by Ted Genoways
At the front of the bleachers on either side of the entry ramp, the auctioneer’s assistants collected the bids. “Four thousand, four thousand, do I hear four?” One of the assistants would yip, and the auctioneer would jump up to the next level. “Four. Who’ll give me forty-two five?” Again, a yip—and so on. For the most part, despite the flurry of raised hands and yelps in response, the buyers were conservative, cutting off bidding well below the sale barn average. At one point, the auctioneer, who was working on commission, scolded the buyers for seeming reluctant to go over $5,000. “Y’all are making some great buys on great bulls today. Every other bull sale in the land has been averaging six to seven thousand. Here’s a chance to buy some really well-bred bulls at a price you can live with.”
Despite the prodding, Rick hung back. If he could get either of the bulls he was waiting on, he said, it would be a good day at the barn. When the first finally came up, Rick shifted in his seat, waiting. The auctioneer’s assistant seemed impressed by this bull, too. “I tell you,” he said over the loudspeaker. “A yearling weight of plus-one-hundred-and-four, high ribeyes, big scrotal.” The bidding started at $3,500, and Rick was quickly in. He was outbid, then came up to $4,000. “Forty-five, forty-five,” the auctioneer called. “Who’ll give me half?” He got a bid for $4,250 and Rick countered at $4,500. The auctioneer called and called for another bid, before finally closing the sale. “Mark him the buy of the day,” the auctioneer said, as his assistant recorded Rick’s bid number. With such a low price on that bull, he had enough left in his budget to make a play for the second and soon came away the high bidder on that one, too.
When Rick’s second winning bid had been recorded, he made his way to the sale window. He could hardly conceal his grin as he gave his sale tickets to the girl at the counter, her hair up in a bun like a rodeo queen. Rick filled out the check and then went outside to his truck. He backed his trailer up to the loading chute, where two cowhands loaded one bull, prodding it to the front and locking the gate, before bringing in the second. They moved with speed and confidence, leaning their shoulders into the interior gates before throwing the bolts on the locks. With both bulls on the trailer, Rick was quickly in the driver’s seat, clearing out of the lot for the next customer to come in.
As we bounced back down Highway 92 toward the grassy acreage north of his house, Rick was chipper and talkative.
“ ‘Mark him the buy of the day,’ ” Rick said, putting on the auctioneer’s tone. He shook his head and laughed. “I don’t know about that, but I’m sure pleased.”
“The auctioneer’s probably never seen a bad bull,” I said.
“No,” Rick allowed, “but that one’s a pretty good-looking son of a gun.”
I told Rick that, years ago when I was in Texas making extra money in school by working on a small cattle ranch, I was helping load a bull into a trailer when it kicked the gate back into the face of the ranch hand. The steel bar split his nose from bridge to septum, like a butterflied filet, sending him on a long drive to the emergency room to get stitched back together and leaving me with a lifelong respect and twinge of fear whenever handling bulls. Rick winced at the very idea of it.
“Were they running longhorns?” he asked.
“No, Herefords mostly.” I told him that almost all of the longhorns were gone by the time I was down there. You’d see them here and there, but rarely.
“Some people up here were raising them for a while,” he said. “They have great, really low-birth-weight calves. So you’d have one longhorn bull to breed with any cows that you were worried about making it through birthing. But they sell like crap at the sale barn, unless you bring in some fifteen-year-old bull with big horns and a nice brindle coloration, something for the Old West nuts who just like the look of them.”
“Not so long ago, though, that’s what everybody wanted,” Rick said thoughtfully, “and here we’re back to water. Before everything was irrigated, you wanted a bull that could survive on range with very little water, very little feed.”
In the panhandle region of West Texas, where the Texas Longhorn was first created by cross-breeding various European-stock longhorns, the giant rack had been an asset on long cattle drives when red wolves and coyotes would come in to prey on the herds. But when farmers started pumping out of the aquifer and irrigating, they turned to raising short-fiber cotton—and with such remarkable success that they began converting rangeland to cotton fields and herding cattle into feedlots. Built adjacent to cottonseed oil mills, Texas feed yards would fatten cattle on meal and hull byproduct; the hardy but lanky Texas Longhorn was steadily replaced by brawnier shorthorn breeds like the Hereford and Angus, as well as new specialty breeds like the Beefmaster. But the whole system was dependent on pumping groundwater from the Ogallala Aquifer system.
“And down there,” Rick said, “it’s a perched aquifer. They’re mining fossil water.” Cut off from the main aquifer system south of the Canadian River, the reservoir recharges so slowly that it would take thousands of years to refill. So as Texas Panhandle farmers cashed in on beef prices and then, in 2005, started chasing big-time commodity profits after passage of the Renewable Fuel Standard ushered in the era of $8 corn, they were pumping out the aquifer faster and faster, draining the great basin of water that had sustained Texas cattle for two centuries—and before long, their wells were starting to run dry.
By the onset of the drought in 2011, the groundwater shortage had grown so severe that the State of Texas commissioned an in-depth study to quantify the problem. The results, published in the Texas Water Report in May 2015, could hardly have been more dire. “Since the 1940s,” the study reported, when ranchers first began trying to grow cotton on the arid rangeland, “substantial pumping from the Ogallala has drawn the aquifer down more than 300 feet in some areas.” But the real trouble has been much more recent. One hundred feet of the 300-foot decline of the aquifer occurred in the decade between 2001 and 2011. This period coincided with the run-up in commodity prices that tempted farmers to start growing thirsty feed crops. With rising temperatures and what the report described as “the near-total absence of rain” during the drought, water use for irrigation had jumped another 43 percent.
“It’s really a cautionary story,” Rick said. “And California’s in the same fix now, too, pumping their water until there’s none left. Nebraska has been smart that way. The NRDs are a model for the country and something to be really proud of. We pump a ton of water from the aquifer, but there’s monitor wells and the NRDs tightly watch the levels. If the level drops below the control, where it was when they started monitoring in 1972, they shut everything down. In the summertime, we listen to the radio out of York, and you’ll hear days where they say, ‘It’s a red day; you’re on control.’ And you don’t get more than twelve hours of pumping for three days out of that week.”
“How do they make sure you’re not irrigating?” I asked.
“They can electronically shut the well down,” Rick said, “and you’ll hear the old guys complaining when that happens, but it’s a good thing. It protects the resource—to make sure it’s there when the next generation takes over.”
THE SUN was still low on the horizon as Kyle fishtailed down the gravel road. It was early, no one else out yet, and he was just making the rounds, checking on pivots to be sure they were all on and turning. A light rain had fallen overnight, maybe a quarter inch—just enough to leave the morning muggy and windless. But York County was still well short of the four-inch average for the month of July, and it was now into the midsummer run, right before and right after corn pollination, when even the most cautious and judicious farmers turn on their pivots and let them run day and night. The last thing you want during that crucial period is to lose irrigation even for a day.
So far, everything had been fine, but then, just as Kyle was in the homestretch, he spotted a problem. Four miles south of Centennial Hill, in a quarter section planted to corn, a spot the Hammonds call the Metz Place, the
irrigation system had stopped moving overnight. Kyle sighed and threw on the brakes. He climbed out and killed the power at the control panel. “The end of July, when the pivots have been running for a solid month, problems start showing up,” he said. He grabbed a few tools and his voltmeter from his truck and waded down the rows, making his way toward the tower, its light no longer blinking, at the center of the field.
Fifty years ago, when farmers had to wait until mid-June to plant hand-selected corn seeds, the health of a corn plant was judged by the old saying “Knee-high by the Fourth of July.” Today, with hearty hybrids making it possible to plant in early May and selective breeding pushing plants ever taller, corn plants are head-high by Independence Day—and towering taller by the end of the month. Kyle pushed down a dense row, brushing the flat leaves aside as he went, until he finally got to the pivot platform. He climbed partway up the center ladder until he had a vantage above the tassels of corn. “If you look straight down the spans,” Kyle said, lining up the arched sections from one tower to the next, “you can see if there’s something wrong.” About halfway down the line of the irrigation system, one tower was tipped at a slight angle. “You go to the fulcrum of that angle,” he said, “and that should be the point of the problem.”
Once Kyle got to the tower, though, he couldn’t find anything wrong. He checked the contactor and the electrical box. Everything looked right, so he squatted low, studying the wheel mechanism until he saw: one of the wheels seemed to have stuck in the mud or simply seized up from the humidity and the constant use. Either way, when the threaded gear coming off the drive shaft was unable to turn the wheel, the shaft snapped under the pressure. The pivot needed a replacement gearbox, but Kyle wasn’t about to call in a Valley repairman. “A new gearbox is probably twelve hundred bucks,” he said, “and a service call is eighty-some bucks an hour, and that includes drive time coming from Grand Island.” He decided to swap it out himself. “I got a used gearbox in the shed, saved from a pivot that went down in a tornado a few years ago,” he said. He was sure he could put on the salvaged gearbox and get the pivot back up and running without losing a precious day of irrigation.
So Kyle went back to the farm and got Meghan. Together, they gathered a handyman jack, a breaker bar, and some giant blocks to lay as a foundation under the jack. “I don’t know how long the pivot stuck there,” Kyle said, “but with it watering that one spot, plus the rain overnight, the jack will just go right down into the mud.” The biggest problem was the sheer heft of the gearbox itself. It must have weighed 150 pounds, and there was no good way to get it from the truck at the edge of the field, halfway across to the central tower. So he parked on the west side, simply hoisted the hulking gearbox onto his shoulders, and started into the field, cutting across the rows.
Kyle kicked the stalks down and stomped them under his bootsole, making a path for Meghan to follow with the jack and blocks, and then he stepped across the furrow and kicked down the next stalk. Losing those plants wasn’t ideal, Meghan explained, but better to lose a few ears now than have the whole field go without irrigation for even a day at the peak of the summer heat. “Anything to shorten the trip,” she said. Three times as he went, Kyle had to stop and catch his breath, but he didn’t quit until he was back at the broken drive shaft. Meghan laid out the blocks, and Kyle jacked up the tower.
By now, the sun was high overhead, beating straight down on the shadeless track made by the pivot’s massive tires. The temperature gauge in the truck had been reading over 90 degrees. And, deep in the densely planted field, there wasn’t so much as a whiff of wind. “I’m about ready to pass out,” Meghan said. “I can’t take it.” Kyle worked quickly, removing the seized wheel and then unbolting the broken drive shaft and gearbox. But then, when he hoisted the salvaged replacement into place, he had an awful realization. Gearboxes for Valley pivots are mounted in opposite directions, depending on which side of the tower the box is on. The new box matched the old—but as a mirror opposite.
“I grabbed the wrong box,” Kyle said.
“What?” Meghan demanded. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Later, when they were back home and cooled off, Meghan was quick to take her share of the blame. “I could have double-checked with him and made sure he had the right one,” she said. “And trying to put an old gear box on the pivot, there was already a risk that it wouldn’t work. So I knew going out there that we might have to do it more than once.”
“It’s definitely not what I wanted to happen,” Kyle said, “but at that point, with the whole thing tore down, you know what you’ve got to do next.”
He put the backward gearbox on his shoulders again and started over the path he had made across the rows of corn. They drove back to the shed and got the reverse version, the correct version, of the gearbox—and Meghan grabbed a length of wire. “The old one is too heavy to carry out,” she said. “It ain’t worth it.” They could just wire the broken box to the tower and let it spin around the field from now to harvest time. “Tie it to the damn pivot,” she said. “It can hang on there until the corn’s out.” So they returned to the field and Kyle shouldered the right gearbox out to the tower. He replaced everything, and they wired the broken box to a rung on the ladder that leads up to the electrical box. With everything now in working order, Kyle turned the control panel on again, and the pivot resumed its rotating, the dead gearbox swinging underneath. It had taken all day, until late in the afternoon, to get it fixed, but the pivot was back up and running.
IN SEPTEMBER, Rick kept his promise. When it was time to hitch up the trailer and head west to Curtis, to load up the breeding bulls and bring them back before the fall harvest arrived again, he offered me a spot in the passenger seat. With the empty trailer bouncing and shimmying behind us, Rick didn’t want to take the Interstate. Instead, we dropped down to Highway 34 and slowly made our way up the two-lane road. Around Holdrege, the terrain began to soften into sloping hills, and by the time we reached Eustis and Farnam, the loess hills had started to crest and break into blowouts. The deeper we drove into Rick’s native terrain, the more he seemed to relax, drawn away for the moment from the worries of prices, the daily fears of soybean and corn futures still sagging ahead of another harvest, but there was one concern he just couldn’t push out of his mind. After months of thought—and one final check of the books—he had decided that he had to let Dave, the farm’s hired hand, go.
“I thought about waiting until after we got through harvest,” Rick said, but Dave had been with him through fourteen harvests. This would be number fifteen. “After that many years with me, I owe it to him to let him make the decision. I think he’ll see the year through. Any farmer wants to see the crops that he planted harvested. I hope he does stay through harvest.”
We came over a rise, and suddenly the cropland dropped away, giving way to grass, knee-high to hip-tall and yellowed with the coming of fall. Rick looked down the highway, empty ahead of us for as far as the eye could see. “Here’s the deal,” he said, turning suddenly frank. “When that neighbor took a half section away from us, I knew right then, and that’s been a year and four months ago, but I sat on it for a year trying to see what would happen, trying to find some way to keep Dave on. But over time, three things have become apparent. One, we don’t have enough work. Without the hogs, big distractions like the new house or building a barn, we can finally concentrate, and we can handle the work. Two, with the collapse in commodity prices, we can’t afford it. That’s just reality. The prices are way down, and I don’t know if they’re ever coming back. The third thing is that we have Kyle now—he’s like having four hired men—and Jesse is coming back for at least half the year now.”
Rick had adopted a tone of finality, but his body language suggested resignation more than resolve. He didn’t like having to let Dave go, but he knew it was the right thing for his family and their business. “It’s just time,” Rick said finally. “It’s time for it to get passed down to the next generati
on. I’ve been mostly going through the motions for a long time. It’s time for me to step aside, for Dave to move on, and let Kyle and Meghan and Jesse take over.”
“How will you divide everything?” I asked. Remembering the years of tension among Heidi and her sisters, I couldn’t help wondering if Rick was worried that there were similar fights ahead among his own children. He shook his head ruefully.
“The way that the Harringtons did things was an undivided share. I say that is a recipe for strife. It’s not going to happen that way with us. Each of the kids will have their own parcels, and they’ll make their own decisions on their own ground, and their own marketing.” He even thought they should buy their own equipment, rather than try to share the costs on major purchases, like tractors or sprayers. “You see so many of those deals where the families end up in fights. They hate each other. I’m not going to have that.” Instead, he was resolved that each kid would have an equal share to farm or sell as they saw fit, and it wouldn’t be gradual; it would be fast.
“Meghan and I went to this workshop on succession,” Rick said. “They said, ‘Do it in chunks, because there’s these beginning farmer interest rates.’ My original plan was to let them take over rented ground. But the tax adviser said, ‘Look, if you give them your ground, then there’s a huge state income tax benefit.’ That would be the logical thing to do. So we’ll get them through this year, and then I’ll probably give them some of our owned ground. We’ll work it out, and maybe we could even do the cattle. Sell it all in one chunk.” He and Heidi would keep their dream house in Hordville, and he would hold onto this land in Curtis, where his sisters and brothers-in-law lived. But it was time for him to make way for the kids.