If you don't want to hear farmers talk, don't stop to talk to farmers.
Farmers talk about the weather, about the price of corn and pigs, cattle and beans, and about the government sticking its nose into their business. And, as my dad might say, too close a nose is bound to hurt you, whether it's the government's or some neighbor's snooping about how much you got, or had, or will get, and from where, and why.
Farmers like to talk about farming as gambling. Wisconsin farmer Gene Henke told me twelve years ago that "you can go to Las Vegas for a week and gamble, but on the farm you have to gamble 365 days out of the year. You're gambling with the weather and all the way along, with everything else. It's probably the biggest gamble there is. It's a good life, as long as you can at least keep making a living."
Some days it rains, and some days it doesn't--either way, you've got work to do. "We hope for a good year," Henke had added; "I guess that's the farmer's life--you work all year, and in one day it could be gone. That's the way it goes."
Like that summer night when my folks went to see the movie Gone with the Wind: A fifteen-minute hailstorm chopped up the alfalfa so bad you couldn't tell which third of the field had already been baled, which third had been cut to dry on the ground, and which third had still been standing. The soybeans looked as if they'd already been harvested, only stubble left. Yeah, Gone with the Wind. In a violent instant, the year's crops were gone. The next week, we plowed the soybeans under. That fall my dad picked corn in high gear all one morning and still couldn't fill a wagon half full of ears.
So it's no wonder Henke's wife, Lois, had to add, "One thing is for sure--you really, really have to like it to keep farming." Farming is never pretty, just plain hard work and no applause.
"What we've got here," Henke told me, "one man can't handle alone--there's no two ways about it. My wife's outside all the time helping me, and our son is seventeen and graduates this year, so that helps…if we can keep him interested. We hope he stays on the farm with us--he's real interested now. But you see these kids in town getting big wages, and it always looks greener on the other side of the fence." The Henkes spoke to me about that year's outlook for farming in March 1977.
Gene Henke might have been speaking, back then, for Missouri farmer Tom Bauer today: Their circumstances and, indeed, their spirits are similar enough, with both men trying to wrest a living from the fertile earth and its unpredictable sky. "Pirating on the high seas of the sun," as Richard Rhodes would say, "you never knew what your haul would be." Tom Bauer and his wife, Sally (not their real names), are the subject of Rhodes' Farm: a book that should be read for some real understanding of the farm outlook at our present crossroads. It has been a decade already since we heard the cruel saying, "A farmer is someone who launders government money for a chemical company."
I'm sure Tom Bauer never meant to represent himself as typical of all American farmers. Reading Farm, you realize that this is one year in the life of one
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