Pungent Brainpower

What rotisserie chicken taught me about agriculture

Barn animals smell like barn animals right up until you put them over an open flame. Then they smell like something else entirely.

Ten years ago, I was pushing snow in the Porter Creek parking lot near midnight, broke and burning, watching the warm amber light through the windows and hating everybody inside it.

I’d lost my job on the farm I was supposed to take over, and learned on the same day that I had a third kid coming.

I needed money. Found it working nights, running a skidsteer with a snow pusher for a construction outfit that moved snow, apparently just for the haha's. I kept that parking lot spotless so the half-lit wine crowd could drive home to their white-collar hangovers in peace.

There were rotisserie chickens spinning in the window and the smell drifted out to the snowpile and I hated those too.

Last week, I was closer to the chickens, inside Porter Creek on my seventh oatmeal stout before the sun went down. Old timer I used to know always said you can’t fly on one wing, so I’d only planned to stay for two.

I was there because of a Champions Alliance and Sound Ag meeting at the Clubhouse Hotel next door, which I’d attended with the low-grade hostility I bring to anything that smells like industry self-congratulation.

The corner of the bar had filled up with a strange cross-section—metrosexual office guys, DNR officers in camo hoodies, farmers and ag businessmen talking drones and combine wiring and politics.

Al from Champion was telling anybody who’d listen about a farmer named Mike who’d been having combine fires in sunflowers out in the beach sands along old Lake Agassiz, the kind of ground that’s always trying to bankrupt you. Instead of calling a dealership, Mike just learned the wiring. Memorized the schematics.

Then he rebuilt entire machines. Fabricated his own sixty-foot strip till rig out of an old air seeder frame and built his own triple-bin fertilizer cart because why not.

Al said Mike should probably be in the engineering department down in Waterloo and not farming sand, and I thought, no, actually, he’s exactly where he needs to be.

Some of the most pungent brainpower hides in farmyards and old quonsets, and you only find it if you shut up long enough to listen.

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Jake Lund leaned over somewhere in the middle of all this and said, "Man, I just love this industry. The way everybody talks openly and just says it. Much different from the insurance arena." He'd wandered into an ag meeting and come out the other side looking mildly stunned, which is funny because I'd walked into the same meeting, annoyed, and come home and written about my own website for twenty minutes before I caught myself.

True Grit Agronomy went live that same week. Felt like the right way to launch it.

Sitting there, I thought about the parking lot. About the chicken smell from the snowpile. About what the last decade actually looked like and how agriculture was the thread that pulled me back up through it.

The connections I'd never have dreamed about from out there in the cold.

The room full of people who'd pull up a chair for a stranger and tell you exactly what they knew without performing any of it.

I love this industry. I know how that sounds. Mike’s out there memorizing wiring schematics for the hell of it, and the DNR guy can’t help himself when he hears the word drone, and somehow I ended up inside instead of outside.

And the chicken smells the same either way.

Jake is right. That’s all.