“And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God made a farmer.” These words, spoken by Paul Harvey, were first delivered as a speech at the 1978 Future Farmers of America Convention. While this convention was the first place in which Harvey uttered this stirring speech, many individuals remember it as a Dodge Ram commercial that aired during the 2013 Super Bowl. The commercial features Harvey’s narration of his famous speech, which included descriptions of what farmers go through during their day, while playing a slideshow of images depicting hardworking farmers, their farms, and typical farm work. While the main objective of this commercial was to compare how a Dodge Ram was as hardworking and family oriented as an average farmer, it instead romanticized the image of the “typically American farmer.” Phrases such as “I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild,” “I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn cold, and watch it die, then dry his eyes and say, ‘Maybe next year’,” and “… laugh, and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says that he wants to spend his life ‘doing what dad does,.” All these quotes matched with dramatic imagery show the world the romantic side of the agriculture industry. It fails to show the hardships and scares that most farmers face, and are currently facing more than ever today.

When people think of the agriculture industry, the images in their minds, due to the romanticized images in popular culture just like this speech, fail to accurately portray what it really entails. It is an industry far more complex than what an average individual believes it to be. Many Americans do not have an appreciation for it as they should. They believe that it’s a thriving industry that is doing great, but little do they know that for the past several years the nation has been suffering from a shortage of prime farmland (Coughlin 33-38). This decrease in number can be linked to three main factors: urbanization, soil conservation, and loss in labor. We as humans have lost the appreciation we used to have for the industry that for the industry our nation was not only founded on but greatly depends on. We need to increase consumer knowledge on the agriculture industry in order to increase awareness, support, and prevent further loss.

Over the years, a lot has changed in the history of the United States. Each year, new innovations and groundbreaking inventions are discovered, changing the way we live our daily lives. We have advanced from riding horses to having self-driven cars, from black and white films to three dimensional films, and from living in single leveled wooden buildings to living in communities with steel infrastructures as tall as the eye can see. We as humans are becoming more digitalized, more industrialized, and more urbanized. We have our sights set on the future, seeing what we can accomplish next, while leaving our old ways of life far in the past behind us. With this persistent race towards advancement and betterment, we are pushing away agriculture to the fringe of life.