In last week’s FTF, I was crying for rain. No more than an hour after publishing last week’s letter, the desert in Bloomer Township hooked a couple-three tenths to keep the drought stress at bay.
More widespread rain clipped much of the Northern Valley late Tuesday into Wednesday, delivering a much-needed inch or two to areas in desperate need.
Though the crop-saving rain arrived in a nick of time, I won’t declare the drought busted; I’m sure many areas got less than needed, and some were missed entirely. We will see if this week’s moisture put a dent in the updated drought monitor when it’s released later on Thursday.
Rebuilding Community
Most everybody who grew up farming has a few of those childhood memories that stick out above the rest. Some we enjoy thinking about and wouldn’t mind revisiting if we could; others we’d like to remain buried in the back forty.
There are many things I’d never want to go back and do over again.
Two that pop out are ditching with a seven-yard scraper or trying to kill four-foot-tall kochia plants with something they called a Rope Wick (IYKYK). I could quickly think of a few more, but lately, I’ve been riding the positive train, and it seems to be working well, so I’d much instead focus on the good childhood memories I wouldn’t mind repeating.
To clarify, I do not wish for the past to return. I did that for many years and spun my wheels. There’s no more giant waste of time than wanting to travel back and do something different, except actively wishing you could.
But fondly reminiscing on the past, now that’s fair game in my book. It’s ok to hold onto your memories as long as you’re not trying to replace the present moment with them. I can tell you from experience it leads down some dark and depressing roads. It’s not something I recommend.
Chew the Fat
Of all those memories, I best remember the bullshitting. In my family, stopping to chew the fat with somebody is mandatory, no matter where you are or where you’re going. My dad and his brother were blessed (or cursed, depending on your vantage point) with the gift of gab, and they utilize every bit of that trait.
Years ago, when I was driving a truck over the road, and we’d all run together, all the visiting drove me up the wall. It seemed like we never got anywhere cause all they wanted to do was stop for a snack and tell stories for nineteen hours.
Afterward, we would have to work our asses off, often driving half the night, to make up the time we lost sitting in a truck stop diner, cracking jokes, drinking coffees, and watching Big Al (rest in peace, young man) slurp jelly squares out of those Smucker’s packets they leave in those plastic racks at the diner tables.
I never understood why we had to do that. Now that I’m a little older and more nostalgic, I see what that’s all about.
Except for busy times during planting or harvest season, Dad and I almost always made at least one stop to talk to somebody. That could have been at one of Stephen’s three local elevators or the grocery store. Sometimes we’d pop onto somebody else’s farm to see what was up. We often stopped on a street or gravel road where we’d sometimes spend an hour visiting with whoever we ran into.
For a young kid like myself, these stops were awful. It felt like we sat there forever, talking about the same old shit he just talked about with the last guy we saw.
I’d tug at Dad’s leg or write my name in the dust on his truck, asking at least a hundred times if we could wrap this up and get on with our day. Probably I drove him up the same wall that these stops led me up. Funny how you don’t realize that as a kid.
That same stuff I hated, the weather and crop talk and stupid jokes, are the things I now long for as an adult.
Progress Isn’t Perfect
But times have changed.
Back then, the average farm size wasn’t squat compared to today's. Seeing a farm with two eight-row harvesters in the nineties was a big deal. I remember when Dad, Uncle, and I spun over to Drayton to check out one of the giant farms of the day, pulled into a sugar beet field with three eight-row harvesters. Three! It was like seeing Mecca or the Big Bud factory for the first time.
Nowadays, it seems you aren’t shit if you don’t have three twelve-rows and two-dozen trucks. Monstrous equipment is becoming the norm while the small guys quietly slide off the map. What once took us multiple days is now accomplished in a few hours.
Our productivity has gone through the roof, yet we seem to have less and less time to keep the community together. Morning coffee and cookies at the elevator are a thing of the past. I don’t remember the last time I had to drive around two vehicles stopped in the middle of the street because they weren’t done talking.
It seems kind of ass-backward to me. Since we can plant or harvest a thousand acres a minute, one would think we have more time to visit with one another.
Counterintuitively, it’s the other way around. We rush to get the fieldwork done to speed out of town and head to the lake, making our already ghost towns even ghostier.
Where’s the Party?
My old man often talks about how our hometown used to be, and I do the same. I never thought I’d say the words “back in my day” until I caught myself saying precisely that a few weeks ago.
Back in Dad’s day, you could come to our small town, and on any night of the week, there would be thirty or forty cars driving around. There wasn’t much to do, but they could always find something.
Twenty years later, when I was in my teen years and searching for shenanigans, it was down to five or ten cars on any night.
By the time I graduated in 2002, we were lucky to get five or ten on a weekend.
Every day is as quiet as a library, the crowd thinner than my hair. If you tally up the cars driving through our town now, you might reach ten total from Sunday through Sunday.
Our towns are dying, and with it, our sense of community.
I get that there’s only so much we can do with a population that shrinks a little bit more each year, both from the old crowd dying off and people moving away to find a life with more opportunity.
Today, we don’t have the population. It’s nobody’s fault that automation and urbanization have driven people out of our midwestern small towns. It’s just the way of the world now.
With the internet and platforms like Substack or Twitter, we can resurrect that community some of us desperately miss.
Introverts like myself who struggle to start a face-to-face conversation, let alone keep one going, aren’t going to be the ones to rebuild our community at the coffee shop. It’s just not the way we’re wired.
With these platforms, we can get together, shoot the shit, and maybe even help one another. That’s the goal here with Farming Full Time, to reestablish the presence of a community that once dominated our small midwestern towns.
We might not save the world, but at least we can still chew the fat.
What I’m Reading
When I picked up Kristen Hannah’s The Four Winds at my biweekly Barnes and Noble stop (yes, one still exists in Fargo), I had no idea she was like the Danielle Steele of historical fiction. She has written over twenty of these monsters, an impressive yet intimidating feat for a rookie writer like myself.
Hannah’s writing carries readers through the 1930s Dust Bowl in the Texas Panhandle before fleeing with her children for California.
She hasn’t entirely shut me up about this year’s moisture shortage, but Kristen Hannah puts things in perspective. The moderate drought we find ourselves in now is baby stuff compared to huddling under a table wearing gas masks while a mushroom cloud of topsoil barrels through the plains.
Not only does Hannah do a great job of entertaining readers, but she does a fine job of reminding us that as bad as things seem right now, they could always be worse.
Farm Story of The Week - The Three Wheeler
After we buried our legendary grandfather earlier this month, I’ve been thinking a lot about the old three-wheeler my cousin Brett and I used to ride as kids.
First of all, the Honda 185 had seen better days. The wheeler that once belonged to our grandpa went on a few wild rides before finding its way to us. I know he rolled at least one pickup with the little red death trap (Seriously, I cannot believe these things were once legal) in the box.
By the time we got to hot-rodding this Honda around, it didn’t always run right, and the seat and fender assembly would slide off and tumble in the weeds whenever we cornered too quickly, but that didn’t stop us from logging at least a million miles.
Brett and I drove that sucker so much in the summer of 1993 that we melted down the dipstick, making it look like an Arby’s curly fry. I can still picture Uncle David laughing at that the first time he checked the oil.
David managed the Stephen Elevator, equipped with a spacious area that we transformed into a racetrack. Local farmers who drove grain trucks had to navigate through the slalom-like course we created, avoiding us as we rode around on the ATV. Despite the questionable safety of our activities, the townspeople nor the authorities ever said a word.
It's still hard to believe we made it through without any injuries. It's even more surprising that the old three-wheelers were considered safe enough to be allowed on the road and remained legal for as long as they did.
Nonetheless, those wobbly bastards made for some good times and gave us stories nobody can ever take away from us. I doubt David would want the stress of watching his kid and nephew ride the little red death trap again, but I’d go back there if I could, if only for a hot minute.