Let's Vote...to Keep a Good Thing Going!

Building terraces south of our house in 1987

Fifty years ago our family would load up long before daylight to make the drive south to Missouri from Chicago for Thanksgiving dinner. As the sun rose, the frost would gleam bright against the black furrows of plowed ground. Nary a corn stalk disturbed the unbroken furls as far as the eye could see.  Later, as snow fell and piled up windblown against the red snow fencing, the drifts would be crusted with black soil.  The spring thaw would leave another kind of drift: the topsoil that had blown free from the frozen and unprotected ground. It seemed wasteful to let that good soil fill the roadside ditches. Even though I wasn't very old,  somehow I understood that soil was more than the dirt washed off your hands before supper, more than mud on a construction site.

Perhaps that was because the contrast between the flat farm ground of northern Illinois and the rock strewn landscape of central Missouri was so drastic.  Tilling the big garden on the farm in Calloway county yielded a bountiful harvest of rocks.  Clay and gravel were less than a spade length away; digging a post hole was a major endeavor.  This wasn't soil: it was a foundation, a substrate;  what it grew was trees, fossils, multiflora rose.....and fescue.  Nonetheless, my father took his land stewardship very seriously, building ponds and seeding grass waterways on the thin chert ridden pasture ground.

So...imagine being transplanted to a place where ancestral winds piled up great mounds of glacial loam, where a drain spade slipped through the ground like a knife through butter...a place Lewis and Clark called the 'bald-pated prairie' after the tall grasses parting before the wind on either side of the great river.....

....A place where spring rains can run unabated through a tilled field, where a ditch will form anywhere a cow has walked two days in a row......a place so fertile...and so fragile...

No matter your landscape or your land use, the topsoil is a precious resource, one that takes generations to build up and but a few seasons to break down. Worlds reside within that thin upper crust: germination, decomposition, fertilization, aeration. The care and feeding of our soil is no small matter.

Long before the term 'no till' was common currency, soil conservation was a matter of structure, keeping the thin brown line in its place by reducing the velocity, the distance, and the slope of what forces moved against it.  Terraces, tile lines, diversions, and waterways were the tools farmers and contractors employed before chemists, breeders and  engineers gave us the means to leave the topsoil undisturbed while we planted, fertilized, sprayed and harvested. These long lived structures are costly, not quite the same magnitude as buying the kids a new pair of basketball shoes every year.

But our state cherishes its landscape: more than thirty years ago, the people of Missouri voted to pay a 1/10 cent sales tax dedicated to their State Parks and the conservation of Missouri soil and water.  Since then this tax has been renewed three times, a measure of the confidence Missouri citizens have in the application and efficacy of these monies to lands public and private.

Like other farmers, our family has been pushing terraces, building basins, plowing up diversions, and practicing no till farming on our lands for as long as we have been farming.  We are direct recipients of the generosity of Missouri taxpayers and we view the responsibility of maintaining and improving our soil as a calling, not a burden.  To us, every broken terrace and every rutted field entrance is a challenge; after a generation of conservation tillage, we take pride when the combine ride across a terrace face is as smooth as the proverbial baby's cheek.

Here's the pitch and the promise: next week is Election Day 2016.  Whatever your decisions about the rest of your ballot, please take time to vote for the renewal of the  Missouri Soils, Water and State Parks Tax.  Know that your vote will make the beautiful landscape and productive lands of our state better, as it has done since the first vote in 1984.

Missouri Parks, Soils and Waters Sales Tax Renewal 2016

Terrace building Hurst Farms version, 1987

Plowing and pushing up terraces on our farm 1987

Calling Mr. Rockwell

One of Norman Rockwell's most iconic paintings portrays a young man in a plaid work shirt and a worn leather jacket standing alone among his fellow citizens. He has a couple of folded sheets of paper sticking out of his jacket pocket, but they have been forgotten in the heat of the discussion and he speaks off the cuff with passion and heartfelt intensity. All eyes are upon him; his audience of men in ties and women in hats listens respectfully. Whether they agree with him or not, they are polite and acknowledge by their attention his right to speak his mind. The painting is titled "Freedom of Speech"; it is part of the series "Four Freedoms" inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union address in 1941.

This painting is what I envision every year when we attend the Missouri Farm Bureau Annual meeting.  Farm families and rural residents from all over our state will gather to catch up with old friends, to be entertained, to listen and learn from eminent speakers and those whom we have elected.  We will eat together, complain about the weather and what it did to our farms, brag on children and grandchildren and ooh and aah over the accomplishments of other folks' children and grandchildren.

But we will also work.  The members of Missouri Farm Bureau who gather each year in December will conduct the serious business of  making the policies this organization will work to fulfill during 2016.  The thick sheaf of colored paper each voting delegate will receive contains color coded pages with the previous year's policy, beginning with the Farm Bureau philosophy and proceeding alphabetically through Agricultural Credit to Young Farmers.  These pages will show redactions, additions and all changes made by the members of the State Resolutions committee, who have collated, combined, and voted on suggestions and concerns from the questionnaires submitted by members all over the state.  The prospective resolutions originated with the folks in the counties and now are returning to be voted and ratified one by one by those same grassroots members.

It's a big room and resembles nothing so much as a political convention with the signs indicating the seating of Districts 1 through 8 arranged across the floor.  As each policy is read, the chair asks for any changes and waits to recognize any member on the floor that desires to offer an amendment or ask a question.  There is discussion, always respectful, but sometimes heated.  There is always a vote, up or down, yea or nay, but if the voters are particularly hearty in expressing their opinion, a division of the house may be called for and they will vote with their feet...

While the differences may descend into trivialities and unwieldy parsing, the motivation is unimpeachable: to work for what the speaker believes is the very best for the future of his neighbors and compatriots.  To that end, the assemblage acts "Rockwellesque", an adjective spawned by the Oxford English Dictionary,describing anything that is "idealistic, quaint, or sentimental" It is an enviable exercise in thoughtfulness, courtesy, and dedication.  Folks stand up who have been voting delegates for decades, whose views are well known, who are the bedrock of the current policy book.  There are new voices, working through the system, taking their medicine when the delegate body sets them down with a resounding 'nay'.  The concerns of these voters reach far beyond the minutiae of arcane government farm policy and deep into the very bedrock of American culture and tradition: the availability of healthcare, safe roads, and modern technology in rural areas, our property rights...our religious freedom.  We approach these policies with great gravity; without the representation afforded by our association, our minority position will lack a standard bearer amid the clamor of our urban nation.

It is worth celebrating these associations, these increasingly rare examples of voter rubber meeting policy road.  When I see one of my neighbors at the mike, speaking his mind in front of seven hundred or so of his peers, I feel a small thrill of optimism and hope.  To the extent this takes place across our nation, we are part of a Norman Rockwellesque America: the one man, one voice, exercising his right to speak his conscience among his countrymen.

With a Farm Bureau cap in hand.....