & they just couldn't make it. And the worst thing about it was that most of them bought their farms for so much down & so much a month on bank loans, thought they were going to make big money out there on the farm! But things got tough & they couldn't make the payments & the banks are foreclosing on them now. Now they've lost it all!

3. ANOTHER PART OF IT IS THAT SAME STORY WITH THE POOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES THAT HAVE BORROWED A LOT OF MONEY. The [ACs] use the same tactics that Joseph did, the same thing the Protocols predicted. They loan them all this easy money by the billions‚ & the banks do the same with these new farmers, they help them buy land & farms, etc. What it amounted to was the farmers who had made it would leave the farms to go to the city to get rich.

4. ANYHOW, THE FARMERS WERE LEAVING THE FARMS. Especially about a generation ago & even before, there was a great movement of the farmers to the city to get what sounded like high-paying jobs & lots of money & fancy homes & cars & TVs & all the rest. So they sold their farms & sold them cheap to all these city slickers who wanted to move out of the city to the farm, but who knew nothing about farming & eventually couldn't make it. Now they're going broke & the banks are foreclosing & all these small farmers that couldn't farm are just going out of business.

5. AND OF COURSE THE BIG AGRO-BUSINESS FARMERS WHO OWN THOUSANDS OF ACRES & HAVE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS, THEY'RE BUYING THEM UP!—And you know who probably a lot of them are!—Including especially the bankers, you know who they are‚ I suppose—the [ACs]! So the [ACs] are buying the U.S. Midwest, the stronghold of Christianity & Fundamentalism! That was a bastion they couldn't conquer for a long time.

6. THAT SO OFTEN HAPPENS TO THE GENTILES OR THE CHRISTIANS, SO OFTEN THEY DEFEAT THEMSELVES. Like the [ACs], they're their own worst enemies! They're so dumb!—I mean the Gentiles, the Christians‚ are so dumb. The [ACs] outsmart them, & the [ACs] are so smart they outsmart themselves!—They're blind leaders of the blind & they all fall in the ditch‚ or they will eventually.

7. MOST OF THESE FARMER STORIES THAT I'M READING IN THE NEWSPAPER SEEM TO BE FARMERS WHO HAVE ONLY BEEN THERE FOR A GENERATION OR TWO, & IT TAKES A LOT MORE THAN THAT TO LEARN FARMING! I'll tell you, we found that out fast when we decided to leave the city & move to the farm & my boys wanted to become farmers. Well, Aaron made it with his cattle by miracles, but poor Ho didn't because he bought goats. The goat hair business about that time was about the worst thing to get into, because the price of mohair had fallen from a Dollar a pound to 25 cents a pound due to the rise of synthetics.

8. BUT HO DID THE BEST HE COULD WITH IT, CONSIDERING HE WAS ONLY GETTING 25 CENTS A POUND. He learned to raise goats & he did pretty well to take care of kids & learn how to shear the goats. We also learned how to eat them, since the meat became more valuable than the hair! Meat was expensive but goat meat was pretty cheap. We even learned to eat goat burgers‚ something that's very popular in Mexico. The trouble with goat meat was I could hardly get it past my nose! It smells just like goats, & if you know anything about goats, they just smell awful!

9. I'LL TELL YOU‚ FARMING IS COMPLICATED! It is a science, it is a skill! Any branch of farming is a highly sophisticated science & skill. Animal husbandry is a whole science in itself‚ in fact, each kind of animal husbandry, depending on which kind of animals you are taking care of, whether you are raising beef cattle or dairy cattle or you have goats or sheep or whatever you're raising, every one of them is a distinct science all in itself & it takes almost a lifetime to learn. And then on crops‚ every one of them is a different science too!

10. SO I ALWAYS HAVE SAID THE FARMERS ARE THE SMARTEST MEN ON EARTH! THEY KNOW MORE ABOUT EVERYTHING THAN ANYBODY! To be a self-supporting, self-sufficient family farmer & to grow everything you need, including meat & vegetables & crops & make money as well, you've really got to be smart! And here all these dumb city people moved to the country thinking that farming was a breeze, they could get out there & have a vacation & all live safely on the farm out of the big wicked city & out of the atom bomb targets & whatnot, & they just found out they knew nothing & could hardly do anything & they went broke! They couldn't make it!

11. THAT'S ONE REASON WHY SO MANY FARMS ARE FAILING NOW IN THE FARM COUNTRIES—THERE ARE OTHER REASONS TOO—BUT IT'S THOSE LITTLE FAMILY FARMERS THAT ARE FAILING & GOING BROKE! It's not the big agro-business, multi–millionaire business farmers who use thousands & thousands of Dollars worth of machinery & scores of helpers & crew. They are often even absentee farmers & have thousands of acres & they can afford to produce big & sell cheap. Whereas the poor little family farmer can't produce on that scale & can't sell that cheap, so he gets outsold by those big business farmers & goes broke.—In fact, he can hardly even farm successfully enough to feed himself & his family, especially when they want a nice car & house & TV like the city folks.

12. SO MUCH FOR FARMING—IT'S NO BUSINESS FOR A CITY PERSON TO GET INTO! Then they find out how dumb they are! The city people don't know anything about weather, except whether it's hot or cold or rainy or sunny, that's about all they know. But the farmer's whole life & existence depends on the weather, on God, & most city people don't know anything about God! The farmer's very existence depends on prayer! Those city slicker farmers don't usually know anything about God or prayer or farming either one!

13. YOU'D BETTER NOT GO INTO THE FARMING BUSINESS UNLESS YOU KNOW THE LORD & YOU KNOW FARMING, or you've got somebody there that knows farming. If you can find a foreman who is a real farmer, fine‚ but if he's a good farmer he'd probably have a farm of his own & not be a foreman for someone else!

14. BUT THEY'RE NOT DEALING WITH THE REAL SPIRITUAL UNDERLYING CAUSES. God is in control & He especially controls the farms, the land & the crops & the animals, something those city slickers never had to deal with before. Now on the farm they've got to deal face-to-face with God, with His actual creations instead of stone & steel & concrete & all of man's phoney creations which they know how to control, & even those are getting out of control nowadays.

15. SO THE CITY SLICKER FARMERS ARE GOING OUT OF BUSINESS, GOD IS NOT BLESSING THEM.—And to be a successful farmer you've got to have the blessing of God or you'll never make it! That's why most of the farmers were usually God–fearing people, the heart & soul of Christian America. Maybe that's why they're going to have the Great Famine! All the [AC] banks are going to own the farms & they don't know how to run them either, so it's going to be a big joke on them! America is going to starve!

16. IT MAY SEEM LIKE AN OVER-SIMPLIFICATION TO SOME PEOPLE, BUT I BELIEVE IT, BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN GOD! Most people think that's pretty simple too, that you've got to be a simpleton to believe in God, so I'm a simpleton! But it is the God-fearing simpletons that the Lord blesses! I could call this talk "Down on the Farm!" Our folks see all these things happening & they read it in the newspaper, but the newspapers don't really tell them why. They want to hear from the Lord why. So there‚ I gave it to them!

17. WHEN I WAS A KID MY DADDY USED TO EVEN SING A SONG SHOWING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE LIFE OF A SOFT CITY SLICKER & A TOUGH HARD OLD FARMER. It was a song about the city guys spending their vacation on the farm. They thought it was going to be a great time, you know, that they'd even earn some money out there helping harvest on their vacation & get free room-&-board. But they'd come back to the city with a song:

"We used brick bats for our soap‚

Wiped our faces on a rope,

That's the kind of a life they live down on the farm!

Oh, the 'skeeters they were fierce,

Any armour they could pierce‚

That's the life we used to live down on the farm!"

There was a lot more to it that my Daddy used to sing.

18. THEY CALLED THEM BRICKBATS because the old farmers' bars of soap were homemade & were just about the same size & shape as a brick & just as hard! They called the towels rope because they were old homespun, heavy, rough towels. That was in the good old days when the farmers grew everything they had to eat & made everything they needed!