Harvested Wisdom: If You Can Run a Farm, You Can Run the World

By Sam Burke

Embrace the Country-Living Mindset and Plant Seeds for Unimaginable Success

 

The biggest lessons can be found on the smallest farms.

 

Sam Burke left his grandfather's farm in Missouri for the Naval Academy. But when he found himself in Afghanistan, the Senate floor, and overseeing the 59th presidential inauguration, he realized the time spent harvesting wheat and raising cattle was the exact thing that led him to success.
 

With the true grit of a country-living mindset, you, too, can take any challenge and make it simple and achievable—the way farmers do.

 

A refreshing memoir on life and leadership, Harvested Wisdom shares a story spanning war-ravaged Afghanistan to the Senate floor, and the unexpected insights from the American farmer that led the way. Whether you're leading solders in the Marine Corps, leading a team in management, or just starting your own adventure, this humble guidance will help you fertilize an amazing life—and possibly change the world.

 

You'll discover:

• Don't run your horse into a car and other colorful anecdotes of a small-town residents' unique perspectives on family, success, and legacy.
• When an old tractor is more useful than a new shovel and how to keep life's complexities simple in order to be highly effective.
• Great harvests require rainy days, plus tough-love motivation to cowboy up while pursuing your goals.
• Why a lack of humility holds you back from gaining knowledge, fostering friendships, and bettering yourself.
• Agribusiness-inspired tips to help you run a lucrative business and lead an effective team—it's not much different than harvest season!

 

Good gatherings never come through luck—they're earned through every seed. Get Harvested Wisdom for a simpler, determined mindset that will help you grow a better harvest of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Salted Pine Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985436815

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Life can take you on all sorts of crazy twists and turns—if you let it. I have always embraced an opportunity for adventure, which is how I found myself living out of a hut that smelled like a dirty bathroom in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The musty hut smell wasn’t so bad. I was thankful to have a hard structure with sometimes-functioning internet. Some of my fellow Marines stationed to the south in Helmand Province lived in tents.

My first 48 hours in Afghanistan were intense. After being improperly welcomed by a suicide bomber who detonated his vest near our perimeter, I enjoyed a holiday meal of lobster and cake. I ate in a brightly lit fluorescent room with people of approximately 40 nationalities who all had one thing in common: instead of being home with our families, we were spending the holiday in one of the most war-stricken countries in existence.

I decorated my new shipping container-sized home by hanging on a cork board the only three physical pictures of my wife I had brought with me. I then put away everything else I had brought—mostly issued gear, such as canteens, desert tan packs, and my fully automatic M4 rifle. The metal clunk the rifle made every night when I leaned it against the wall was a consistent reminder of where I was and sometimes, more somberly, where I was not.

Just two weeks earlier, I had been on the floor of the United States Senate in Washington, D.C., dressed in my best navy suit with a new tie and fresh haircut, expecting to take a farewell picture with U.S. Senator Roy Blunt from my home state of Missouri. Instead, I sat behind Sen. Blunt in shock as he gave a surprise speech on the floor, thanking me for my service as his Department of Defense liaison for that year. It was hard to hold back my emotions. Had I known at the time that my parents back home were watching the senator’s remarks about their son live on C-SPAN, I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep it all in.

All my experiences—from my day on the Senate floor and months in war-ravaged Afghanistan to my tour as a company commander in Southeast Asia—take me back to the town of Charleston, Missouri, and my family’s farm.

I am more than confident that learning how to harvest wheat before I was a teenager directly correlated to my graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy. And I have no doubt that roping cows played a part in my later travels with senators and world leaders overseas and even in being able to keep my sanity in that smelly shipping container in a war zone. My experiences have validated all that I learned on the farm, and they represent the by-product of implementing basic concepts that farmers and ranchers teach their children. So much of life is about learning how to navigate stress and accept responsibility. The daily occurrences on a farm made me intimately familiar and acquainted with both from a very young age.

Farmers and ranchers do a lot of things in life right, but not all their values are necessarily unique to small-town America. For instance, when it comes to a strong work ethic, I can imagine a stockbroker on Wall Street also puts in 60- to 80-hour work weeks. While I think lots of wonderful life concepts are exemplified throughout the U.S., I think farmers and ranchers differentiate themselves in how they greet life’s challenges head-on with a simplistic, yet determined, ethos combined with an unwavering integrity that ultimately cultivates their success. I’ve learned so many lessons from small-town life that I have found helpful in times of need. Those lessons form the basis of the chapters of this book. I hope you will find something useful from them, too.

CHAPTER 1

LIFE IS ONE BIG HARVEST; UNATTENDED THERE WILL BE NO CROP

Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans, and people of the world: thank you. We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to…1

Oh, my God, Uncle Emmett, I said with childlike enthusiasm into the phone after the inauguration ceremony had ended. You should have seen it! I had to go through about ten layers of security to get up that close, but I was right there as President—

Sure ‘nuff! Your daddy was showin’ me the pictures. I bet you was the only dude from Charleston that’s ever been up that close to a presidential inauguration. What did Melania’s perfume smell like? She sure was purtied up, if you ask me.

You have no clue, Uncle Em; it was crazy how—

Hey, Sam, my uncle said, cutting me off, I’m up here at Boomland meetin’ this ol’ boy I’m about to buy a pistol off of. I hit the jackpot today! Man, we were up here eatin’ breakfast this mornin’ and he was telling me about how he just bought this sweet new revolver, but he and his ol’ lady were splittin’ up and he needs the money. I told him I would pay cash to help him out, but jus’ between you and me, I thought it would be cool to snatch up a revolver on discount. Call me later ‘cause I wanna hear what the food was like at that big ball you went to.

I have no idea why I thought my fifth-row seat at the presidential inauguration would have made my locally famous and beloved Uncle Emmett so excited. It’s mostly the reason why I love him so much. He does not get overly flustered, for the good or bad, no matter what the situation may bring. You may think you are telling him the best possible news or even the most devastating information you have, but you would be mistaken if you thought his enthusiasm or disappointment would match yours.

Rudyard Kipling’s internationally famed poem If, published in 1910, tells us, If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same…, which brings to life how my Uncle Em plays it cool during not only the harsh times, but during the good ones as well. To successfully produce a harvest, maintaining composure throughout the inevitable hardships is all but a requirement. It also equips a farmer with the proper foundation for how to act when the harvest is much better than they could have expected, as good harvests never come through luck but are earned with every seed.

Our whole family was forged from what I’d call a culturally rich atmosphere, where wedding invites are created on a piece of paper and placed under the windshield wipers while everyone is eating at the local farmers’ market, horse troughs holding copious amounts of beer on ice double as large coolers, and surrounding schools give a fall break that coincides with the opening day of deer season. I have been swimming in a pool that was created by digging a hole in the ground and placing a grain silo inside of it. I even learned about the birds and the bees one day while riding down the road behind a grain truck… but more on that later. A lot of people would consider us pretty redneck when compared to the rest of society. And while there are numerous small towns across the nation like ours, the personalities and influences in my hometown make it incredibly unique.

Fifty Harvests Summed Up in One Legacy

Dad always told me growing up that he was trying to do the best he could with raising my brother Evin and me in the same manner he was raised, but he told me once, I just can’t replicate what it feels like bein’ dirt poor. Though parents are usually the ones who boast about their children, I can never think about Dad’s personal triumph through hard times without the biggest grin on my face. I have this movie reel that I play through my head with dramatic background music, a plot, and a twist. He is the lead character who overcomes insurmountable challenges and is forced to fight through all the naysayers and tough times.

Charleston can afford someone endless opportunities at developing character and personality, but unfortunately it does not provide a lot of economic potential. When I worked on Capitol Hill for my U.S. Senator, I remember looking at a chart in our office that broke down every county in Missouri. I was discouraged, yet not surprised, to see that our county was one of the poorest in the state. The median household income for a resident in our county was around $35,000.2

You would think by looking at our county on a map that we would be much better off. Situated in the outermost tip of Southeast Missouri, our county is at the convergence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. All that land and all that water should create opportunities, but it doesn’t.

There is a small town immediately across the river called Cairo, Illinois, that was once a thriving river town back in my dad’s younger days. My friends from back east may think it should be pronounced like Cairo, Egypt, but back home, we drag out the long a vowel sound as though it were spelled Cayro. Cairo now has dilapidated, abandoned buildings, graffiti-decorated homes, and remnants of what was once a thriving community. Unfortunately, our town is only in slightly better condition.

I was born in 1987, so it was well into the late 1990s before Dad had me doing farm tasks. I knew on the first day of my first job on the farm that I wanted an easier occupation when I grew up, although I still had all of the appropriate tools and gloves, a nice water cooler, and any other amenities required for doing manual labor. Dad and Uncle Emmett, his older brother, were not even close to as lucky as I was. Dad always told me that Grandpa Edmund would never have wasted money on things like nice leather gloves for them to build a fence. That was practically the tone for how Dad was raised: they had no money, did not own an acre of land, and accomplished all their farming with secondhand equipment and manual labor.

Dad’s parents, Miss Emma and Grandpa Edmund, raised their four kids in the same house I grew up in, which is down County Highway UU almost five miles south of the Charleston city limits. I know this because Charleston High School sits right by the welcoming sign, and one day my JROTC instructor Major Robey and I went on a run to the end of my road. It was that day on that run when he planted the seed of my one day attending a service academy.

Grandpa Edmund farmed far less than a few hundred acres in his prime, which is like saying my full-time job is owning storage units while I only have three garages to rent out. He also had a small herd of feedlot cattle. His small footprint was not due to laziness but more to harsh times.

The Business Model of Trying to Make It

A crop farmer’s income is dictated by several factors but can be boiled down to two key indicators: how much grain you can harvest from your fields (measured in bushels) and the price per bushel you are able to sell. If you do not make a lot of grain and sell it during a period of historically low prices, you do not make any money.

Furthermore, if interest rates are abnormally high, then it can almost break you to borrow money that your limited farming income can pay off. This was the life Dad knew from the time he was born. While a lot of his friends uptown were getting new Christmas presents and birthday toys, he maybe got a day off work. And when he was 16 years old, when life seemed to have no clear light at the end of the tunnel, Grandpa Edmund died of cancer.

Grandpa Edmund had smoked incessantly, and it eventually caught up with him. My dad’s two sisters, Aunt Martha and Aunt Janet, had already left home for college and brighter futures. Uncle Emmett had left for Arkansas State University, where he was a freshman. Dad was the only one at home with Miss Emma when his father left this world. Dad was not foreign to incredibly hard work and tough economic conditions, but leadership was a burden he had not yet been faced with.

When comparing these upbringings to the journey of a harvest, I would say this is the breaking-up-ground phase. To even plant a seed in the ground, well before it is ready to be irrigated or fertilized, the ground must be ready to receive the seed. My dad and Uncle Emmett’s start to their life’s harvest had some really tough ground to break up, but that’s OK. Knowing what type of dirt you are working with can allow you to get any field prepared for a great crop!

What is Worse, Two Broken Arms or an Upset Father?

Dad has a great story about doing manual labor when he was a kid. They were row crop and cattle farmers, but Edmund and Miss Emma had a large garden behind their house because of course they were not going to pay for something they could manufacture on their own. Dad once joked that Edmund probably had kids so he could have free labor.

One day, Dad and Uncle Emmett were in their preteen years and were put in charge of hoeing weeds in their garden while Edmund and Miss Emma went to town. The family had one old Ford truck that would probably have been classified as a model antique, even then, had it not been for the rust and missing parts. Edmund was apparently always tinkering on his vehicle and it was rare for him to spend money on maintenance unless it was absolutely required. While he and Miss Emma departed for town, Dad and Uncle Em were disparagingly chopping away at weeds as though it was part of a prison work release program.

As their parents puttered down the road out of sight, Uncle Em had a brilliant idea. Hey Jim, you wanna’ saddle up ol’ Trigger and go for a ride?

Trigger was an old horse Dad and Uncle Em had. One might wonder why they had a horse seeing as how they were too poor to afford anything else. Trigger was given to Grandpa Edmund by a friend of his that no longer wanted him and thought it might make some good entertainment for Dad and Uncle Em to have as kids. Apparently, Dad did not need an ounce of convincing that day. He threw down his hoe like a factory worker that had just won the lottery and off he went.

They ran off like two kids going to Disney World to saddle up Trigger and go for a ride they just knew they deserved. But neither Dad nor Uncle Em had a watch and time quickly got away from the two. As they were riding, Uncle Em spotted Edmund and Miss Emma off in the distance returning home. Grandpa Edmund would undoubtedly expect his two young foot-soldiers to be hard away at work just as