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God said, I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, 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 arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait for lunch until his wife's done feeding visiting ladies and tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon—and mean it. So God made a farmer.
—Paul Harvey 1978
The farmer has long served as an iconic example of what it means to be a man in the United States. In 1978, radio broadcaster Paul Harvey delivered his speech, "So God Made a Farmer," to the Future Farmers of America convention, intending to inspire and rally a new generation of farmers (Franke-Ruta 2013). On February 3, 2013, an estimated 108.41 million Super Bowl viewers watched a commercial for Dodge Ram (Ram Trucks 2013) trucks featuring an original recording of Paul Harvey's speech while pastoral scenes of farmers engaged in agricultural chores and rural life alternated on the television screen (Baker 2013). Many post-Super Bowl reviews awarded this advertisement the best commercial award for 2013. The Dodge Ram commercial quickly went viral, and while its illustration of romanticized, idealized images of farm life moved many, others were furious. Shortly after the commercial aired, subsequent spoofs and remakes featured images showing those left out of Harvey's original narrative and the Dodge Ram commercial's images: women farmers, Latinx farmers, farm laborers, and factory farm workers, to name a few (Engler 2013).
The Dodge Ram advertisement's purpose is to sell a truck, but it also invites men to engage in and with certain kinds of performances, objects, and knowledge outlined in cultural narratives about farmers. In an era when very few people in the United States know the sources of their food, much less a farmer, Dodge chose this iconic image of the American farmer as a representation of individualism, freedom, and tradition to sell their trucks during the most expensive ad time on television. This commercial, and the...