by Ted Genoways
After the end of harvest, when the last of the beans were in the bins and the calls for white corn had started to come in from the elevator, when the rented harvester had been loaded back onto the flatbed and sent on to some other farm farther north, Rick turned his attention straight to getting the cattle ready for winter and then for spring calving. He drove the trailer out to Curtis, where he grazed the spring cow-calf pairs on pasture, growing them on grass through the summer and start of fall, and loaded them up. He brought them back to York County and ran them onto a quarter section of freshly harvested corn surrounding the solar-powered barn.
In fields like those, where the corn has been well irrigated by a center pivot, the cut stalks standing in a winter field along with the wayward cobs and kernels scattered by the combine, what farmers call “crop residue,” can provide ample feed without any additional cost. The moisture left in the stalks plus the greens from the turnips and radishes planted as winter cover crops are enough to get lactating mothers through until weaning—and for those cows without calves, calories from those cover crops can actually help them put on pounds. But if the cows were going to be nursing newborns in a few months, then it was time to separate the spring calves from their mothers in order to wean them, and it was time to check the cows for new pregnancies.
Meghan groaned just thinking about it all. “When harvest is over, you’d think you could catch your breath,” she said. “But we’re straight into the cows—bringing them home from pasture, sorting them, weaning them, and getting them to the sale barn. It’s a lot.” She hit the gas, speeding up to the pipe corral attached to the old barn. She jumped out of the truck and swung open the wide metal gate. “C’mon, girls,” she called again. Heads bobbing, the first of the mothers walked obediently into the pen, their calves skipping but sticking close. The Hammonds raised all Angus cattle for beef. In recent years, Rick had moved away from hormones and feed-grade antibiotics, and he had tried to do more direct marketing, selling halves and quarters to customers willing to pay a premium for hormone-free, grass-finished beef. But with so much risk already sitting in his grain bins, Rick was content to get his calves to market and get more on the way. Beef prices were soaring, hitting $6.30 per pound at retail, more than a dollar above where they’d been just a year before. Most years, Rick regards the cattle as a side operation, work he enjoys but doesn’t expect to pad his wallet. But with prices climbing and several years of drought driving the national cattle herd to a lower point than it had been in decades, the sale of beef promised to be the farm’s saving grace for 2015.
Once the cattle were all in the large holding pen, Meghan swung the gate closed and grabbed her notebook. They would go systematically through each cow-calf pair, checking ear tags and noting any obvious health problems, before running them into separate pens. After that, they would herd the calves into the chute for more detailed health inspections. Rick, Meghan, and Kyle, as well as Dave, who had been waiting back at the barn, all filed into the wide paddock, the cattle stooping and scattering around them like startled birds. Rick had a pair of rattle paddles, like two oversized lollipops, lemon and orange, but inside those bright-colored plastic pads were ball bearings that shook and spooked the cattle forward.
Arms stretched wide, coaxing and calling, shaking one paddle and then the other, Rick separated calves, one by one, from their mothers. He sent the weaned calves one way and then the other, until they skittered toward the gate, which Dave would swing open to usher them into the calf pen. If they showed signs of balking at the doorway, Dave and Kyle had herding rods, nothing more than long flexible poles, to tap their hindquarters—just enough to trigger a prey animal’s flight instinct and send the calf galloping ahead. Eventually, when the calves were separated out, the mothers were moved as a group to another pen, and the next batch of pairs was brought in.
This was how it proceeded for hours, cajoling and cursing. The four dust-covered and wind-chapped humans wading into galloping herds of erratic cattle, their black flanks twitching and mud-patched, their hooves kicking up more clouds of dirt in the holding pen. Rick would call out to the cows, then to his helpers, and before long he was yelling at Meghan, Meghan yelling back at him, and then the two of them were laughing at each other. And with each new group, the din of the corral grew: calves bawling for their mothers, worried cows mooing in response, straining to lift their mouths, tongues lolling, over the crush of other fussing mothers.
“Working cattle is a high-stress time,” Rick had warned me ahead of time. “Be prepared for a lot of noise.” There was certainly that, but it only dawned on me later that it wasn’t so much the chaos he was worried about as how I might respond to the distressed and calling mothers or the sight of the skittish calves as they bolted through the gate and were snapped into the chute, so Meghan could complete a wellness check, looking for tumors or signs of nasal or bronchial infections or pinkeye. She marked down the information for each as she went, the pinned calf tense in the chute, sometimes letting out a meek bawl, sometimes releasing a milky panicked poop, its eyes rolling and wild to be free.
“We had pinkeye terrible this year,” Meghan told me later, “and pneumonia in one group.” She shook her head in frustration—another side effect of all the rain late in the season. “We don’t get pinkeye out west, because it’s a drier climate.” But in the eastern part of the state, flies hatch out with the rains and swirl over manure piles left in the fields and feed yards. When those same flies cluster around the eyes of cows, tonguing the salt right out of their tears, pinkeye can spread and then pass from mother to calf and through the herd. “We treated them all ourselves, except for a few that were pretty bad,” Meghan said. “They had to go in and get a shot in the eye and have the lid stitched shut.” That subconjunctival injection of antibiotics to kill the infection, mixed with steroids to knock down the inflammation, usually takes care of the problem in just a few days, but it also means that the animal can no longer be sold as antibiotic-free or steroid-free. A rash of pinkeye can close the door on a whole season’s direct marketing and its premiums.
This second-guessing of basic animal husbandry, often to satisfy a grocery shopper who has never been on a farm, is a sore point for almost anyone engaged in raising livestock these days. Every cattle rancher is quick to talk about how they have scaled back on chemicals and drugs, and they can barely conceal their suspicions of outsiders, who might object to ear tags or branding, or mistake commonplace herding for rough handling. Even in the intricate systems of corrals at livestock auctions, where most cattle are still moved by skilled cowboys on horseback and drovers with herding rods, I’ve been told innumerable times that electric prods are rarely necessary, that no one wants to stress the animals. At one large feedlot in Bridgeport, Nebraska, the owner wanted me to know that his son had gotten a bachelor’s degree from the sustainable agriculture program at Yale and that his daughter had gone to college at Colorado State, where she studied under Temple Grandin. She had come home and redesigned all of their chutes and gates, he told me. Almost across the board, beef producers feel scrutinized and critiqued, and they have a love-hate relationship with a consumer base willing to pay extra for an antibiotic-free steak without any thought for the potential suffering caused by denying drugs to the cow that produced it. More than once a rancher or feedlot owner has asked me: “Would you prefer that I withhold medicine from a sick animal?”
By evening, when the gray sky deepened to black and the temperatures dropped below freezing, Meghan and Rick seemed fatigued both by the physical exhaustion of the all-day work and by the inescapable feeling that they were somehow under surveillance. As direct marketers of their own beef, they know well that much of the new food movement is built on a nostalgia for a bygone era of family farms and natural food production, and all of the farming magazines and websites are always urging them to “tell their own stories.” They’re not trying to hide anything, but they often feel forced to prove their heightened commitment to land stewardship and a
nimal welfare and building sustainable agriculture in support of communities and health. And they know all too well that this urge for “food with a story” has only encouraged corporations, with much bigger marketing budgets and an army of branding experts, to reposition their products and remake their image. Not only have the big meat producers taken over any organic or hormone-free company large enough to take a bite out of their market share, but they have often assumed the identities of the very farmers they are trying to elbow aside.
In just the last decade or so, Smithfield Foods acquired Farmland, Tyson took over Hillshire Farm, and Hormel bought out Farmer John. Now, the products from some of the largest and most industrialized food producers in the world are packaged with logos featuring red Dutch gambrel barns, white farmhouses, and smiling farm families, decked out in denim shirts and overalls, holding grandchildren and hand tools for hoeing rows. Shoppers see those pictures and assume that’s how their food was raised. “But how does the little guy get the message out?” Rick asked. He was slumped over the bed of the pickup, now wearing a brown pullover stitched with the logo for R Diamond, the name of his cattle operation. Consumers make demands, he said, and it’s easy for major corporations to pass along those new requirements to their growers. “No sweat off their back,” Rick said. But for farmers maintaining narrow margins and getting squeezed from both ends, it was hard not to feel trapped.
Later, as we all sat around Rick’s kitchen devouring a pizza that Heidi had picked up at the Casey’s General in Aurora, Rick downplayed his worry. “I don’t care if I come off as the dumbest SOB,” he said. “If there’s truth in advertising, I don’t see how it could be any other way.” He said he was more concerned that life on an American farm isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and that he appreciated it when people like Willie Nelson and Neil Young ride in and give concerts, but he had grown leery of how they romanticize small farms. “I’m afraid what you’re going to find,” he said, “is that the idyllic family farm that Willie and Neil have been trying to save does not exist. And by the way: the good old days weren’t so good either. Financial woes and danger and tired all the time.”
“I want you to tell the truth,” Meghan interjected. “But you have to understand: our family and neighbors are also our coworkers. They’re going to be there when someone dies or when we have a big fire or when the cows get out.” She had seen how protesting against the Keystone XL pipeline and the spotlight of the media had turned one neighbor against them already, and she was worried about what further attention might do. “If there was something that our neighbors didn’t like and they wouldn’t let us farm their ground or run our cattle on their fields, I would just be heartbroken.”
Meghan hesitated, then seemed to wave it all off. She put her plate and fork in the sink, the darkness outside the window now deep and complete. But then she had one more thing to add. She wheeled and braced herself on the edge of the sink, as if she’d suddenly been overcome by great exhaustion. “It’s just that we’ve sacrificed so much,” she said. “We work hard just trying to keep our family together.”
PART TWO
THE HOMEPLACE
November 2014–February 2015
To understand, first remember: Nebraska is a place. It sits square as an anvil in the center of our maps, and yet, somehow, everyone manages to forget it exists. Maybe that’s because Nebraska is also a land of ghosts, of small towns dwindling to the point where, in another generation, they might simply cease to exist. In Benedict, the nearest town to Centennial Hill Farm, the school stands empty and abandoned; the only restaurant has been for sale for years. There’s a grain elevator, two well drillers, a feedlot outside of town, but, otherwise, there’s no work, nothing to do, no reason to be there instead of anywhere else. West of town, approaching the hard edge between York and Hamilton counties, the roads lose their Civil War names—Lincoln Avenue and Shiloh Street, Sherman and Atlanta, becoming just a grid of letters and numbers, unfolding in perfect one-mile squares. At the crossroads of 22 and G, five miles west of Benedict, is Centennial Hill, the piece of ground held by—and holding—Meghan’s family for generations.
It doesn’t look any different than the miles of flatlands surrounding it in all directions, but it is the center of the family’s universe, the homeplace. Every farm family has one. Though nearly all operations have expanded in the decades since the Farm Crisis, acquiring land and growing piecemeal, these are just scattered acreages, constellated satellites orbiting the homeplace’s center of gravity. In most cases, the new land has no emotional importance and doesn’t even get a new name. So when families like the Hammonds talk about the patches they own and farm, it is a kind of geography of the gone: the Metz place, Roger’s dry-land patch, Karen’s quarter. It’s all the people and families that disappeared off the land, leaving only their names, like tombstones, as a record of the generations spent there.
These places are critical now to the survival of the Hammonds’ operation, but the homeplace, Centennial Hill, is different. To really understand why, to count the generations of hardship and hard work that have gone into holding on to the farm, Meghan said I should go see her aunt Jenni. She is the acknowledged keeper of Harrington ancestral lore. The basement of her Victorian farmhouse, cattycorner from the homeplace, holds the family archive—the scrapbooks filled with faded clippings fixed in place with yellowed and brittle tape, the box of old photographs, their corners all curled and chipping. When I arrived, it was cold outside, no snow on the ground but the winter sun pale and sharp. Light poured through the north-facing window into the dining room, where Jenni had laid everything out on the table.
It was uncanny how much Jenni looked like Heidi, like all of her sisters. They were all in their fifties but had an intangible youthfulness about them. They all had kind and lively eyes, a soft but frank tone of voice, and smiles that could be slow but genuine when they emerged. Jenni welcomed me inside and got me a cup of coffee. Once I had warmed up a bit, she brought me back to the dining room, where she sorted through stacks of sepia and silver prints until she found the one she wanted: a picture of the first proper house on the farm. Her father had had the place torn down when Jenni was still little, but it seemed to float in her memory, blurred and overexposed like the ghostly image in the photograph. It was irretrievable but also forever present. She studied the image, holding it up to the light in her strong, tan hand.
“Our great-great-grandfather was Thomas Barber,” she said. “He came from Suffolk, England, with his mother and father when he was about age four.” The family settled in Wisconsin in 1852 and farmed there, but it was less than a decade before their adopted country was divided by war. When he was still not quite sixteen years old, Thomas signed up for the Federal Army and was assigned to the 13th Independent Battery, Wisconsin Light Artillery. He had already crossed the ocean and traversed half his new country by rail; now he was sent the length of the Mississippi River to Louisiana, where he spent eighteen months as a member of the fortified defenses in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. After the Confederate surrender, Thomas returned briefly to Wisconsin but felt restless and eager to strike out for the territories. He was not yet eighteen when he went west.
According to Jenni, Thomas was hoping to take advantage of the Homestead Act. The first Homestead Act had been signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in May 1862, just as the trenchant and gory battles of the Shenandoah Valley Campaign in Virginia were signaling that the Civil War would be more than a brief insurrection. As the bloodshed increased, President Lincoln began looking not only for tactics to hasten the war toward conclusion but also ways to create a lasting postwar peace, both free from slavery and from the conflict the “peculiar institution” had created since the nation’s founding. Lincoln’s ingenious solution, the Homestead Act, granted small farming plots in the western territories to any citizen who had never taken up arms against the Federal government and was willing to occupy the land and “prove it up” with a year-round habitable home and a crop that co
uld be shown to be sustainable for five years.
Bringing families onto the barren prairie might seem far removed from the battles raging in the Eastern Theater, but the dispute over western settlement—whether the Kansas and Nebraska territories along with other points west would be divided and designated as new slave states or free soil—had been the central political question of the 1840s and 1850s. The admission of Kansas as a free state in January 1861, just before Lincoln’s inauguration, was the match that finally lit the fuse of civil war. It had realized the abolitionist dream of the martyred John Brown and, coupled with the fear that the new president was a silent opponent of slavery, it had propelled Southern states toward Secession.
But Lincoln, already a shrewd and hard-nosed statesman, recognized that the roiling of the country toward constitutional crisis had also created a political opportunity. With the South removed from congressional debates, Free Soil members of the House and Senate had the numbers to configure western settlement as they had always envisioned, as a stronghold of small-plot farms worked by free white labor instead of large plantations held by small numbers of wealthy landowners who thrived on the backs of slaves. Though he had only recently emerged as the unlikely leader of the Republican Party, Lincoln readily understood that such a realignment of the nation’s social structure was both the mandate of his election and the best chance his newly formed party had for broadening and shoring up its base of power. The rapid settlement of the American West into small, self-sustaining plots would ensure that, when the horrific battles of the war had ended, the country would be firmly established as a free nation of independent farmers.