By Mike Isbell
University of Georgia

If you’re a “Baby Boomer” or younger, you weren’t around in the
“old days” when people’s lives were structured around putting
food on the table.

But my father was.

Even though his father had a small general store in mountains of
north Georgia, if they were going to have food on the table, they
still had to raise it or grow it.

My father always enjoyed telling the story of the day my
grandfather called on Mr. Ewing to slaughter their hog. Mr. Ewing
might not have enjoyed telling the story as much as my dad
did.

Mr. Ewing and the hog

The hog was kept in a slightly slanting-floored pen with a
sloping tin roof. Mr. Ewing carefully centered the sights of his
22-caliber rifle on the center of the hog’s forehead to kill it
quickly.

And he fired.

But the bullet ricocheted off the hog’s head, hit the sloping
metal roof, ricocheted off it, and hit Mr. Ewing in the center of
his forehead, knocking him to the ground!

The hog wasn’t bothered very much, but Mr. Ewing wound up with a
very big knot on his head.

Hey, it wasn’t you

Now just think for a moment. If it weren’t for our farmers, just
about all of us would have stories to tell our kids about hog
killing and having to work in the fields. And we might be telling
them that when we weren’t working in the fields, we were
preparing the next meal or preserving food for the winter.

As modern technology changed agriculture, farmers became more
efficient. A hundred years ago, one farmer could feed only five
other people. So folks had to grow their own food. That’s the
reason my grandfather did.

Today’s farmer feeds about 128 people. That allows the rest of us
to choose the lifestyle we live without worrying about having to
grow food to put on our table.

We can be anything

We can be doctors and lawyers, teachers and ballplayers, factory
workers and carpenters — even county agents. We can be those
things because our farmers feed us.

About 98 percent of us are liberated from working the soil, and
that makes it easy to forget how dependent we are on our farmers
for food.

It’s important for every American to know how very lucky we are
to have the best farmers in the world working hard to grow and
deliver the best food in the world to us every day.

So this Thanksgiving Week, enjoy your food. And appreciate all
those who made it possible: our farmers.