“I Didn't Know How Long I'd Survive”

With his leg caught in the sharp, whirling teeth of a gigantic corn conveyor and no one around to hear his cries for help, this farmer grabbed his pocketknife and did the unthinkable

- Carson Vaughan

The morning of Good Friday started like any other for Kurt Kaser, a third-generation farmer in northeast Nebraska, USA. The 63-year-old, taciturn and as lean as a fence post, woke around 5:30 a.m., his wife, Lori Kaser, by his side. He lit a cigarette, pulled on his muck boots, stuck an old pocketknife in a front pocket and headed outside to start his day.

With 3,000 hogs and roughly 1,500 acres of corn and soybeans, not to mention a small trucking business, Kurt’s to-do list never really shrank so much as recycled itself, though he understood all too well the dangers of rushing on the job. In sixth grade, he’d jumped down from his father’s tractor only to land with one foot inside the corn picker. Though he didn’t break any bones, the teeth mauled his foot and ankle so badly he spent the next three months in and out of a hospital bed, the surgeons finally grafting skin from the top of his leg to the bottom before it could fully repair.

“Everybody gets in a hurry and we just don’t think,” he says. “I got lucky on that one.”