have dinner on the hoof at your doorstep. That was the human race's first cattleman and the founder of the ranching business.

Together, the farmer and the cattleman created civilization. Even today, the farmer and the cattleman are the foundation of our own civilization. That's because, as Lin Yutang, a brilliant Chinese writer, once put it, "Man is born with a bottomless hole called a stomach that he must try to fill every day."

First we must eat, but before we can eat, someone has to produce the food. It worries me a lot that farmers and cattlemen have become almost invisible in America today. I can't think of any sitcom or drama that is set in a farming area. One almost never reads a news story about farmers or cattlemen, and I read a lot of newspapers. It wouldn't surprise me if most kids thought milk and hamburgers came from a factory in Detroit.

Farming and cattle ranching are tough businesses. The politicians and the financiers seem to have conspired to make it almost impossible for a small farmer or rancher to succeed. You'd never know it from the prices in the supermarket, but the farmer gets a darn small slice of that pie. Several years ago, however, I knew we were in trouble when a congressional committee invited three actresses who had played farmers' wives to testify about agriculture. No kidding.

Suburban sprawl has been eating up farmland at an alarming rate, and now it has become fashionable for rich celebrities to buy up ranches so they can pretend to be what they are not. Despite mechanization, a working ranch or farm requires a whole heap of sweat and a lot of knowledge.

The government projects a continued decline of small farms and ranches and a continued growth of large agribusiness corporations. I don't think this is a healthy trend. I know we have a tendency in this country to industrialize everything from underarm odor to growing beans, but big is not necessarily better. Big corporations tend to put short-term profits ahead of everything else, including the land and the environment.

Caring for the land so that it can continue to provide for future generations is not likely to be found on the mission statement of a large corporation. We have done terrible things to this beautiful country in the name of a quick buck.

I can remember when the intellectuals started touting a service economy, but the guts of any civilization can never be paper-shufflers. Growing and making tangible items are what produces real wealth. We are already importing way too much of the stuff we buy, and now we are starting to import more and more food. It says a lot about the federal government that it has resisted requiring supermarkets to label their food with the country of origin.

I know there are still farmers and ranchers out there. I would like to hear more about them and less about movie stars, singers, politicians and athletes. Not a one of those four categories of people produces any tangible products. They just perform and run their mouths.

Washington produces paper; Wall Street is all about paper; Hollywood is all about ephemeral images. You can't eat paper or images, and if we don't shift our priorities in this country, we might discover that the hard way. There are 6 billion people on Earth wanting something to eat. You would think that a farm or a ranch that provides something to eat could at least succeed, and the fact that so many can't tells us that we need to re-examine our economic and political systems as they pertain to agriculture.

(Write to Charley Reese at P.O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL 32802)

(c) 2006 by King Features Syndicate