To the editor:

Back in the time before the 1900’s when most farm work was done with horses, mules or oxen, the average farm was about 80-160 acres. There was a farmstead about every quarter mile. That meant there were a lot of families with lots of children. There was a country school every two miles if I remember right.

I grew up on a farm in Guthrie County in the 50’s and we had 160 acres and had a variety of crops, hogs, chickens, milk cows and horses. The horses were not the large work horses, but were used for riding and fun.

We had a Ford 8N and two Allis Chalmers tractors. My grandfather was quick to buy a tractor when they first came available, but did use the work horses for light field work.

I do remember one time when the one neighbor had a thrashing bee and all of the neighbors took their work horses and hay racks and we thrashed the oats that year. After the tractor was invented, the farmers could take on more land to farm.

As a neighbor would get older and no longer wanted to farm, we rented their land and farmed it for them. As there were now fewer farmers, there soon became fewer families on the farm.

The year my brother started to school, they closed the country school that was located on the corner of our farm only a quarter mile away. So we both went to town school on the bus. But I do remember that when I was a freshman in school there were some new kids that came to town school because the country schools only went through the 8th grade.

So with the invention of the tractor, and all of the farm implements that made life easier, there was no longer the need for large families to do all of the labor on the farms. With fewer families, there were fewer farmsteads. With fewer people on the farm, buildings were torn down and the children went off to college and learned a new career. That meant there were fewer people to populate the small towns and buy from the stores located there.

Demographics have changed a lot in the last 100 years, and with it a lot of businesses have had to close. But I am very glad that we as humans can adapt and here in America, we have the freedom to do just that. When the farmers started getting rid of their livestock and went to just grain farming, someone had to take up the slack and that is when the large factory farms started building large buildings and putting the animals in them. I guess it would be nice if we all could get our eggs, and meat from range fed chickens, sheep, goats, hogs and beef, but the way things are today, that just isn’t possible anymore.

I guess we should just be glad there are farmers that still love to do the hard work of farming and are willing to feed the world with their produce. We need to pray for all of the farmers in South Africa who are being driven off of the land and sometimes murdered, just because they are white. Those people who are driving them away will one day find they have nothing or at least very little to eat, and will wish they had not been so anxious to adopt Socialism, which leads to Communism. That is what Progressives are all about. All of the individual nations would be better off making their own nation as great as it can be, and not buy into the Globalism that seeks to rule us.

Rick E. Titus

Clarion