We Build...and Rebuild That

No number of compliments, accolades, reorders, contracts, ooohs, aaaahs,  or verbal pats on the back can compensate for one nasty phone call, one irritated email, or one dissatisfied client.  A won/loss record of .600 sends your team to the World Series; batting .400 lands a player in the Hall of Fame.  Its a rare year indeed when the team coming out of the Final Four has run the table.  But....in business, as we all learn eventually, statistics like these make for lonely days and nail biting nights. 

'Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail may stop the postmen from their appointed rounds', but neither are they excuses for flowers that are too little, too big, bloomed out or not colorful enough.  Selling service, personality, expertise, or creativity is all for naught if the so called factors out of your control take over and change the equation.  Dealing with Mother Nature is a fickle and frightening enterprise.

So...you cover all the bases you can.  You double down on...or up...as the case may be, on numbers.  Perhaps ten percent overage is enough, but let's be safe as long as there's still a margin to be had.  After all, a deer might run through, followed by all the canines on the farm.  A straight line wind might play grim reaper and windrow a hundred pots against their neighbors.  These occurrences are not hypotheticals; they are data points on the graph of experience.

There isn't a safety net in this small business. 'Don't look back.  Something might be gaining on you,' is the admonishment of Satchel Paige.  With the admission of imperfection comes the wedge of vulnerability.  Someone, somewhere, is growing, and selling, and trying their darnedest to make a living too.  Maybe someday it will be easy and we can all get lazy and fat and dumb and happy.  

Or maybe not.  More likely, we will continue to scrape and worry and use all the means at our disposal to grow row upon row of mums as perfect as soap bubbles but durable as basketballs. We'll sweat in the summer and chill in the rain.  We'll admire our handiwork marching four by four in the slanting golden light of autumn.  

Yes, indeedy.  We have the cuts and scars and pulled muscles to prove we built that.   Not only that, but we'll pick up the pieces and build it all again if we need to.

Dry County

I turn the sprinkler off just about the time the blister that is  the sun melts down behind the trees.  I'm rescuing the hostas under the sycamores and I stand for a few minutes just to hear the drops fall off the overhead leaves.  That's what a rain would sound like.

In the middle of the night, the air conditioner comes on in our bedroom.  Its soft whooshing through the vent wakes me and I think, half asleep, that it sounds like rain on the windows.

  This is what happens when you live in a dry county.

An early spring, a dry spring, does not necessarily lead to a dry summer: this is what the meteorologists told us again and again as the daffodils and crab apples bloomed before Easter and the peonies were drooping by Mother's Day.  Heat shut the door on spring and spoiled the first evenings with fireflies.  Those leisurely strolls and bike rides around the neighborhoods became races to beat the sunrise.

The corn was planted in record time by a record date.  Nothing to do but plant the beans shallow and hope a passing shower brought them up out of the dust.  Farmers run on hope and prayers, whatever the forecasters say.    Corn grows on its own internal computer, following the inexorable timetable of  its breeding.  'First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn shall appear', as the hymn proclaims.  Corn doesn't stick its tassel out and look for its shadow like the groundhog.  Corn says, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!  Our corn has been worthy of its expensive pedigree, remaining green and pretty long after topsoil moisture was gone, two and a half weeks after the last half inch rain.  Tassels emerged and pollen shed over the Fourth of July, the 5th and the 6th with temperatures of 100, 100,  and 102. We know what happened in 2011 when it was 100 degrees and wet.  We didn't talk about what might happen when the corn field is three digits and dry.  We are farmers.  Damn the torpedoes, its Independence Day; we shot our fireworks anyway.

Be realistic.  We live in the western Corn Belt. We were married in a drought year...1977.   In the 80s we suffered three droughts.  Four, if you count 1980 itself.  In the 2001 and 2002, we pumped the well dry for the first time  in March and hauled water for our greenhouse crops every day until September when we sold them.  The rains came in October.  We haven't had a crop failure due to drought since then.  Our land isn't worth $10,000 an acre for a reason.  And that reason is rain.

Be philosophical.  We are not alone in this one.  The land is dry everywhere in our state.  The land is dry, I hear tell, even in Illinois and much of Iowa.  The markets tell us so.

Be grateful.  Our wells are holding up.  We can still water the mums and the gardens.  We can still keep something pretty around us.  After a while, you have to develop tunnel vision.  Drive down the road looking neither left nor right at the crops turning white and the trees turning brown.  Summer does end and rain will fall.  Dust will settle.

Then we'll all toast the end of this dry county.

Legends of the Fall

"Tonight the moon was out, it was nearly full.
Way down here on earth, I could feel its pull.
The weight of gravity, or just the lure of life...."
Mary Chapin Carpenter's verse whispered in my ear as I made my way back to the Jeep from the cab of the combine.  To be accurate, the moon was a mere romantic sliver fading into the western horizon.  The Milky Way wrapped up the arch of the sky like a giant package. I looked up the sky chart for October 1 to put a name to the planet dominating the eastern sky.  Jupiter....I'll be watching you these harvest evenings as I reacquaint myself with the rising fall constellations.  Its a Friday night: I can see the halo of the lights on Burlington Junction's football field.  The air is still: I can hear fireworks at the football game in Tarkio.  Things must be going well for the Indians.


I've pretty well quit looking at the weather forecast, September has been so dry.  I haven't watched the ten o'clock news either.  But the wind yesterday was memorable enough that I checked out NOAA to see when it would end.  Our corner of the world had the dubious distinction of a red flag warning AND a chance of frost.  Fire and ice....Robert Frost...
Some say the world will end in fire;

Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

One terrible dry year I nearly burned our farm down.  We've always burned our paper trash in the deep hole we use to dispose of greenhouse and garden debris as well as downed tree limbs.  One frosty morning in November, I burned our household trash as usual, and then the kids and I went shopping. While we were gone, a north wind akin to the one that filled the air with dust yesterday churned through and caught some random spark left from my fire.  When we returned home, the rural firemen were gone, but a good portion of the harvested bean field around the greenhouses was blackened.  I could see where the fire had crossed the driveway within licking distance of two greenhouses.  It was a sobering and sickening experience.  This spring was dry as well and we weren't so lucky.  Somehow a bit of fire escaped the notice of at least ten people and melted the plastic and all the wiring of one greenhouse.  We have often lost plastic to the wind. We have frequently lost plastic to ice; losing one to fire was a first.  Fire is terrifying.  Ice is depressing.  To farm is to have fear of the Biblical plagues bred in your bones.  I tremble in deep rooted sympathy for folks in sere landscapes of the South.  I stand four square in the middle of the ancient Greek elements: earth, air, water, fire .


Harvest present conjures up harvests past.  Both combines feature GPS monitors. The children enjoy the moving mosaic of red, violet, green and yellow following the little green combine icon across the screen.  Various bells, whistles, beeps and buzzers monitor the vital functions of the monster mechanical beast.  When the grain tank is full or the unloading auger running, aggravating, repetitious beeps act as an audible cattle prod to the operator.  Still, the driver must treat the combine like the expensive Thoroughbred it is, feeling the rumble of the stalks feeding into the header and gauging speed, humidity, and yield faster than the photons can make it to the monitor. Push any factor too far and the whole symphony ends in a discordant chord.  We run much longer hours than we did years ago.  I assume the rotary machines are technologically superior and better able to process the larger volume of beans and stems.  Most evenings the beans would stop pinging against the windshield about the time the sickle bar quit shearing the stems.  This year, for a change of pace, the stems are still soft inside even though the beans themselves are down to a minuscule moisture below eight percent.  The dust is fierce; last week one combine caught on fire and spread sparks with each blast of the extinguisher.  With the advent of our grain wagons and diesel tractors, we haven't suffered the wildfires in the field of years past.  One memorable harvest, we burned two trucks, a pickup and Nancy's jeep....over the course of just two weeks!  


Fire and ice....twenty five years ago, we finished picking the bottoms after an ugly winter storm dumped snow up north and dropped temperatures into single digits in Atchison county.  We paid the price in spring in dead trees and shrubs, but farmers on the bottoms tested the strength of the frozen ground gingerly with their combines and trucks and brought the harvest home. The year we came back to farm, the men would chip enough frozen mud from the tread of the combine tires to keep them moving through the ruts of the bottom fields.  One Halloween, we set out to trick or treat Grandma Nelson with rain spitting and threatening to freeze.  By the time we got there, the power was out.  Grandma had her flashlight ready and treats waiting!  We crept back home over routes B and C that night.  In the morning, the Jack o'lanterns were coated with more than an inch of ice.  The elms in our yard were a wreck and power was out everywhere but our house.  We were warm but dry...there was no electricity to the well.  These fall ice storms are memorable for their rarity; winter ice storms for anxiety, exhaustion, and lingering aftermath.

Most evenings I do some housekeeping in the cab before I serve up supper.  The coffee Thermos,  squished water bottles, sections, fingers, sockets and three gallons of water require arrangement or disposal. I used to perch on the armrest in combines past.  Now there is a real live padded seat and room to stretch my feet out to the windshield. We used to think FM radio was a luxury. During the baseball playoffs or Saturday afternoon Tiger games, the farmers would vie for the catbird seat of the combine with its ear open to the sports world. Whether truck or tractor, the radio, or more likely, the antenna, would have given up its ghost a year or so into the hard life of Hurst Farms.  We've gone whole hog these days, realizing the thin line between work and torture may reside in the ability to listen to Special Report, Diana Krall, the Ricochet podcasts and Dave Ramsey. No longer do the markets and a.m. radio suffice: Blake sets his i-phone on the Sirius XM Sky dock and he is connected. None of these communications wonders is cheap, but blood pressures and tempers are in it for the long haul; communication, the experts say, is at the heart of a successful marriage. 


Riding the combine this year has been a less bone jarring experience thus far: one benefit of a drier year.  We shouldn't expect the washouts on the hillsides or the sticks and logs on the bottoms from toad stranglers or floods.  I am certain there will be dead falls on the sides of the fields though, judging from the sycamore limbs I've hauled off from my yard this summer.  Did you know there is an actual government wildlife program to encourage the downing of trees in the field margins?  "Feathering" is the technical term I remember.  When I heard of this, I was dumb founded.  Mother Nature not blowing down enough trees for you? Field borders require constant vigilance in our big combines with the long unloading augers.  The auger seldom escapes unscathed in a close encounter of any kind with branches or REA poles.  A wise man leaves a wide turning row and misses the big stick..........


'The weight of gravity'....or perhaps just the weight of harvests past.  We begin harvest in late September most years, but I remember filling the silo on my birthday one year in mid October.  We  typically finish harvest by Thanksgiving, but Blake's dad and grandfather finished in January. As much as the soil and slopes of our hills, the ditches and wet spots of our river bottoms, the winds, wets, warms and colds of our weather, our harvests bind us together over time and give us common history.