When I read agricultural magazines from 50 years ago, I sense an irony in agriculture's history. A look back  shows that like Sisyphus, we're pushing a rock up a steep hill, and regardless our efficiency, at the end of the day the rock rolls back down.

A dismal scene, I admit, but as I write this, Paris is ablaze, Americans are being shot at in Iraq and the Gulf Coast is still collecting itself after a serious gutting from Mother Nature. Plug in to the news. You'll be convinced that we live in fast, uncertain and calamitous times. If you dwell on it, you can envision a growing chasm between your patch of countryside and a looming world.

So is it reassuring or alarming to glance at the past and see that, despite the advance of technology, we aren't far removed from the earliest days of mechanization? You slice the soil and plant a seed. You post watch over the calf-bearing cow. You toil and wait, just as it has always been. You yield to a faith in the natural order of things.

It is this faith that sets a farmer apart. Maybe the mortician has it, too—and the tax collector—but the rest of this $13 trillion economy is built on the commerce of selling and buying, the cult of acquisitiveness and fickle human nature. Such a faith as the farmer's is useless there. Better to employ cunning and skepticism in that mercantile morass. Economists say it's all a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life. But farmers know the true business of life and prefer it to trying to understand their fellow man. This isn't a flight from the larger world, but an adherence to what's real.

We owe the act of farming a reverence I doubt is often enough paid. The repetition—the toiling and waiting—is our counsel to an unyielding outside world. It is an understanding of the necessary against the trivial.

A look through five decades of an agriculture magazine will show you that folly is perennial. In the early 70s, it was Scenic Rivers—region-wide zoning that would curtail landowners' rights on rivers in the Ozarks. Today it's spring floods on the Missouri.

Back then the goal was to preserve natural heritage; today we want to save prehistoric fish. Both plans were hatched by people who live outside of an agriculturalist's understanding of the world. Both were fought from that perspective and more will come.

Still, caught up in the controversies of the day, an agriculturalist cannot flail in doubt. The seed must be planted in spring, the livestock fed in the winter. These aren't options or business strategies that can be abandoned. They can be altered, but to neglect them is to neglect the act of farming, which, with the assets of a modern farm, is a viable economic option. Yet for most who are engaged in the act, quitting comes only in old age or by the call of an unpaid bank. Few who take up the calling leave it because the act is bare-knuckled reality; they cling to it because such a clarity is edifying.

So you take up the rock and begin the long push to the top because you know that the rock will roll back.

The weather will forsake you. Fed by your food and wrapped in your fiber, environmentalists will curse you. Disease and insects will ruin your careful work. Your own blood, now living in town, will not understand you. But for all of this, spring will come, and with it all the things that foster your madness. Pastures, lush and in need of grazing, will invite hay weary cows. Come April, the scent of soil mellowed by winter's freeze will call.

And you'll be there, enveloped in the smell of diesel and dirt, knowing that there is no other place you could be.