The Responsibility of the Land: Lessons from a Father to a Son

My father was a great influence in my life and I spent a lot of time with him as a boy and during much of my career. He was a patient teacher and explained what we saw or experienced together in a manner a child could understand.

When my father was a teenager he worked a small plot of land his father set aside for him. He plowed with a mule after school and during the summer. Later he became a pilot during WWII. The war was over before he went overseas. He would laugh that in a very short time, he went from plowing a mule to flying some of the most sophisticated technology the US had. Such was the story of many farm boys then.

Later my father return to the farm, but he did not drive a tractor. We also had a general store that sold goods to the community and most of that was on credit. So he was also a businessman and looked after several other businesses, so he did not have time for driving a tractor. One day he explained to me about markup on goods and that the markup on a pair of shoes was greater than for a pack of cigarettes, because a person might only buy one pair of shoes in a year, but would buy several packs of cigarettes in a week. I did not understand the concept at age eight, but that is an example of things he thought I should understand. He or my mother read to me every night before bed.

They instilled in me a love of reading and learning and taught me concepts I do not remember learning now. Some of those were concepts of farming and of taking care of the things and people that provided us with our living.

One of my responsibilities was to feed our dogs that lived outdoors. I was to do it before I ate supper. One day I was very hungry, and told my father I would feed them after I ate. He told me that it was our responsibility to take care of the animals before we took care of our needs. Such were the lessons of being responsible.

So the lessons of taking care of the land, the people that worked with us, the animals and even of the wildlife on the land were more of a lesson of responsibility than of taking care of the environment. Perhaps the lesson was to take care of what we could do something about and expect others to do the same.