“His work was laid out there before him
In rows of green, his whole life was revealed”
“A Man On A Tractor” – Rodney Atkins
If there is a profession and music genre better matched than farming and country music, I’ve yet to find it. Preparing for this column offered plenty of country music options to recognize and appreciate farmers, but this tune seemed to strike a chord.
Atkins has experienced plenty of success and also long periods of struggle in his musical journey, but this song was part of his most successful album, “If You’re Going Through Hell” and I’ve featured one of the songs, “Watching You,” from that album here before. It also includes a song that my girls have been introduced to as a preliminary warning to their upcoming dating, “Cleaning This Gun.”
This song has the reflection of an observer watching a farmer work in the field with a dog by his side. He longs for a life that has such clear purpose and focus as tilling the land and caring for crops.
Anyone who has experience on a farm knows that it’s nowhere near that easy. I used to joke with family that farming was the process of putting a million dollars in the ground and hoping a million and one come out of the ground. That joke was getting outdated in cost 20 years ago, so it’s certainly seriously underselling the costs of doing business now.
As a country, and as a world, we rely incredibly on the work of America’s farmers. Data from the USDA Economic Research Service shows that California far outpaces any other state in agricultural exports, with more than $26 billion in annual exports from the state. South Dakota ranks No. 12 among the 50 states, with $4.6 billion in exports.
The state’s leading export is soybeans, at $1.25 billion, followed by corn, at $722 million.
As of 2024, the state had one claim to fame in the country – the highest cow-to-person ratio in the nation. South Dakota has more than four cattle for each person in the state. Nebraska is second, at roughly 3.3 cattle per person.
While watching the state basketball tournaments the last two weeks on South Dakota Public Broadcasting, one commercial continued to catch my eye, even when I simply had games on as sort of a “background noise” as I worked. South Dakota Corngrowers has been a part of my family’s life for many years, with my brothers and I singing as part of multiple annual conventions and my father serving as state president and eventually on a national board for the organization.
Their advertisements this year spew a lot of numbers, but it’s good to look at them individually. The ag industry provides 130,000 jobs in South Dakota. That number can get a little skewed when considering direct agriculture employment versus ancillary jobs related to agriculture, either directly or indirectly. Whatever the number is, the general consensus is that South Dakota has among the highest ratios of direct agriculture jobs, with around 5-6 percent of all employment in the state being a direct agriculture job.
One of the other numbers that caught my eye was that there are 854 million bushels of corn produced annually in South Dakota. The state’s population is growing, and the most recent census bureau estimate was approximately 935,000 people reside in the state. Even with that growth, 854 million bushels of corn translates to more than 900 bushels of corn produced by the state for every man, woman, and child in S.D. And corn is not even the top crop produced in the state!
I had a chance to speak with Rebecca Blue of the Women’s Ag Network as the organization kicked off with launch events in Huron and elsewhere around the state. She discussed that in setting up and networking for her organization, she has reached out to many women who don’t consider themselves part of agriculture because their life is not directly associated with caring for animals or planting crops in the ground, but in this state, as in many upper Midwest states, there is very little industry that is not significantly affected by agriculture.
So on this National Ag Week, let’s tip our cap to our farmers – and if it’s a good farm cap, it’s probably coated with the oil, dirt, and sweat that is part of every day in agriculture!
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