March 18 was National Agriculture Day, and I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the people who work every day to provide the world with food, fiber and fuel — and among many other things my job.

I am in awe of people who survive without a steady paycheck, have no set hours, don’t set their own prices for the products they grow or raise, and are constantly at the mercy of adverse weather conditions.

And unfortunately their livelihoods are constantly upended depending on who is in the oval office and in the halls of Congress.

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But I do believe our president and the leaders of this country are well-aware of the essential benefits farmers and ranchers provide as they have announced $10 billion in economic disaster assistance. This money is so important now as farmers prepare to plant their crops during a time of high production costs and blow back from tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China.

Because I’m no wordsmith, I have gathered up some quotes about agriculture that exemplify the importance farmers and ranchers.

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“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

“To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” — Mahatma Gandhi

“The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.” — John F. Kennedy

“Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.” — Thomas Jefferson

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” — Aldo Leopold

“There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.” — Benjamin Franklin

“Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land’s inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.” — Wendell Berry

“The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn’t still be a farmer.” — Will Rogers

“Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.” — Daniel Webster

“No race can prosper until it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” — Booker T. Washington.

“It will not be doubted that with reference either to individual or national welfare, agriculture is of primary importance.” — George Washington.

I hope you will take all these words to heart and that they will remind you of your importance in this country and the world.