On March 2, Calvin Schultz, a farmer from our community, went to his heavenly home at the age of 74 years. He farmed on the outskirts of our little town of Miltonvale, Kansas, for many years with his brother Richard.
Through his work on the farm, he helped put food on the tables for hundreds of people during his lifetime. He was an EMT for 26 years and served as director for 5 years. He was a volunteer fire fighter for many years, and he was a wonderful brother, uncle, and friend to many.
On March 8, the church was packed with family and friends for his funeral service. The video about Calvin’s life began with Paul Harvey’s voice stating, “So God made a farmer.” Some of the photos in his video were set to the song “The Outskirts of Heaven,” written by Craig Campbell and Justin Dave Turnbull.
Paul Harvey’s narrative about farmers was written in 1978, and it is still narrated today. It was printed in The Atlantic and is now on Farms.com. Harvey’s piece about farmers describes Calvin well. Here it is in italics:
And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.”
So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.”
So God made a farmer.
“I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait for lunch until his wife’s done feeding visiting ladies and tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon—and mean it.”
So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, ‘Maybe next year.’ I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, then, pain’n from ‘tractor back,’ put in another seventy-two hours.”
So God made a farmer.
God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in mid-field and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor’s place.
So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark. It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and finish a hard week’s work with a five-mile drive to church.
Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life “doing what dad does” (written by Paul Harvey).
Calvin was a good farmer like his dad had been before him. According to the USDA and American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture, there are about 1.9 million farms in the U.S. that are operated by families such as Calvin’s and his brother Richard. And even though the life of a farmer is probably not easy, it must be fulfilling, or farmers would not work such long, hard days, year after year.
Whoever wrote the song about living in the “outskirts of heaven,” may have grown up on a farm like Calvin. I grew up in Tennessee on a farm, so I still love the country with “the dogwood trees, blue skies, honeybees, and the green grass” as mentioned in the song.
To the readers of this article, perhaps you too grew up in a farming family. And maybe you, like Calvin, are physically strong, hard-working, and have a kind, generous heart.
Perhaps you too would like to live in the “outskirts of heaven” someday—I’d like to imagine Calvin being there now. Calvin, a farmer from our little town, will be greatly missed.
