“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all.  It is the healer, restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life.  Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”

~Wendall Berry, The Unsettling of America:  Culture and Agriculture

“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”

~Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.”

~Robert Louis Stevenson

I hope you enjoy these Friday farm favorites of Grandaddy Rieley harvesting wheat for the last time in 1986 while driving my great-granddaddy’s 1933 McCormick all-iron tractor.  Also pictured is Dad mowing hay last summer, which may be his last time as well.  He plans to retire from farming this year, selling his herd of cattle after 40 years of raising Black Angus cows.