Weathering the Storm

Out here on the prairie, your nearest neighbor can be a mile away. But in times of trouble, they're right by your side

-  PHIL HAMBURGER

My family has been farming here on the prairie since 1959, when my dad bought some land. Things have changed since then, and they haven’t changed. We farm 10,000 acres now, and I harvest the wheat, soy and corn in an air-conditioned combine with a padded seat and computer controls. But we still work just as many hours, sometimes 100 a week in peak season. And family farming is still a knife-edge business. It costs one and a half million dollars to put a crop in the ground. If something goes wrong, we’re sunk.

We love it, though. All that lies between us and the sunrise is our front yard and wheat rolling to the horizon. Our closest neighbor is more than a mile away—church, another 24 on a dirt road. It’s a spacious, self-reliant life. That’s good too. If you’ve got to rely on someone, it may as well be yourself. My parents; my brother, Elmer, and his family; and my wife and kids and I live alongside the farmyard in three separate houses. Elmer runs the plant er in spring. I drive the pesticide sprayer. Dad does repairs in his workshop. Barb, my wife, keeps the books. Watching her at our computer, surrounded by account logs and subsidy reports, I wonder how our family keeps the whole enterprise together— all on our own.

One thing we do know, though, is weather. Growing up on the prairie, you learn the language of clouds— rain clouds, hail clouds and the black, bruised clouds that mean trouble. Usually, if bad weather’s brewing, we have time to prepare.