Once Again, Gene Said it Best

So, after making y'all suffer through a rant and whine about big business farming and it's effects on the soil (and the farmer), I just found a great passage in "The Contrary Farmer" by Gene Logsdon that put its all in perspective - in about 100 words less than it took me to do so.

"A farmer of deep ecological sensitivity is to the plow jockey on his 200-horsepower tractor what a French chef is to the legions of hamburger handlers at fast food chains.  The chef's work is infused with artistic, scientific, and spiritual satisfactions; the hamburger handler's is infused only with the ticking of a time clock.  To the plow jockey, soil is a boring landscape of clods that need to be crushed.  To the ecological farmer, every clod holds a wondrously exotic, tropical-like world of brilliantly colored microorganisms, the very stuff of life."

Perfect and beautiful.  All in four sentences too.

If you haven't read "The Contrary Farmer" by Gene Logsdon, it's well worth the money (or the free checkout from your local library).  It establishes the ethos of the modern small farmer so well I find myself reading it whenever I need inspiration and motivation, like now.