By Carie Moore
Many of us want to make an impact. Sometimes it may just be in your family, sometimes it's in your community, sometimes it's in your state. As farmers and ranchers, we often hear that we feed the nation or feed the globe. For many farmers, they harvest their crop, they take it to the elevator, get their sales receipts and get back to work without much more thought. It is our job to grow and harvest quality food products.
Most of the farms in the nation are family farms; whether small or large they all deliver to a local elevator. For a state like mine that's smack dab in the middle of the country, far away from any major river or ocean, we don't think too much about where our product goes. We know it gets shipped out and many times our wheat goes to the state mill.
But even in a tiny North Dakota town like mine those semi loads of wheat are making a global impact.
I had the opportunity to visit a shipping terminal in the Pacific Northwest. I was fortunate enough to see train cars coming in from my little elevator hauling wheat. If you know me at all, you know I made a joke about this when I saw it on their board.. I was told they get trains all the time from that elevator and they get shipped out on a barge across the ocean.
Feeding the nation and the world takes a whole slew of people to accomplish that, and I am a middleman in the process, yet I play a very significant part. We have people who supply us the seed but it's our job to make it germinate, grow and harvest and then we pass it on to production.
Sometimes we try to downplay our actions or think we're not important. But we have to remember to look at the bigger picture, not just necessarily what's right in front of you.
Even a small farm can make a strong global impact. What a family of five does on 600 acres will possibly affect a family of five on the other side of the world.