In The Nation's Breadbasket, Cool Mornings And Hard Work...It Only Looks Quiet...

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
Editor of The Tribune

FRIEND, Nebraska - A blue-gray morning blooms ever-so-slowly as you move west on Highway 6 past this small town of some 1,100 sleeping residents. Sunday morning is for rest, especially the early hour of 7 ayem, when all you hear is the sound of your car's rolling wheels and all you see is shuttered homes and farm equipment parked neatly alongside vehicles that speak of farming. Friend has many such neighbors. Move down Highway 81, the road south to Kansas, and you see enough portraits of the American farmer to make you believe all is well in the grain fields.

"One farmer feeds 128 people," reads one particularly-insightful and prideful sign.

For miles and miles, the landscape is of fields, grain being the most common. It is tall grain silos that stand as the symbol of the American midwest, the so-called breadbasket of the world. It is the tractor moving easily across large fields that bring it to life. An assortment of gear and equipment, tractors, balers, mowers, flows among them, stand at the ready. This is not a place where one sees idle men; work is a daily need and requirement. The fields will burst with bounty, but they have to be worked, and time is as demanding as the mortgage company and the banker overseeing the purchase of farm equipment.

Odd as it may sound to most, the life of a farmer is a sun-up to sundown undertaking that does not come with a quick jaunt to the corner convenience store for a Coca-Cola or a bag of chips. You may see one or two such businesses as you move down the highway, but they're always miles from the fields, in town.

It would take an outsider a good year to learn the ins and outs of farming, to understand the ways of the successful farmer and to perhaps appreciate the work someone else undertook to get that loaf of bread to the dinner table. Here, a good pair of denim overalls is as good as is a tie-and-suit in the city. Fashion is simple; the boots always weathered. You can spot a farmer in ways more than just how he speaks and walks. They can dazzle you with statistics and commentary to do with crop prices and geo-politics that brings sleep-less nights to the family. America may import 84 percent of its seafood, but it feeds the world with grain that becomes flour. That loaf of wheat bread came from here. So did the contents of that box of corn flakes.

No, the American farmer is not dead or lazy. Corporate farms may own the cattle and the pigs and the horses and the chickens, but much of the the land around here is family-owned. Down the highway to the east, a daily symphony of trucking moving into and out of the grain mills attests to the region's energetic farming lifestyle. Trains run a daily schedule, as well.

It would be easy, a throwaway line, to simply say that there is no problem with the American farm or farmer. That would be true and untrue. Farmers worry about the staples in their business: good seed, weather, prices at the market, government involvement in foreign trade, etc., etc.

But it also is true that what you see in this part of the nation is a certain pride in the hard work it takes to see one day lap onto another.

It is something to be admired...

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