The Farmer Who Refused to Panic

In 2019, wheat farmer Dale Crenshaw watched his neighbor in western Kansas sell out to a corporate agriculture company. Within months, the corporation planted fence line to fence line, bought GPS-guided equipment Dale could never afford, and harvested a jaw-dropping first yield. Local papers ran the story. Dale's own kids asked why he didn't sell too.

Dale kept farming his 800 acres the way his father taught him — rotating crops, resting fields, reinvesting slowly. "Soil doesn't lie," he told his wife. "Give it time."

Three years later, the corporation's fields were showing signs of nutrient depletion. Their monoculture approach had stripped the ground. Meanwhile, Dale's patient rotation had built topsoil so rich that his per-acre yield quietly surpassed theirs. By 2023, the corporation pulled out of the county entirely, and Dale purchased forty of their abandoned acres at auction.

This is the wisdom David sings in Psalm 37. "Do not fret because of evildoers," he writes. "Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him." The wicked may flourish like a green tree in its native soil, but the Almighty sees what is underneath. Those who trust Him, who commit their way to the Lord and refuse to panic, will find themselves not just surviving but inheriting the very land others abandoned. The meek, it turns out, really do inherit the earth — one faithful season at a time.