David Michael Farmer

David Michael Farmer was born June 5, 1942 in South Bend, Indiana to Claude and Juanita Farmer, the first of their two sons. He grew up on their 20 acre farm, exploring nature with his boyhood companions and developing a fascination with traces of the past left behind by earlier generations inhabiting the region. Later in life he would combine this keen interest in the past with his love for family and become an avid genealogist, tracing the ancestry of the family back to their arrival in Boston-area America in the late 1600’s (some remember him asserting an ancestor among the non-Pigrim crew of the Mayflower), and to their English and Dutch forebears (his discovery of a connection with Richard III made him more sympathetic to the idea that Shakespeare's portrayal was Tudor propaganda).

After graduating from high school in Niles, Michigan in 1960, he attended Michigan State University, where one of his Triangle fraternity brothers would introduce him to his future bride, Ginny Shidle. Upon graduation from MSU, he took a job with General Mills in Minneapolis (he would later reminisce about his participation in the development of Bugles snacks). There during one winter visit, a fateful ice-fishing trip with "Ginny Darling" led to his proposal and her acceptance, and the two were married in her hometown of Commodore, Pennsylvania on June 11, 1966.

They moved back to East Lansing, Michigan for David to pursue graduate studies in agricultural engineering at MSU, culminating in a Ph.D. for his thesis "Optimization Techniques for Grain Dryer Design and Analysis" under advisor Fred W. Bakker-Arkema. During that time, David became a father to Chantelle (1968) and Andrew (1971). After he completed his doctorate, the family moved to Ada, Oklahoma where he had taken a job with the recently formed Environmental Protection Agency.

It was at this time that David's life was radically changed when a hospitalization induced by a brain bleed led to the discovery of a tumor; though successfully operated, this left him re-learning basic cognitive skills like reading at the same time his son was first learning them. A friend from graduate school helped him get a job in the Oklahoma State University Agricultural Engineering Department so the family moved again to Stillwater, OK. Recognizing that they would need additional support as he rebuilt his abilities, he encouraged Ginny to go back to school and get a graduate degree as well. In Stillwater, they became involved with the United Methodist Church, having found comfort and support in their faith during the period of his hospitalization and recovery.

The family's next move was to Lansing NY (1980), where in his spare time David began a collaboration to develop software designed to assist others who were facing similar challenges in reading to those he experienced following the brain tumor. He eventually took a position in Cornell's Winter Lab, where he was involved in the analysis of concrete structures and their modes of failure during earthquake activity. This focus on civil engineering coincided with his participation in missionary work in Haiti through the Methodist Church in Lansing. He and others from the church visited Haiti several times, helping to build new schoolhouses and addressing other community needs. He never lost interest in agriculture, and after an experiment in trout farming in the basement of the Lansing residence failed to satisfy that urge, his next venture was the Farmer's Choice blueberry farm at their next home in Dryden NY (1994). There Dave and Ginny lived for the next thirty years, retiring from their jobs at Cornell and devoting their time to the blueberries, the Dryden Methodist Church, tending to their parents, and enjoying visits from their grandchildren (to whom he dedicated genealogically-motivated stories like "When Grandpa was a Little Boy") and other family.

David's struggles with neurological challenges returned suddenly late in life during a walk near Dryden Lake with Ginny when he first experienced an epileptic seizure. After hospitalization, he returned to Dryden but subsequent bouts of the seizures and issues with the medications to control them as well as other illness led to a decision to move from their longtime home in Dryden to Longview, an independent living facility in Ithaca, closer to where their daughter Chantelle lived. After a year and half there with Ginny managing his care, a seizure-induced fall sent him back to the hospital, after which he was moved to a rehabilitation facility in Groton. Although the family was hopeful that he would be able to return to life with Ginny at Longview, on the same day that he was scheduled to be released there he relapsed and began a slow decline from which he never recovered. He passed away peacefully on October 2, 2025. Since he had expressed interest in a natural burial, he was placed to rest in nearby Green Springs natural cemetery surrounded by fields and woods of the sort he had once loved to explore as a boy.