Optimism and worry grow on family’s farm
In his affecting book “This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm,” Ted Genoways follows Rick Hammond, who for 40 years had been raising soybeans, seed corn and cattle on his wife Heidi’s fifth-generation homestead. In 1874, her ancestor acquired the first 160 acres of prime land in York County, Neb., under the Homestead Act, naming the “homeplace” Centennial Hill Farm.
The story focuses on Rick, who in his 60s is “tan, weatherworn, but still plenty fit,” the Hammonds' daughter Meghan and her fiancé Kyle Dalloway. The plan is to have the young couple eventually take over the operation of the farm.
In his compelling narrative, journalist Genoways gives the reader a kitchen-table view of the vagaries, complexities and frustrations of modern farming, beginning with the 2014 harvest, when the Hammonds were “wrestling with how to run the farm in the future.”
“Worry was heavy in the air,” he writes. Several factors would affect the family in the next year, including soybean and corn surpluses, a steep fall in prices and the bad news that the Hammond’s biggest seed customer, Dupont Pioneer, would be cutting back on acreage and reducing payments to farmers.
Then there’s the weather. Rick was in a hurry to harvest his soybeans before the prices went down more, but heavy rains and mud were keeping them out of the fields. When the harvest finally got started, he decided to set aside his beans in an old grain bin and wait it out for better prices, acknowledging the risk that they might go down even more. Adding to their worries, a neighbor who had rented hundreds of acres to the family for years sent a letter stating he was pulling out of the deal because of Rick’s and Meghan’s opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline that was slated to go over their land. They feared it would “slash their crop production” and posed what they believed was “an existential threat” to the Ogallala Aquifer, the source of freshwater they depend on to irrigate crops and water their cattle. The neighbor’s “move was likely to cost the Hammonds between $150,000 and $200,000 of gross income in the following year” writes Genoways.
Given the circumstances, the Hammonds would have to cut expenses and hold off expansion plans to pay down machinery and irrigation debt. Even so, there’s no doubt this tough, tenacious and resilient family would do whatever they could to preserve the “homeplace,” where “generations of hardship and hard work (had) gone into holding on to the farm.”
Insightful and empathetic, Genoways interweaves the family’s personal stories, with the factors impacting their decision making: fluctuating markets; trade deals, the rise of agribusiness and mega farms that affect profit margins; the development and widespread use of genetically modified crops, herbicides and pesticides weighed against potential long-term environmental damage; and the stress heavy irrigation places on water sources, such as the aquifer that supplies groundwater for Nebraska and eight other states from South Dakota to Texas.
“The stakes get higher, “when farmers and ranchers are forced to go for broke each year, planting fields of whatever crops and grazing herds of whatever breeds are selling highest on the futures market,” writes Genoways. Still, the Hammonds carry with a mix of optimism and worry.
“My idea was to try and build an operation that I could hand down to my children with as much land as what we were benefited when Heidi’s share was handed down to her,” Rick told Genoways.
“So I did everything I could to get ahead and to turn that success into more and more contiguous land. If you can swing it, you buy it. When you’re a farmer that land means everything.”