by Ted Genoways
Audacious and brazen, Rick had a head full of ideas for ways to expand the operation and make way for the future. “In the 1980s,” he told me, “inflation was so high that bankers were encouraging farmers, ‘Hell, borrow money, because next year that money will value less.’ So everyone took out loans against their farms. Then ground went from $2,500 an acre to $800 in two years, so farmer equity and the value of what their loans were borrowed against, went to nothing. And then the banks started selling them out.” It was a terrible time for family farms, but Rick also saw the opportunity, the once-in-a-lifetime chance to leverage the land that Tom had carefully stewarded, in order to pick up more ground at a fraction of its real value.
Rick was still too young to appreciate it, but Tom himself had always been an early-adopter, a firebrand and risk-taker in his own right. But these times had him spooked. Tom’s father had been put off the land when he was young, his grandfather forced to sell it off after bad decisions in the teens. His father had worked his whole life to save up enough to buy the farm back, and when he died young and unexpectedly, Tom had had to give up his own dreams. After just one semester at the university, he dropped out and came home to save the farm from being lost again. Whatever the ambitions of the young man who wanted to marry his daughter, Tom was reluctant to make unnecessary and untested changes and even more cautious about taking on debt in the midst of a credit crisis.
“But when Heidi and I got married, and she inherited her share of the land,” Rick said, “I was fifty percent of the decision-making process on how to go forward.” And he couldn’t bring himself to pass up the opportunity he saw before him. Heidi had 50 cows, 50 sows, and 300 acres of land under her control. “When I first came back from the Peace Corps, I was going to make it on forty acres, and be all holistic and symbiotic, and everything working together,” Rick said, but something about having more land and livestock than he’d ever imagined possible, along with a desire to prove himself to his father-in-law, brought out his competitive side. Rick and Heidi worked it all out on paper and decided to take the risk. They upped the operation to 150 sows and 100 cows. Heidi’s father thought they were being reckless. “We had a hell of a good year, that first year. We worked our backsides off, but we made a hundred thousand dollars on hogs.” To free themselves from Tom’s second-guessing, Rick and Heidi used their profits to buy out all of the remaining debt on the equipment. It took every penny, but their piece of the farm now belonged to them outright.
But it didn’t stop there. “After two years, I got Heidi talked into taking on three more quarters.” Now approaching the peak of the Farm Crisis, land prices were at an all-time low. Rick was eager to buy up as much as possible, rolling each year’s profits into buying still more land, on the assumption that an eventual recovery would set them up for life. So just three years after taking over their share of the farm, Rick and Heidi decided to use part of the original homestead as collateral for a loan to make still more land purchases. “I could see what a land base did,” Rick told me. “Without land you cannot operate.” He said he had everything nailed down for a loan from First National in York, but the day before he was supposed to sign the paperwork, he received a phone call from the loan officer.
“We’ve got a problem with our board of directors,” the banker told him. “Because everyone’s going broke, we want Tom to cosign.”
“By then Tom and I were just fighting like hell,” Rick said, “so I told him, ‘Evaluate the loan on its own merits and if we don’t qualify, we will seek assistance elsewhere.’ ”
Rick tipped his head back, draining the last of his beer. Then he lined up the two empty cans in front of him and shook his head ruefully. “So arrogant. Farming just three years, and I was that brash.” The bank agreed to make the loan, and the pattern was set for the rest of Rick’s farming life. “Because of my aggressive ways, we have continued to stay in debt for thirty-two years and always pushing, doing a lot more than we should. My idea was to try and build an operation that I could hand down to my children with as much land as what we were benefited when Heidi’s share was handed down to her. So I did everything I could to get ahead and to turn that success into more and more contiguous land. If you can swing it, you buy it. When you’re a farmer that land means everything.”
It was late now, pitch black outside the window. Even the moon had waned to nothing but a slim sliver of light. Beyond the reach of city glow, the only sense of a world outside came from the distant barn light, its dim bulb always left burning and just bright enough to give shape to the shadows.
“I’m probably close to bipolar,” Rick said at last. “When I’m on, everything is possible. I just go for it. But then I’ll get really down, thinking, ‘God, how are we going to get out of this?’ And I put it on my kids, this guilt for my avaricious and aggressive ways—that I was doing it for them. That was my excuse in my head.”
He sighed deeply. Months before, Meghan had warned me that one of Rick’s defining characteristics is self-doubt. “He worries every decision to death,” she said, “and then, no matter what he decides, he always thinks there could have been a better way. Rick is a very regretful man.” It’s a common trait among farmers. The neighbor’s corn always looks taller, their cattle fatter. Every farmer kicks himself for not doing enough to capitalize when the markets are up and for being too exposed when the markets are down. Rick’s mood, in particular, seemed to rise and fall with the prices from the Board of Trade. He regretted every missed opportunity but even more deeply regretted the times he hadn’t been more cautious, more careful in planning ahead. Why hadn’t he set aside more money when there was $8 corn?
“I just get comfortable, to where the wolf’s away from the door,” he said, “and what do I do? I go and remortgage everything and do dumb things—buy more land, more equipment, build a barn or a new house. It’s like, Rick, quit digging. You know what this is going to do to you.”
He tapped the empty cans on the table in front of him.
“And it’s caused a hell of a lot of stress on my family,” Rick said. “Was that worth it? I don’t know. That will be for them to decide.”
KYLE DROVE the pickup south across the interstate and then back east toward what all the maps label as Lushton, Nebraska, though it’s barely more than a wide spot in the road anymore. And we were still several miles outside of town, making our way toward Seth’s farm. Kyle explained that Seth’s wife is a Barlow, that his mother-in-law was Joan Barlow. “When we talk about ‘Joan’s half section,’ that’s who we mean,” Kyle said. “Seth farms most of the Barlow family land, but we farm that one property.” Kyle told me that he didn’t know how exactly to explain why Rick and Seth had started harvesting together, but it had something to do with a kind of shared stubbornness.
A few years back, for example, Seth had taken a load of high-moisture corn to the grain elevator and been charged a drying fee. But Seth had seen the elevator simply blend his corn with a load of overly dry corn, so they hadn’t actually had to turn on the dryer. “I was there,” Seth told the operator. “The dryer was not running. I am not going to pay a drying fee.” Rick had told me earlier that he’d admired Seth for telling the co-op that it wasn’t right. “I thought that was pretty gutsy of him.”
As we hit the rise and the acreage appeared, we could see a wide field of ready soybeans and then a shelterbelt of tall trees, a farmhouse and cluster of outbuildings tucked behind. The beans, brown and mature, seemed almost to glow in the October light. “Wow,” Kyle said, surveying the field. “It’s ready to go.” But then he turned along the south edge of the property and drove slow, so he could count rows and divide them to figure out the number of rounds to complete the field. As he went, I could see the shimmy and drift of Seth’s rows. “He just hasn’t invested in auto steer yet,” Kyle said and laughed. “He just put this pivot up last year. Before that it was flood-irrigated with the pipes and all.” It was a system that most farmers, especially in eastern Nebraska where center-pivot i
rrigation was invented in the 1950s, had abandoned long ago. Given the labor of changing gates, Seth was reluctant to irrigate except when it was absolutely necessary. It seemed to me that maybe Rick’s admiration for Seth came from his ability to keep his farm producing by force of sheer will.
But it meant that Rick and Kyle were going to have to harvest the old-fashioned way—keeping an eye on the outside furrow, following the wobble and drift of rows planted by the human eye rather than computer-drawn straight lines. The mood, though, as we got out and Rick and Kyle readied the combine, was decidedly light. It was Meghan’s birthday, and she was in the grain cart, chattering away to Rick and Kyle over the CB. Seth would swap in occasionally. He had his daughter with him, and she was having a great time taking the wheel of the John Deere. She was used to riding with goggles and earplugs in her dad’s clattering old International Harvester, and she was sold on the air-tight, cooled cab, the sounds of Kyle’s classical music playing over the radio.
But as the sun started to set, the mood seemed to shift with it. Because Seth had planted by eye, every turn of the combine required lining up with where he had tried to match row spacing between each pass at planting. Farmers call these “guess rows.” The sixteen rows laid out by the planter are perfectly spaced, but the furrow between passes can be slightly narrower or slightly wider than the machine-spaced rows. Because the harvester is twelve rows wide, it’s impossible to split each planting swath. Instead, you have some passes within the planted pattern and some where the harvester is straddling the places where two planting rows come together. But as the light failed and the shadows grew longer, it was getting harder and harder for Kyle to keep track of the guess rows and remain within the pattern. He leaned forward, peering down over the steering wheel, to be sure that the spinning reel of the harvester was standing up the rows and cutting everything cleanly.
Seth, back in the spring, had planted around the concrete platform of his new center pivot for the first time. And rather than setting his row-spacing starting from that platform, he’d started from the edge of the field and worked in. Ordinarily, farmers won’t plant closer than 30 inches from their pivot, but Seth, hoping to get a little extra from the field, had allowed just 5 inches. So as they neared the platform, Rick and Kyle had to figure out where to set the floating bar on the outside of the harvester head, what they call “the snout,” in order to stay aligned but without having to take multiple passes to get around the pivot.
“We try to put the outside of that head on the guess row,” Kyle explained. “But the eye-planted rows can sometimes run together. And if you don’t guess right, you’re taking half a swath trying to fix it—which takes fuel and time.” And if you get off by too much—you miss a guess row and don’t notice or just try to keep going—you can start to run over rows, breaking the pods or treading the plants into the muddy soil and making them impossible to harvest. Seeing the trouble it was causing, Seth told them not to worry about the rows right around the pivot, but, even in a neighbor’s field, Kyle wanted to capture every bit of the yield. So between passes, he would come down from the cab, study the rows with Rick and then hustle back behind the wheel.
At dinnertime, Meghan drove to pick up food Heidi had waiting for them at the house. Meghan returned with tacos wrapped up in aluminum foil and a cooler full of Cokes. Everyone sat on the tailgate of the pickup or leaned against the bed, eating quickly. Rick kept eyeing the sun, now sinking into the line of trees that stood between the edge of the field and Seth’s house.
“I think we should call it a night,” Rick said finally.
“It’s all right,” Kyle said. “There’s just a few more swathes.”
Kyle was hoping to finish this field before it was full dark, so they could load up the head and the combine for another field for tomorrow. If they could get done in the next hour, they would have a jump in the morning. Together, Rick and Kyle walked over to the remaining rows, getting a read on how many rounds were left to complete the field, but also going back and forth about whether to continue or stop. Finally, Kyle won out. He took the combine down to the north edge of the field, then turned back toward the pivot, watching the spinning reel below him and steadying the wheel.
As he neared the south edge of the field, Meghan, waiting in the grain cart, came on the radio. “You’re driving crooked,” she said. “You’re knocking over rows.” Kyle looked down at the reel. Everything seemed in line. So he stopped the harvester and climbed down to see what was going on. Right away he could see: the snout was bent in and the plastic body of the soybean head was broken. He’d hit the pad of the pivot and never even felt it.
“Goddamn it,” Kyle rasped under his breath. This could be thousands of dollars of damage. Worse still, if it was more than he could fix himself, it could be days of waiting for a Deere certified mechanic. He pulled back the plastic body and he stuck his head inside. Kyle told me later that he could see that the snout had been pushed in and bent up the hydraulic arm on which it floats. That arm was rubbing on a pulley belt that runs the cutting sickles, putting slack in the system and creating friction. “It was still cutting,” Kyle said, “but it was already getting really, really hot.” He reached in to see if he could straighten the bent arm by hand. No dice.
“I should have just left that row,” Kyle said, still tugging hard on that arm. “It was planted right up against the pad.”
“That’s what Seth said,” Rick snapped. “You cannot harvest something that’s planted that close.”
“Yeah, I probably should have just left that little bit.”
“If Meghan wouldn’t have seen it, it could have started a fire,” Rick said. He couldn’t hide his anger, but Kyle was already thinking about what they needed to do now. He said he could straighten the arm if he could just heat it up, but he couldn’t afford to wait until morning to fix it. If they were going to finish this field in the morning and still stand a chance of loading up and getting some beans out of their own fields, Kyle was going to have to make the repairs right then, in the dark. He asked Seth if he had a cutting torch and a wrench he could borrow. Seth told them to pull around to his shop, and he set off across the field.
By the time Kyle and Rick had driven up in the pickup, Seth had already rolled out a portable light and the tank and hose and a rosebud heating tip for the torch. He grabbed a couple of wrenches. Kyle asked if he had any fender washers. Seth pulled out a box and shook several into his hand.
Hoping to get out of the way, I went with Meghan back to the house, where we waited, saying little for close to an hour before Rick and Kyle came rolling into the driveway. They stomped into the mudroom laughing and kicking off their boots. “You asked for that fender washer, and Seth just said, ‘How many you need?’ ” Rick said, slapping Kyle on the back. “Why can’t I have a shop like that?”
“I assume everything’s working,” Meghan called from across the kitchen.
“Yeah,” Kyle said with a long sigh. “We had to drill out some rivets and get the plastic bent up so we could get the torch in without burning everything up. And then we had to heat up that arm to get it straightened out so it quit rubbing. It was really hard steel and we couldn’t get it bent by hand. And then a little piece on the backside broke. So we had to weld that back together.”
Rick interrupted. “I want you guys to know: the combine is better than it’s ever been.”
“Better than before?” Meghan asked skeptically.
“At least,” Rick said. “We should hit every center-pivot pad.”
Before long, they were seated together around the dinner table, recounting stories of all the near-disasters of past years. The time Dave took out a power line with the unloading auger. The time Meghan had swung wide to make a turn on a country road with the bean head strapped onto the flatbed trailer and clipped a stop sign. They laughed until all the tension and worry of the accident, the adrenaline of what could have happened, had been shaken off and disappeared.
In the end, American f
armers harvested more than 14 billion bushels of corn in 2014 and nearly 4 billion bushels of soybeans—setting new records, as they had the year before and would hope to in the year to come. With so much production, roughly three-quarters of the harvest nationwide went directly into bins, as every farmer waited and prayed for rebounding prices. They never came. Instead, prices continued to slump as yields continued to grow, and whispers spread about the possibility of another Farm Crisis. But for now, on that one night in October, the last hours of Meghan’s birthday nearly gone, everyone was gathered in the kitchen, happy and laughing until they were ready to sleep and go again in the morning.
“The hardest part of my job is working with family,” Meghan told me later, “but that’s also the best part of my job, because family can be pretty hard on each other, but at the end of the day, they’re the ones that will be there for you in the hardest times. We’ve been through some hard times on the farm, and we’re still here, still going—and hopefully on to the next generation.”
INTERLUDE
WORKING COWS
November 2014
First the truck appeared, then the cattle trailing along behind. The November sky was slate-gray and cloud-strewn, the temperature holding in the forties, just warm enough that the intermittent rain came as a dry mist rather than snow. Meghan was at the wheel of the white pickup, slowing occasionally to bang on the side door and call out to the hesitant cows. Their big bags swayed under them as they ducked over the furrows. “Come, boss,” Meghan called, beating the door again like a drum. Behind her, Rick and Kyle on four-wheelers stitched along the edges of the herd, circling up stray calves and keeping the line moving. Kyle, in a stocking cap covering his buzz-cut head, stood up on the running board, straddling his seat. He kept his hands on the handlebars, still easing forward, as he scouted across the line of jogging cattle. If he spotted a loose calf or errant cow on the other side, he whistled to Rick, who zoomed ahead, shouting in a hoarse staccato. “Go on, now. Go, go, go. Go on, get moving.”