The Best Laid Schemes of Mice and Men

Our corn waiting to be planted... May 27, 2011

Any farmer seeing this picture will know that it's not looking good for us to get that corn seed planted in 2011. Time's up folks. The window is closed on planting corn in Big Stone County. Or I should say the window is closed on getting a corn crop planted and harvested. Same difference.

Time for plan B.

But first I'll reflect on plan A. A plan that was based on, well..., a form of greed. The decision process was not unlike the familiar "Make hay while the sun shines." Instead it was "Grow corn while the commodity prices are in the stratosphere." Corn at $7.50 a bushel was just simply too promising to say "no" to. Yeah, sure, we were going with the morally superior Organic Corn, but corn all the same. And we weren't going to market it as organic, just deliver it to the elevator with all the other RoundUp Ready GMO Corn. The decision was simply a "count your chickens (or corn as the case may be) before they hatch" calculation that we could make a chunk of farm payment off those 40 acres of corn-- even a fair to middlin' crop.

The sky got progressively darker this morning until is started to rain at 10:30am. When I stepped to the door as the rain started I yelled "NOooooo!!!" It is the second time this year that we were close, really close, to getting into the field when the rain started back up.


To add insult to injury, 80% of the State's corn crop is already in the field. You may not know me personally, but I don't take kindly to being in the trailing 20% of anything (except maybe in youth and those days of being the youngest person in the room are fading fast as well). I don't mind being on the fringe, but let's make it the leading fringe please. So it's depressing as hell, frankly, to be looking at this from my farm house window.

View of our silos from my 2nd floor window

Which leads me, finally, to Plan B. Oh yeah. There is no Plan B. Plan A is bought, paid for, and sitting on pallets on our machine shed floor.

One of my rare talents is to recite Robert Burns poems in my made up 1785 Scottish accent, with strong overtones of Minnesotan and a hint of Iron Range. But since the old Scottish is indecipherable, I'll leave you with the standard English version of the great Mr. Burns' last two stanzas of his immortal "To a Mouse, on Turning Her up in Her Nest with a Plough." Oh and ask me sometime to recite this for you... although you may have to buy me a couple beer first. And frankly, that's sounding pretty good about now. As they say "it's 5pm somewhere."

But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!


Still you are blest, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,
I guess and fear!

Five Feet High and Risin'

About a quarter of our farm is underwater. You can hear the water rushing through the large drainage pipe into the slough from about 1/4 mile away. It's not safe to walk from our house to the pond right now. The water is fast, ice cold, and treacherous.

An increasing portion of our farm is subjected to flooding due to the upstream drainage tiles that have been put in over the years. There's more and more incentive to install field drainage tile as the price of ag land and commodities rises. Big Stone County had not had such an aggressive tiling mindset, but it is increasing here. This is a complex issue with folks on all side and high emotions. We've waded into those hot waters. We're trying to find some peace on the extremes of the continuum-- from throwing in the towel and turning a recurring flooded area into a permanent wetland to installing more drainage for another part of our farm to seeing what regulatory interventions exist to stop the increase of tiling the points to our farm. I.e. we are both solving and exacerbating the problem.

That said, we're lucky. Our house and barn were built 100 years ago up on high spots on the farm. The thaw has been happening very slowly with the days only flirting with above freezing temperatures. It's only March 26th, so there's time for the water to go down before it is time to plant. Hope springs eternal- right?

One of my fictional heroes is Neighbor Rosicky from Willa Cather's short stories and novel. Anton Rosicky asked his wife to prepare a nice picnic on a particularly hot day during a drought. The young family enjoyed the unexpected break from farm work. As they relaxed, his wife asked if he wasn't worried about the effect of the heat on the crops. Nope, he said, no sense in worrying since the crops had all died in that day's heat.

We are no way as dependent on the land as the Rosicky's were in Cather's novel. But in keeping with being mindful of the moment to moment joys in Full Catastrophe Living (re: Jon Kabit-Zin) we enjoyed a wonderful dinner on Friday night. It was Mike's birthday and all three kids were at play practice with the Prairie Fire theater troupe. It was, by our calculations, the first time in 11+ years that Mike and I had dinner alone in our house. We took the best steak left from beef in the freezer, baked up our potatoes and the last of the squash, and sipped a fine Minnesota wine with some fresh sliced pear and smoked salmon. The sun sparkled on the water around the farm.


Our best hopes go to those facing flooding in the days and weeks to come.