Seedtime and harvest is essential

In the Hebrew Scriptures, in Genesis 8:22, following the story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood, is a divine promise that, hereafter, so long as the earth continues, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall never cease. That promise has under girded human agricultural pursuits from ancient times until now, with its assurance of the productivity of the earth for providing for our human needs.

Of course the Bible itself often speaks of times of famine, times when no rains fall, times when sections of land, even vast nation-sized lands, fail to produce for long periods. So the divine promise is not necessarily a promise that every space will consistently produce in abundance every year. Sometimes, as in the case of Jacob's family in the book of Genesis, there were times in the ancient world when major populations had to move to other places in order to survive seasons of drought and scarcity.

In today's world we have become very accustomed to relying on foods that are shipped in to us from great distances, produce from California, fruit from Texas and Florida, bananas from southern countries, and so on. We don't see as much of the locally sustainable agriculture that characterized our part of Arkansas just a century ago. I have come to appreciate KURM Radio of Rogers and KARV Radio in the River Valley for doing annual observances that remind us of the essential place in our society for food-producing agriculture. But even those emphases on the air do not reproduce the sense of this time of year as "Harvest Time." I'm hoping that we never lose or let go of the sense of "Harvest Time." If we allow that sense of "Harvest" to be lost from the fall season of the year, I'm afraid we will be lost in the supposition that our food just somehow mysteriously appears at the grocery store. Losing our sense of "Harvest Time" will cause us to lose our appreciation for the good earth as a divine gift for our well-being and sustenance, and to lose our appreciation for the people of agriculture who are faithfully providing our food and other life-sustaining products year by year.

During my early life, in the 1940s and 1950s, we always had among us a widespread general consciousness of the recent "hard times." The 1930s had not only been a time of deep economic depression in the nation, but also a time of droughts and deprivation which were suffered by ordinary people almost everywhere. Even in the Great Plains states, which are known as the breadbasket of the nation, drought, sandstorms and loss of productive lands to wind-erosion plagued the farm people of that era. It was an era when the "Okies" were leaving a blighted Oklahoma in hopes of better fortunes in California. Many "Arkies" were doing the same thing, looking for work and a better life "out west."

My parents' generation grew up in those hard times of the 1930s, and they began farming for a living back then. I think they were always moved by a sense of how crucial to human well-being is "harvest time." My Dad used to talk about years when he had joined other young men from Arkansas in "going to the harvest," which meant traveling to the great grain states of Kansas and Nebraska, hoping to find work in the wheat and barley harvest. They didn't make a great deal of money, but in many cases it was a way to survive, a way to make it through trying times.

Today, both in the Great Plains and in the grain-growing areas of eastern Arkansas, harvest time is often the sight of huge combines, cutting and threshing the grain crops in one great mostly-mechanized operation. In the 1930s, combines were very rare, and the human and animal labor component of the harvest was much greater. Even the machines of that time, such as the horse-drawn mowers and grain binders, the horse-drawn wagons, the steam-powered threshers, all required a great deal of manpower to operate. The "harvest" required many men working at various jobs in order to make it happen, cutting the grain, binding the sheaves, hauling them to the thresher, feeding them into the machine, feeding the steam engine, hand-scooping the grain into burlap bags, hauling the bagged grain to the mill, and so on and on.

Because it was a "big job" back then, the harvest was a significant part of people's thinking in the fall of the year. But now that our area is no longer so much into corn and wheat and barley and oats, our sense of "harvest time" has diminished. Nevertheless, the success of seedtime and harvest is still just as important to our well-being as ever, and as vital to the economic strength of our country. Maybe we need to purposely cultivate our awareness of the seedtime and harvest which happens in various places for us, sometimes at a distance from us and out of our sight! When we see food items on the grocery store shelf, maybe we need to wonder where that came from? Who produced it? How did it get here? What had to happen so that we can enjoy this food and its benefits?

•••

Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Editorial on 11/04/2015