Thoughts from the Tractor: Creeds and Campfires
Thoughts from the Tractor Seat by Ken Polehn
The Dalles, Ore., Nov. 17, 2025 — This year started out optimistic and full of hope. New opportunities, new goals, and the kind of early-season promise that makes a farmer stand a little taller. But if life — and agriculture — have taught me anything, it’s this: don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.
The last few years have reminded all of us that you can do everything right.
You can grow a big, beautiful crop.
The weather can be perfect.
The market outlook can shine with promise.
And still… you can end up financially upside-down.
It’s a quiet kind of heartbreak — the kind most people outside agriculture never see. The reality of what many producers face would keep a lesser person up at night. Truth is, some nights it keeps all of us up.
But even in the middle of that truth, November has this way of slowing us down just long enough to remember where our strength comes from. I think back to the creeds and campfires of my youth — 4-H, FFA, Boy or Girl Scouts — and I realize those lessons weren’t just for kids. They were teaching us how to survive seasons like these.
We learned to show up.
We learned to stand again after getting knocked down.
We learned that character outlasts circumstances.
And we learned that community matters — especially when the load gets heavy.
Those simple creeds still matter. Maybe more now than ever.
So this Thanksgiving, even with the struggles, I’m thankful for what has carried us:
the values we were raised with,
the people who lift us when the year goes sideways,
and the faith that reminds us this season of hardship is not the end of the story.
May your home be warm, your table full, and your heart steady.
Happy Thanksgiving.
About the author.
I was born in 1961 into a second-generation farm family in The Dalles. I grew up on a tractor seat, moving irrigation pipe with my sisters before school, and spent my summers picking cherries alongside the children of migrant families who returned year after year. My wife, children, and parents have all worked the same land. I’ve served as county Farm Bureau president, sat on the county fair board, and continue to support 4-H and FFA. I’ve seen firsthand what happens when farmers are squeezed out—not just of business, but of the conversation.
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