Friends Visit the Farm

We had a nice visit at Ellis Farms a couple of weeks ago from an old friend of mine.

Isabel and her husband Chuck have been farming and ranching their entire lives. When I first started farming on my own, back in 1977, they took me under their wing and taught me a great deal about caretaking the most precious resource America has, productive farm land.

Chuck and Isabel taught me the kinds of practical skills you can’t learn from books. With characteristically good humor, they burst the bubble of some of my naive and dogmatic environmentalist ideas. Perhaps most importantly, they demonstrated what it means to be good neighbors. That kind of mentoring is why talking about the “farming community” is far more than a cliché.

Through careful management over the course of decades, Chuck and Isabel have left their farm in better shape than when they started on it. Theirs is an example of true conservation conducted by individuals, and done according to the constraints and opportunities of the marketplace not the bureaucrat’s regulatory manual.

As we all know, the amount of farmland in this country is declining as farms are converted into housing developments. When farmland disappears, it doesn’t come back. These two friends have done their part to stand in the way of that kind of “progress.”