Thank you all. McD, my parents were honored for having acheived a Century Farm. It's called the Century Farm Award.
This is given to farm owners whose land has been in family hands for over 100 years. My great grandparents settled the farm, then it passed to my grandparents, and then to my parents. They have been on the land for 43 years.
If you are not from a farming background, you may not get the full impact of what this means. During the 1970s and 80s, many farmers from the mid-west went belly up and lost their heritage land to foreclosure. Banks sort of went wild with taking over farms after giving farmers really bad loans. The banks were very pushy with the loans, but seemed to have no heart at all in callling in the loan after a missed payment.
My parents have always been super frugal, and Dad worked at another job at night and farmed during the day in order to make ends meet. Instead of buying new equipment, he welded and patched the old. He was very hands on in caring for his animals instead of developing a mega-feedlot approach. Even so, they came within a breath of losing their farm, too. So this award really shows the gutsiness and perseverance of those who managed to hang on.
I am soooooo proud of them. All of my sibs and inlaws and I gathered there to see the Secretary of Agriculture make the presentation, and to hear the thunderous applause, and to see the tears in my mother's eyes, as she recalled her own grandma and grandpa and mother and father being on that same land.
This is given to farm owners whose land has been in family hands for over 100 years. My great grandparents settled the farm, then it passed to my grandparents, and then to my parents. They have been on the land for 43 years.
If you are not from a farming background, you may not get the full impact of what this means. During the 1970s and 80s, many farmers from the mid-west went belly up and lost their heritage land to foreclosure. Banks sort of went wild with taking over farms after giving farmers really bad loans. The banks were very pushy with the loans, but seemed to have no heart at all in callling in the loan after a missed payment.
My parents have always been super frugal, and Dad worked at another job at night and farmed during the day in order to make ends meet. Instead of buying new equipment, he welded and patched the old. He was very hands on in caring for his animals instead of developing a mega-feedlot approach. Even so, they came within a breath of losing their farm, too. So this award really shows the gutsiness and perseverance of those who managed to hang on.
I am soooooo proud of them. All of my sibs and inlaws and I gathered there to see the Secretary of Agriculture make the presentation, and to hear the thunderous applause, and to see the tears in my mother's eyes, as she recalled her own grandma and grandpa and mother and father being on that same land.
