OT (I guess, for the narrow minded) RE: My husband and I farm ....
I also have more prosperous neighbors. My neighbor across the road (who farmed my land for me, TAD Paradise)came in 1933 as a penniless tenant to live on the farm I now own. The farm itself had been bought and sold so many times it thought it was a share of WCOM. He and his sons cleared some land, cut down trees and sawyered them to produce the planks he needed to build the house and barns. They dug the cistern, and septic field, and built damns for three ponds on the place. They raised gardens, chickens, cattle, pigs. They ate what they made and killed (the place is full of quail, deer, and ducks in season) and sold some corn and beans for cash. He did well enough out of WWII to buy some patches of land scattered around the county so that he was a small but substantial farmer. He sent his sons and grandsons to war, and not all of them came back. He owned 2 Ford tractors, a seeder, a combine, two trucks, a shotgun, a Pflueger Supreme, 500 catfish,and 14 dogs, including two German shorthair bitches (I owned the matching dog -- Graf). He built the second house with his own hands (cash grain farming in Illinois has huge gaps when there is nothing to do except build houses, repair the equipment,hunt and fish, fix the buildings, clean up the sheet metal from grain bins blown around by the tornados (it plays heck with cultivators), garden and take care of the livestock -- obviously a relaxed life style). He is in a nursing home now, paying his own bills with medicare, and his 71 year old son is farming both places.
It was always strange to me that Shorty had no use for my next neighbor whom he thought was a scrounger and had not made the best of his opportunities. Shorty thought I was dopey for letting those oak trees go for $2 when I could have held out for $3 or maybe $3.50. (I think of him often and kindly when I'm trading options). Was I patronizing my next neighbor at $2 or was I just giving up the spread? Fortunately, Shorty was prosperous enough not to need firewood or hickory nuts (I still think that was a good trade on my side, and you might agree if you'd ever had to shell a hickory nut), so I didn't have to choose between them.
Shorty spent my money on seedcorn, fertilizer, chemicals, road building, and drainage ditches for 20 years without so much as a bag of my fertilizer wandering into his hopper. My seed beans and his shared my grain bin as good neighbors (they were closely related), with no disputes and somehow ended up always in their proper field (we kept seed!). His redbone hound ("Red")thought he still owned my farm, and my Graf gave up 20 pounds of muscle and bone and 10 pounds of mean and still licked him. He got a big steak that night. It sort of started things between me and Shorty on the right terms. He was a hard man, but honest and fair and I miss him outworking me. He never complained about Franklin D. Roosevelt to me. (It wouldn't done him any good if he had. I thought FDR was Lord God J***. He and the President had worked out a modus vivendi that apparently satisfied Shorty's need for government programs and Mr. Roosevelt's need for Illinois votes.
I guess that it is necessary in order that grain be produced in the lowest cost places (which some big dome professor from MIT assures me is Ukraine) that men like Shorty and women like Hettie be driven from the land, or killed, or something in the name of global equilibrium and the Heckscher-Ohlin-Stolper-Samuelson factor price equalization theorem, but I personally (and I speak only for me and Eddie, Graf being sadly long deceased -- and I'm still in tears about it) am willing to pay a few more cents (or dollars or tens of dollars) per bushel in prices (not subsidies) to keep Americans (or aliens) farming our American land, feeding us townies, and building strong rural communities where children can grow up and learn without tommy-guns (that's what we used in gang fights when I was a kid), and old people can relax on their front stoop (lanai we call it here) without becoming victims of drive-by shootings (but keep your head down on opening day of deer season.)
Hugh |
