Last weekend I went home to my parents farm just to get away from the ball of stress that is currently my life. I thought I would be able to just curl up in a blanket with a hot cup of tea and really focus all my attention on my graduate school applications. I should have known better.

My father and grandfather are in the midst of harvest season. Up at the crack of dawn, and won’t hit the hay until well into the early morning hours. They are racing Old Man Winter: trying to get the crops out of the fields and into storage before snow covers everything in sight and it is impossible to get the equipment back into the field before spring.

In addition to running an impossible race with Nebraska’s hourly changing weather, the cattle must be fed. And moved to the stock fields. And taken to market. Plus, the combine breaks down every other hour, and the hired men call in sick, and the electric fence refuses to be electrified.

So, in the eleventh hour when not one, but two hired men called in sick, my dad called on me. The fashionista/writer/artist who drinks tea huddled in a blanket to bail him out.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve helped my dad around the farm before. I even help him do chores every Sunday morning. But, it’s been four years since I’ve been thrown into the wild, wild West of harvest season at Schwartz Farms. He is the backbone of the operation. The steel pillars that keep the roof from caving in. The flotation device that keeps the farm above water. He is both the left and right lung, breathing in and out. Gasping for another breath, another day. So, there I am: chasing cattle and hauling corn and fixing fence as fast as I can so I don’t have to focus on the fact that my father is running literal circles around me. Hauling buckets of feed twice or three times as fast, finding the problems in the fencing before I even start looking, chasing stray calves into the corral without blinking an eye.

By the time he finally let me call it a day and retreat into my cozy blanket with my tea, I was exhausted. But he wasn’t even finished yet. Even though it was 9 p.m. and he had already put in over 10 hours of work, he still went back. Back into the fields to harvest corn until he either ran out of fuel or could no longer prop his eye lids open.

But, before I left Sunday evening, he thanked me for all my help at least five times, called me a “lifesaver,” said he “couldn’t have done it without me.”

I can’t imagine the amount of sincerity and humility and love it takes to spend all day and night cultivating the earth, raising calves nearly from scratch, wading through knee-deep mud and busting through frozen tanks with bare hands. He bears the heavy, heavy responsibility of feeding the entire world on his shoulders, but he never puts it down, never passes it off to someone else. He carries it, 24/7, with grace and pride.

So, can we just have a round of applause for all the farmers out there? Actually, how about a standing ovation? At the very least, they deserve an A++ for their dedication and service to the well-being of the entire world.