There’s a group of retired ag guys who get together every morning for breakfast. I join them occasionally. It’s a good group with good conversation. Once a month, they meet in the afternoon and spouses are invited. When I got the notification about the April afternoon get-together, I replied to the text saying we wouldn’t be able to join them, because I was going to fix fence. My reply drew several responses. One said the only thing worse than fixing fence was picking rocks.
We were three days into spring. It was March 23, and the lady who greeted me outside of church said she had seen a robin and a meadowlark that morning. I understood why those sightings were so meaningful to her and worth mentioning. I had seen robins and a meadowlark in preceding days, and I, too, felt the urge to tell someone. It’s because of what their annual appearance represents – the hope of spring.
In the summer of 1965, I hauled feed barley to the Occident Elevator in Mandan in Dad’s 1950 three-quarter-ton Chevy pickup truck. The price of feed barley had finally climbed above $1 a bushel, a price too good to pass up. The year before must have been a good enough harvest to have enough barley for the hogs and milk cows, with enough leftover for seed, so that feed barley ended up as a cash crop.
Picture this. It’s the 1930s. A middle-aged farmer, wearing bib overalls and a plaid shirt, is sitting in a chair listening intently to the cathedral-style radio on the table next to him. Through a nearby window, you can see ominous clouds approaching. That painting was commissioned by the National Association of Farm Broadcasting (NAFB) to salute farm radio. It depicts the immediacy of radio in an era when rural America was isolated.
It was early in the morning on Aug. 20, 1982. I had been sleeping in a chair in the intensive care unit of the local hospital at the bedside of our daughter, Becky. The afternoon before, she and her sister, Amy, had been riding horse and had gotten separated. When Amy came upon Becky, she found her lying on the ground unconscious. Amy said it appeared Becky’s horse had slipped on muddy ground and gone down.
On a flight from Texas to North Dakota recently, I looked out the airplane window and remembered an observation I had made many years ago. People who develop farm policy should do less flying and more driving. When you’re 33,000 feet from the ground, I reasoned, it’s easy to think about agriculture as a large, diversified industry. You focus on policies to support the overall health of that industry, national farm income and keeping agriculture globally competitive.
“In this season of giving, it’s appropriate to recognize all those who have given generously to help the ranchers in McKenzie County.” That’s how I began a commentary written 25 years ago on Dec. 8, 1999. On Nov. 1 of that year, range fires fanned by a 75-mile-per-hour wind burned over 80,000 acres of land in that county. Hay, many miles of fence and some buildings were also destroyed.
On a beautiful evening in late August, we sat alongside the Bohemian Hall south of Mandan and listened as Chuck Suchy sang about the hall and this “place” where he grew up and still lives. As he sang, a semi-truck barreled past on Highway 6, after hauling a load of grain to market. I thought of all the changes the hall has seen.
I was visiting with a friend recently about the fact fall grazing isn’t what it used to be. Back when farms were more diversified and much of the cropland was devoted to wheat and barley, farmers would turn their cattle onto those fields after harvest. There was usually some pigeon grass or other weeds for the cattle to eat, along with the grass that grew on the headlands and field margins. Today, those wheat fields are clean, thanks to better herbicides, and the headlands and field margins often aren’t as wide as they once were.
The farm where I grew up and still live was surveyed in 1883. The surveyor’s report for the home section refers to the rolling topography and the Little Heart River that bisects the farm. The report concludes, “soils first rate.” I always smile when I read that. The surveyor failed to mention the alkali flats that border the river, the gumbo and all those rocks that had to be removed before one could farm those first-rate soils.
