I Want My Son to Grow Up on a Farm

For many years, the pages of Farm Journal have been a forum for the opinions, joys, sorrows, reflections, advise of country-wise men, women—and sometimes children. They have shared their experiences and wisdom and humor and heartbreak with millions of other families who also earn their living and find their perspectives on the land. On my bookshelf, I still have a collection of Farm Journal short stories and letters and this particular letter caught my attention (the page was dog eared from 40 years ago) but I knew I needed to share this letter written to the Farm Journal over fifty years ago. It touched my heart then and it touches my heart now. What a healthy perspective on life in general. It’s worth a read as we regain our perspective of the land and our farming community.

Here’s the letter

“I want my son to grow up on a farm”

I want my son to grow up on a farm. Some will say that it would limit his opportunities. They may even feel sorry for him. But how can they know what his life and pleasures will be?

They do not realize that my boy will never be lonely; that nature will be his companion for life. Through nature he will know that there is a God; that science does not control everything. He will learn to work hard and to be ambitious; but he will also learn to accept things as they come—the hail and the drought and the unforeseen.

As a farm boy he will know animals as good friends. In feeding and caring for those friends, my boy will learn the joy of doing for others. Early in life he will know a father’s feelings toward those who depend on them.

To him all living things will be sacred. He will watch life appear and reproduce itself. He will learn the certainty of death. Its quiet presence in the plants and animals will assure him that life’s end needs not be feared.

He may find an Indian arrowhead behind the plow, and his wonder will kindle a love of history. A small animal’s skull or a fossilized leaf imprinted on a rock will move his curiosity. Learning will be spontaneous, an adventure.

My boy will learn compassion. He will never forget the killdeer’s nest in the pasture, and the fence he built to keep the cows from trampling it.

One of his pleasures will be a shack in the woods, where he will learn to love the stillness of a country night.

He will notice that each year the saplings around his shack grow bigger. Then a day comes when he and his father cut the grown trees into firewood for winter.

He will realize then, that he himself has grown year by year, and that the time is near for him to start his life’s work as a young man.

I want my boy to hear country church bells as he finishes his Sunday morning chores. The bells will ring again as he sits in church before the services begin. He will set his watch by the bells—they will help him chart his life.

I want the soil, the trees, the killdeers, the farm animals and crops, the bells of a country church, to be part of my son’s life.

He may leave the farm someday to begin another way of life. But his faith, his sense of duty toward others, his compassion—these truths that the farm has taught him—will go with him.

As long as he lives, there will be a little bit of the country in him.

                                                                                                     —Karl Ohm