Neighbors help when farmer dies before harvest
CHICAGO—Sue Hanson was still in bed when she heard the familiar sound of the John Deeres maneuvering onto the Hemp family farm in Ashkum, a small community about 80 miles southwest of Chicago. Bright headlights guided each of the tractors and combines into 8-foot-high stalks of corn ready for harvest.
“They’re early,” Hanson remembers thinking, knowing she’d have to finish fixing the three-bean bake, cheesy potatoes, pulled pork and Italian beef before noon for the farmers who were trying to reap the corn before the rain came. With six combines running at once, the guys would no doubt be done and hungry in a couple of hours.
In a way, Hanson was grateful for the distraction. Better to be mixing casseroles, firing up the extra slow cooker and setting up rectangular tables than to focus on what was really happening.
Steve Hemp, the love of her life, a third-generation family farmer and the neighbor you could always count on for a shot of Southern Comfort and a practical joke, went into cardiac arrest in September on his way to his ailing mother’s bedside. Within the same week, both he and his mother died, just as this year’s crop was ready to harvest. Hemp, who was 64, was the last in a line of family members who chose to keep the fields running.
Everyone in town knew that Hemp’s death signaled the end of a legacy.
Times are tough for farmers in Illinois. In the past four years, farm income across the state has dropped from a record high of $123.7 billion in 2013 to a projected $63.4 billion for 2017, according to the Illinois Farm Bureau. With nothing to drive demand for corn and soybeans, commodity prices are down, leaving most farmers to expect to break even at best.
Mother Nature didn’t help this year, either. Hemp had to plant his corn twice after heavy spring rains washed out a portion of the first planting.
Acknowledging how delays in planting and harvesting further cut into farmers’ profits, Gov. Bruce Rauner last week issued an emergency declaration allowing farmers to exceed weight limits when transporting their harvest. The measure was aimed at helping farmers to get their products to grain elevators more quickly, so they can return and ready the farms for spring planting.
Yet Hemp’s friends, who know these stresses well, did not mention the hardships when they took precious time away from their fields to attend his and his mother’s funerals. They came in their Sunday best, hugged Hanson, Hemp’s sisters and his two adult daughters, and told them not to worry one bit about harvesting his crop. Many things have changed about farm life in Illinois, but when a family from the community needs help, farmers still pull together.
And so the tractors, combines and semis rolled up on a sunny day in October to pull out Hemp’s soybeans. And on the first Saturday of November, another group of farmers from across Iroquois County was back to harvest his corn, using time each farmer probably didn’t have to spare from his own farm to gather the Hemp family’s final crop. “You don’t always really know who your friends and neighbors really are until something happens, because they come forward,” Hanson said. “But I was also thinking, ‘I know this is it. This is the last time.’”
Fifty years ago, it seemed every farm in Iroquois County was owned and operated by a family living on the property. In Ashkum, a town of 800, those farm families were considered to be living in the “country,” while other residents settled in “town” on a cluster of 10 streets just east of the railroad tracks. After supper, residents in town took walks up and down their streets and visited with neighbors on porches for hours, Hanson, 62, recalled.
This was the era Steve Hemp grew up in. The older brother of three sisters, he was well-known in the community for playing on the local high school football team, showing cattle for 4-H and proudly wearing his navy blue jacket for the Future Farmers of America.
Harvest time was always a time of joy for kids on the farm. Hemp, his father and uncle worked long days gathering beans and corn, then emptied it all into wagons parked near the farmhouse. Hemp’s youngest sister, Nancy Schunke, who was 18 years his junior, remembers helping her mother pack sandwiches into Tupperware containers for the guys, who would take lunch breaks while she and her cousins jumped and played in wagons of beans. It was their once-a-year sandbox.
Anyone who knew Hemp was not surprised when he took over the family farm. Like his father, Hemp knew the profits from the farm were not enough to support a family, so he took day jobs, including working at a factory, working as a mechanic and managing a nearby gas terminal. But his true passion was tending to the 320 acres.
Through the years, Hemp embraced the modern advances that made farming easier: He had machines to spray fields instead of paying school kids to “walk the beans” and pull out weeds like in the old days. On hot days, he cranked up the air conditioning in the enclosed cab of his tractor—something that didn’t exist decades ago. He checked corn and soybean stock prices daily on the internet, and followed the weather with an app on his phone.
But other changes over time were not as easy on the farming tradition. With the high cost of equipment and operation, margins became so thin that farmers needed more acreage to produce a crop that would provide for a family. Yet it was hard to acquire more acres because the cost of land was continually rising. And as longtime family farmers began to rent out their land it became commonplace to rent to the highest bidder, not your longtime next-door neighbor who would like to grow his operation.
In turn, over the past several generations in Illinois, farmlands are no longer mostly owner-operated. Of the 75,087 farms in Illinois, only 58.7 percent are operated by the people who own them and who don’t rent land from anyone else, according to statistics from the 2012 Census of Agriculture by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Let’s take my dad, for instance. He had 700 acres, and he had five sons. All five wanted to come home and work, but there was not enough acres to support six families,” said Richard Guebert, president of the Illinois Farm Bureau who operates a corn, wheat and soybean farm in Randolph County. “It’s gotten to be very competitive.”
The evolution changed the feel of tiny rural communities like Ashkum, which still has a population of 800 and no stoplights. But Hanson said she doesn’t know everyone in town the way she once did.
Still, Hemp held on to the basic values of family farming and small-town life, she said.
There is no one in the Hemp family left to operate the farm. Steve Hemp had always known his daughters had interests outside of farming. He still danced on the table when Colleen, a financial analyst, married a computer technician, and had proud tears in his eyes when he walked Angela down the aisle during her wedding to a political science professor.
Neither Hemp nor his siblings blamed their kids for not wanting to take on the farm life, Schunke said.
“It’s just how kids grew up now versus then,” Schunke said. “There’s so much technology and things for them to do constantly, their interests go in other directions.”
So as the autumn winds came in, drying Hemp’s crops into the perfect state of moisture for harvesting, Hemp’s friends arrived to take care of the fields one last time before the farm, like so many others around, gets turned over to renters next year.
Hemp’s sisters, daughters and their families were all there when the combines and tractors came, trailed by semi-trucks and wagons. The farmers didn’t need anyone on the ground to coordinate or tell them who should handle what. They each just pulled their heavy machinery onto the land and took out row after row, grabbing stalks of corn and leaving behind a field of broken, yellowed husks and emptied cobs.
Before it was all done, Hanson walked to the crop’s edge and stood patiently until one of the friends in a combine noticed her.
Once each year, Hanson used to love sitting next to Hemp in the combine during the harvest, a favorite tradition for farming wives. The noise was loud, but she could feel him close. It was always amazing to her the way, in an instant, the fields went from standing tall to becoming a memory of another year past.
She asked Hemp’s friend if he wouldn’t mind giving her a ride, offering him fair warning: “I’m going to probably cry when I get in there.”
The old farming friend didn’t mind at all. So she climbed the ladder, pulled herself up into the cab and they drove on.