The Super Bowl and Farmers

With contributions by Anne Barrett

Last Sunday, the Super Bowl was not only an exciting game of football, but also featured a much talked about commercial about farmers, which happens to fit well into the theme of our current digitization project, Cultivating a Revolution .

The commercial is the Dodge Truck commercial called “God Made a Farmer,” which can be accessed on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/AMpZ0TGjbWE . The narration for the commercial comes from a speech given in 1978 by newscaster Paul Harvey at a Future Farmers of America conference. The speech focuses on the family farmer, rather than the industrial farms that were increasingly growing during the 1970s.

While the focus of Cultivating a Revolution is innovation in agriculture at NC State, many films that were digitized as part of the project show the impact these innovations had on the family farmer.  This video https://media.lib.ncsu.edu/libVideo/details/834/ , digitized as part of “Cultivating a Revolution,” is a news interview with the 1976 Farm Family of the Year in North Carolina. Each member of the Charles King family, who lived in Wake County, is interviewed in the segment, and it provides an interesting snapshot of a private farm family in the 1970s.

Working on the digitization project, the project staff has realized what an integral part North Carolina farmers, researchers, and extension agents have all played to change the face of agriculture in the state, the country and globally.  All these groups are featured in Cultivating a Revolution. To see more newly digitized materials for the project, check them out here: http://go.ncsu.edu/cultivatingarevolution