It Happened Like This
When Old Fuzzy, Young Fuzzy and I moved back to the family farm sixteen years ago we received a questionnaire from a government farm program.
They wanted to know about our farming operation. How many acres, row crops, animals and what not.
I don't have a problem sharing some information but when it comes to minute details like if I have a flock of homestead chickens? I view that as none of the government's business.
We have a saying in this family that I think dates to my father-in-law, 'I think I've lost control of the weather'. Which basically says, 'I'm not God'.
The thing about our government, and apparently most all governments is they want to be God. They get bigger and more powerful, until they are running people's lives.
A few years ago in a southern state, birds in a certain town fell out of the sky dead. No reason, just a mystery. And perhaps a hundred/two hundred miles away, fish washed up on the shore dead...just another mystery.
We've had disease hit pigs and wipe out the baby pigs one year, only to have disease wipe out commercial chickens a year or two later.
I am sitting back thinking about the past and the future. The picture above is Old Fuzzy and Young Fuzzy when they did volunteer work at the Des Moines Living History Farms.
Old Fuzzy was the 'implement dealer', and Young Fuzzy worked in the blacksmith shop in the 1875 town. In Gene Stratton-Porter's book "Laddie" she described their farm which contained a large orchard. And the Living History Farm had some vintage farms as well—with orchards and gardens.
Iowa at one time had canneries and farmers grew vegetables for those businesses. Our farmscapes have changed to the extent that we no longer have many orchards or vegetables and certainly no canneries.
It wouldn't be a bad thing to get back to the 'American made idea'.
"But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed." (James 1:4-6 KJV)
