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March 2005
Diversity Is Good
Dear Friends,
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 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, pork, turkeys, chickens and eggs and cornfed, grassfed, organic or natural beef.
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 National Agriculture Month, 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.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
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