“It isn’t what a person says that counts. It’s what they do.” Everyone on the farm learned this from the cradle, and over the years they’ve come to know exactly how sage this advice really is.
Being in business puts your values into action. It proves, every day, exactly what your beliefs are, and what you believe about those around you.
I suppose, though, it might be the sort of aphorism I should run from. After all, a magazine is all about “saying,” isn’t it? It isn’t about doing.
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But, of course, putting together a magazine is just another kind of “doing” too. And in our particular case, if there’s one thing that I hope our doing this magazine bears out, it’s our belief that the real energy in agriculture doesn’t come out of a science lab or out of some symposium of experts, important though those things can be.
Instead, the driving force in agriculture is the individual farmer, making smart decisions, one decision at a time.
It seems clear to us (and I hope it aligns with your experience of us) that the way to be at the very heart of agriculture is to focus on individual farms and what we can learn from them.
It’s why you see so many photographs of farmers in Country Guide, and why you’ll almost always see the face of a farmer on our cover, even though we get criticized sometimes for printing a cover with “just another farmer.”
Sometimes in the trace, of course such stories get called profile pieces, or they’re simply labelled as features. But to us they’re more than that. Much more.
I wanted to point that out because October is the issue every year where we write even more than usual about “money management.” But because of our belief in the centrality of the farmer, I hope you’ll appreciate that this year, we’ve chosen to do this a different way.
Money on the farm is never only about money. It’s about the future, or it’s about family, or it’s about opportunity. It’s always about something.
So this year, we have included a story in our Money Management issue where there isn’t any money changing hands at all. It’s the story “Not related,” and it’s about how farmer Ken Wiebe is helping non-family member Dustin Krahn get his start. Clearly, this is a story that points to what I said about doing and values.
Our other stories about the van Oords, about the Connerys, and about Lydia Carpenter and Wian Prinsloo build on this belief too.
I don’t expect any of our readers to believe that everything these farmers are doing is exactly what they would always choose for themselves. But it does give me a chance to express how privileged we feel that such families will share their lives and their values with us. Are we getting it right? Let me know at [email protected].
