drought

 It is impossible any longer to ignore the fact that our American west is drying and burning up.  The drought has reached our farm in western Minnesota, where it is said we are several inches short on rainfall.  This is an underestimate, I am sure, that fails to take into consideration the extreme heat and low humidity this spring and summer that have succeeded in sucking out what little moisture exists in the soil.  

The crops do not grow.  The weeds do, of course.  It is difficult to impossible to operate a diversified organic row crop farm this year.  We teeter on the edge of disaster.

Anti trust

 Interesting isn't it, how for most of a century anti trust law goes unenforced, basically tearing apart diversified agriculture in the farm country and dispossessing God only knows how many farm families until there are only four huge conglomerates, mostly not American, supplying all our meats and no diversified farms left, but the Supreme Court and the entire regulatory presence of the government can finally rouse themselves to action when it is a college kid wanting to play a kid's game who thinks he ought to get more than room, board and tuition free for doing so.

Hard snow

I stood for long periods listening, alert to what I might perceive under the snow, trying in vain to hear the tiny lives there getting about their business and resolving to learn more about their world in whatever time I have left on the land.  And I listened too, between the clang of the first Payloader scoop of frozen sugar beets to hit the bottom of the semi trailer three miles to the northwest and the sound of another Payloader revving as it hit the silage pile at the ten thousand cow dairy factory just two miles north and it seemed to me that we have missed the point and have gone on a long tangent and that if we are ever to belong here, to become native to this place, we have to begin to get quiet enough to think we hear the wind in the eight foot prairie grass, the sound our grandfathers heard in this place.

The solutions to our lives in this place will only come in the quiet and humility of a man, any man, or woman willing to stand and try to hear the sounds of life among the clatter of industry.  They cannot be theorized, or imposed from above, or bought and paid for.

1988

 Anyone of a certain age is beginning to see the similarities between this year and the drought year of 1988.