I grew up on a farm in Southeastern Indiana, where my family worked hard to make ends meet. We raised beef cattle, crop farmed corn and soybeans, and even raised a garden from which we canned vegetables to preserve them for the winter. Chickens frequently ran around the barn lot, and I can remember climbing around on the stacks of hay with my sister to search for chicken eggs to be gathered for breakfast. There were seldom dull moments on the farm with the raising of animals, and it seemed like every week some pigs would escape from their makeshift fenced lot and make their way into the front yard, where they would root up the lawn with their noses, looking for fresh grub. This would generally turn into an eventful morning because we would have to turn the acre of sod back over and try to fit each piece back to where it came from, like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. Tending to the farm was a never-ending job that consisted of grinding feed for the animals, baling and stacking hay for days on end, and endless hours behind the wheel of a tractor tilling the soil for planting.
Quote: “One of the biggest challenges that we face today regarding our health is the mixed emotions of who is responsible for it.” — Trent Mozingo Twitter: @MozingoDC
I am the youngest of four children; in order of oldest to youngest—Travis, Troy, Tiffany, and Trent (that’s me). As you can probably imagine, our names would get mixed up quite often. Travis and Troy are nine and seven years, respectively, older than me, and my sister Tiffany, is two years older. Tiffany and I grew up thick as thieves. We were always bouncing around the farm looking for adventures, probably a little spoiled because our older brothers were taking care of most of the grunt work of farm life. Travis and Troy were like mentors to me. I always wanted to be just like them, so I would spend as much time analyzing their every move as I could. Still to this day, I feel like the little brother that’s trying to follow in their footsteps.
Our parents allowed us a great deal of free-thinking growing up. We had strong principles such as “Work comes before play” and “Always help a neighbor in need.” These embraced our daily lives. It always seemed like farm life provided a lot more work than play, but looking back on the years of growing up, I can see how it’s how I got to this point of my life. There is no debate: hard work pays off. As I write this, I am nostalgic about the undeniable blessing that my life has received. Our parents were not hovering parents; they allowed and demanded us to take responsibility for our own actions. They also helped each of us build confidence within ourselves to take on the tasks that lay in front of us.
There were times that making ends meet were more difficult than others, but there was never a time that money was wasted on paying to do things that we could do ourselves. Ours was a small farm; that meant our equipment was old and not under warranty. When the tractor broke down, we had to fix it. When the lawnmower blades became dull, we had to sharpen them ourselves. When we wanted a treehouse, we had to build it.
The confidence that our parents instilled in us certainly started my brothers and me out on the right foot. I can remember, as a small child, lying on the dirt floor of our barn holding a wrench for Travis or Troy as they worked to put a new axle into the back of our combine harvester. That was so they could make it a four-wheel-drive machine instead of two-wheel. During the harvest season that year, it rained constantly, turning our fields into a muddy mess. Without four-wheel drive, our combine would have been unable to reap the crops; thousands of dollars would have been lost.
We had no formal education on mechanics. We had no teacher to explain how to do mechanical things. John Deere mechanics were not there to help us. We were...