Editorial

Letter from Larksong      

Smoke and steam are rolling from sugar camps around the community and fresh maple syrup is on the menu; on pancakes, French toast, and fried corn mush. If you are a part of the gathering and boiling down of the sap to syrup, it simply tastes better than any you can buy. We had a three-day run and then the jet stream looped south again, opening our back door to frigid Canadian air that then promptly shut down our small enterprise. But good weather is forecast for later in the week—nighttime 20s and daytimes sunny and high 30s. Weather that will heave the farmer’s alfalfa roots out of the ground is ideal for the maple syrup man. According to most local folks our winter has been a long and cold one. Where the ground was snow-covered, it never froze to a great depth. Underneath driveways and other places where the snow was removed, water pipes were frozen. In the hard winter of 1976-77 all our water pipes froze, except from the cistern to the cattle watering trough, our most crucial water line. That stayed open because there was a slow leak at its lower end in the piggery. All our house water was supplied by the hand pump on our hand-dug well in the yard. Of course, our children were small and didn’t demand a daily tub bath and we survived the winter in fine shape. Eventually the weather warmed, spring arrived on schedule, and when the pipes thawed out in late March there was cause for celebration. I hope that is an indicator for the economy. What a difference a year makes. Last spring we worried about high grain and fuel costs and there were predictions of milk prices hitting record highs by autumn. Somewhere along the way things went awry, New York banks toppled like dominos, the economy changed directions, and so did the grand economic projections.Once the housing bubble ruptured and sank like a lead balloon, it brought practically every commodity down with its demise. Crude oil is a third of its high point, grain prices are down, ethanol plants would be doomed were it not for hefty government subsidies, milk and cattle prices are down, and nobody seems to know where it will end. Nassim Taleb, author of the The Black Swan, a book on economics, writes that asking an economist to predict the future is like asking the Christmas turkey what’s for dinner on Christmas: based on its entire lifetime of experience, the turkey expects to be fed on Christmas, not to be eaten. My parents married January 1929 and started farming that spring. As Dad would say, “Just as things started rolling…the wrong direction.” In October the stock market crashed. While Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, said, “The fundamentals of the economy are sound,” Variety, the show business paper was closer to the truth as it reported, “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG.” Although Henry Ford had declared in the late 1920s that, “Machinery is the new Messiah,” as a new car or new Fordson tractor rolled off his assembly line every ten seconds, the agricultural depression deepened. Ford’s tractors did to the Great Plains what “no hailstorm, no blizzard, no tornado, no drought, no epic siege of frost, no prairie fire, nothing in the natural history of the southern plains had ever done. They removed the native prairie grass so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land—thirty-three million acres stripped bare in the southern plains.” The stage was set for the Dust Bowl and the Dirty Thirties when millions of tons of topsoil blew away. Ships at sea, three hundred miles off the Atlantic coast, were covered with brown dirt from the dust storms. Photographs showing farm foreclosure sales in Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma are not nice. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath tells part of the story of getting out and moving west. Timothy Egan’s more recent book, The Worst Hard Time, tells the story of those who stayed. In spite of the collapse, my parents lived well in those tough times because they ate well on home-grown fruits, vegetables, grains, eggs, milk, and meat. The only thing that was scarce, Dad said, was money. All their years, formed by the decade of the ’30s, they nurtured and practiced the typical Midwestern caution and frugality and passed the belief on to us that the very best food one can possess is to grow it on your own land.                                                  -DK