Mike Pence Responds to Mike Bloomberg: ‘So God Made a Farmer’

A farmer in Hastings, Minn. Photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images
Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images

Vice President Mike Pence has responded to Democrat presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg after resurfaced footage shows the billionaire making the claim that farming requires little knowledge and skill.

Bloomberg’s comments on farmers came during a 2016 Oxford University forum in England. “I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” Bloomberg said. “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that.”

“Then we had 300 years of the industrial society,” Bloomberg added. “You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow, and you can have a job.”

Without naming or referencing the situation, Pence shared a 2013 Ram Trucks Super Bowl commercial titled “Farmer,” which included audio from 1978’s “So God Made a Farmer” speech by radio broadcaster Paul Harvey.

Harvey’s speech, delivered at the Future Farmers of America convention in 1978, is as follows:

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 to get up before dawn and milk cows and 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 strong arms. Strong enough to rustle a calf, yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry and have to wait for lunch until his wife is done feeding and visiting with the ladies and telling them to be sure to come back real soon…and mean it. So, God made a farmer!
God said “I need somebody that can shape an ax handle, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire make a harness out of hay wire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. And…who, at 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 on 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, heave bails and yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink combed pullets…and who will stop his mower for an hour to mend the broken leg of a meadow lark. So, God made a farmer!

It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight…and not cut corners. Somebody to seed and weed, feed and breed…and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk. Somebody to replenish the self feeder and then finish a hard days work with a five mile drive to church. Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who’d laugh and then sigh…and then respond with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life “doing what dad does”. So, God made a farmer!

After Bloomberg’s remarks resurfaced, President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., targeted him on Twitter.

“Bloomberg wouldn’t last 3 seconds as a farmer… but like his comments on minorities, you can tell he really hates regular hardworking Americans,” Trump Jr. wrote. “He will never fight for them because he couldn’t care less about them.”

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