They Laughed When She Said Mix the Seed — Then the Pest Hit and Her Field Was the Only One Standing
The pest populations on the diverse farms did not disappear.
They cycled.
They had natural checks.
They never built the kind of sustained pressure that could devastate a single crop across an entire county in a single season.
The diverse farms also showed a 19% improvement in soil aggregate stability over the 6-year period, which translated directly into better water retention during drought and better drainage during wet years.
The numbers were not ambiguous.
They were not preliminary.
They were six years of data from 12 farms.
And they said the same thing every year.
What they said was, “Any farm that grows only one thing is a farm that needs only one disaster to fail.
” Clareire had also studied a second piece of research that Dr.
Voss assigned in the fourth week of the semester a paper from the University of Minnesota Extension Service examining the economic performance of diversified small grain and legume rotations in the upper Midwest between 1975 and 1982.
The paper compared per acre net revenue on farms using three crop and four crop rotations against farms using corn soybean only.
In five of the seven years studied, the diversified farms outperformed the corn soybean farms on a per acre net basis, not because their gross yields were higher, but because their input costs were lower and their risk exposure was distributed.
In the two years the diversified farms underperformed, they underperformed by an average of $11 per acre.
In the 5 years they outperformed, they outperformed by an average of $38 per acre.
Over 7 years, the math was not close.
Claire Gustoson came home from Ames with all of this in a notebook and she sat down with her father at the kitchen table in the March of 1987 and she told him she wanted to try something different.
Let me tell you about that kitchen because it matters.
It was a practical room, not a decorative one.
The table was oak, bought in 1958 with the kind of scratches and stains that mean a table has been used for everything a table can be used for.
There was a window above the sink that looked out over the south field, and in March the field was still brown and flat.
The corn stalks from the previous fall chopped and lying in rows, waiting for the disc.
Carl sat at the head of the table with his coffee and his seed catalog, and Clare sat across from him with her notebook open, and she told him about Dr.
Voss and the Illinois field trials and the Minnesota Revenue Study, and she told him she wanted to plant a portion of the farm in oats and winter wheat and hairy veetch as a cover and nitrogen fixer.
and she wanted to try a small plot of sunflowers on the sandy ground near the back fence line where the corn never did well anyway.
Carl Gustiffson listened.
He was a man who had learned to listen before he spoke, which is rarer than it sounds.
He looked at the notebook.
He looked at the numbers.
He turned the pages slowly, the way a man reads something he wants to understand rather than something he wants to dismiss.
When he was done, he set the notebook on the table and picked up his coffee and looked out the window at the South Field for a long time.
“I need to think about it,” he said.
That was a Tuesday.
By Thursday, Clare’s mother, Ingred, had said her piece.
Ingred Gustiffson had not gone to college, but she had kept the farm’s books for 22 years, and she understood revenue and risk in the way that people understand things they have lived with rather than studied.
She told Carl quietly in the kitchen after dinner that the girl had done the math and the math was sound and that the back 40 had never broken even on corn anyway and that it would cost them nothing to try.
Carl said he knew.
Ingrid said she knew he knew.
The conversation ended there, but something in it had shifted.
Carl told Clare on Saturday morning that she could plant 80 acres her way.
The back 40, the sandy northeast corner where the corn always ran thin and the wet strip along the drainage ditch that flooded every third spring and had cost them two corn crops in the last decade.
80 acres out of 480.
Not a revolution, a test.
Clareire said thank you and went to the barn and opened her notebook.
Let me tell you about Jean Crowley because you need to understand the man before you can understand the laugh.
Jean Crowley was 58 years old in 1987 and had been the primary seed and chemical dealer serving the northeast quarter of Tama County for 19 years.
He was not a dishonest man.
He was a man who had built something real, a business, a reputation, a network of relationships that ran through every farm in his territory.
And he had built it by being right about corn.
He knew corn.
He knew the hybrids, the planting populations, the fungicide schedules, the nitrogen programs.
He had helped a lot of farmers in Tama County make money.
And he knew it, and they knew it.
And that knowledge had given him a kind of authority that he wore the way some men wear good boots constantly, without thinking about it, as though it had always been part of him.
Gene held court at the co-op on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, the way certain men in small communities hold court, not by announcing it, but by being there consistently enough that people come to expect it.
He would be at the counter with his coffee by 7 and by 7:30 there would be three or four other men there and by 8 there might be six or seven and the conversation would move through seed prices and weather and equipment and the general state of things and Jean’s opinions would settle into the conversation the way rocks settle into a stream bed heavy immovable shapen the current around them.
Claire Gustiffson made the mistake, if it was a mistake, of stopping at the co-op on a Thursday morning in early April.
She needed a soil amendment, a specific phosphate formulation that Dr.
Voss had recommended for the Vet establishment, and the co-op was the only place in the county that carried it.
She was 22 years old and wearing her Iowa State jacket, which was green with gold lettering, and she was carrying her notebook, which she carried everywhere that spring, the way a surveyor carries a level, as a tool, not an affectation.
Jean Crowley saw her come in.
He knew Carl Gustoson’s daughter.
He had known her since she was 12.
He asked her what she was after and she told him and she told him why.
And she told him about the rotation plan because she was 22 and had not yet learned the particular kind of discretion that comes from being burned by a conversation you didn’t need to have.
The silence lasted about 2 seconds.
Then Jean Crowley started laughing.
It was not a mean laugh.
That was the thing about it that Clare would remember for years afterward.
It was not contemptuous or cruel.
It was the laugh of a man who finds something genuinely surprising.
The way you laugh when a child says something that doesn’t understand how the world works.
It was patient and almost affectionate.
And it was somehow worse than contempt would have been because contempt at least would have acknowledged that she was worth taking seriously.
Sunflowers, Jean said, in a corn county.
He said it the way you’d say swimming in a desert county, as though the category mismatch alone was a joke.
The other men at the counter smiled.
One of them, a farmer named Hal Thornton, who ran 600 acres 3 mi to the south, shook his head slowly.
“Your daddy know about this?” Hal asked.
And the question was not hostile, but it was not neutral either.
It was the question of a man who assumes the relevant authority is elsewhere.
Clare told them yes, her father knew, and her father had agreed, and she had the data from the Illinois trials in the Minnesota study if anyone wanted to look at it.
She said this calmly because she had expected something like this, though she had not expected it to feel quite the way it felt.
She put the notebook on the counter and opened it to the revenue comparison table.
Jean looked at the table.
He looked at it the way a man looks at a document in a language he doesn’t speak.
Not uninterested, but not engaged either, as though the symbols are real, but the meaning is not accessible to him.
Those are Illinois numbers, he said.
This is Iowa.
The soil types are comparable, Clare said.
The pest pressure dynamics are the same.
The market’s different, Jean said.
You can’t move sunflowers out of this county.
There’s no elevator for them.
You’d be hauling to Marshall Town at minimum.
I’ve already called the elevator in Marshall Town.
Claire said they’re buying at 11 cents a pound, and my projected yield on that sandy ground is 1,400 lb per acre.
That’s $154 per acre gross against an input cost of about $60.
My corn on that same ground last year netted $31 an acre after inputs.
Jean looked at her for a moment.
His smile was still there, but it had gotten smaller.
“That’s your projection,” he said.
“First year, no experience with the crop.
” “That’s correct,” Clare said.
“That’s why we’re starting with 80 acres.
” Jean Crowley sold her the phosphate amendment.
He did not say anything else about the sunflowers or the veetch or the rotation plan.
But as Clare was walking out the door, she heard Hal Thornon say something to the men at the counter, something she didn’t catch completely, but the word she caught was aims.
And the tone was the tone of a man explaining why something doesn’t apply here.
Clare drove home on the county road with the windows down and the notebook on the passenger seat and she did not say anything to anyone about what had happened at the co-op.
She went to the barn and she started planning her planting schedule.
Let me tell you about the spring of 1987 because it was not a gentle one.
April came in cold and wet the way Iowa April sometimes do with three inches of rain in the first two weeks and ground temperatures that stayed below 50° until the 23rd.
Carl Gusten watched his planting window compress and made the decision, as he had made it before, to wait.
He was right to wait.
The corn he planted in the first week of May went in on ground that was ready and it emerged clean and even.
The kind of stand that makes a farmer feel briefly that everything is under control.
Clare planted her 80 acres in two phases.
The winter wheat and Harry Veetch went in first on the wet strip along the drainage ditch broadcast seated in late April when the ground was still soft.
The veetch was a nitrogen fixer.
Dr.
Voss had recommended it specifically for ground that had been in continuous corn where the soil biology had been simplified by years of the same inputs.
The vet would put 80 to 120 lbs of nitrogen per acre back into the soil by the time it was turned under, which meant the following year’s corn on that ground would need significantly less synthetic nitrogen.
The math on that alone was compelling.
Clare had done it three times to make sure.
The sunflowers went in the second week of May on the sandy northeast corner in rows 30 in apart with a population of 18,000 seeds per acre.
She used an open pollinated variety that Dr.
Voss had recommended one with a 90-day maturity that would come out of the ground before the first frost in a normal year.
She used no insecticide at planting.
She used a reduced rate herbicide on a split application schedule.
Her total planting cost on those 40 acres was $41 per acre compared to $67 per acre for her father’s corn ground.
She wrote all of this in the notebook.
The neighbors noticed.
It is impossible in a county of 340 farms on flat ground with long sight lines to do something different without people noticing.
By the third week of May, when the sunflowers were 2 in tall and clearly not corn, three different farmers had slowed their trucks on the county road to look.
One of them stopped and got out and walked to the fence line and stood there for a while before driving on.
Clare watched this from the barn and felt something she would later describe as a combination of satisfaction and nervousness, the feeling of having committed to something you cannot take back.
At the co-op that Thursday, Jean Crowley told the men at the counter that Carl Gustoson’s daughter had planted sunflowers on the northeast corner.
Howal Thornton said he’d seen them.
Someone else said it was a shame to waste good ground.
Jean said it wasn’t good ground, which was true, and that it still seemed like an odd choice, which was also, in his view, true.
Nobody at the counter said anything in favor of it.
Nobody at the counter had read the Minnesota study.
Let me tell you about the summer of 1987 because the summer is where the notebook started to prove itself.
The corn county had a good summer.
Rainfall was adequate.
Temperatures were warm but not brutal.
And by July, the corn in Tama County was as tall and clean as anyone had seen in several years.
Carl Gustiffson’s corn was no exception.
His stands were even, his canopy closed early, his ear set looked promising.
He walked his fields in the evenings the way he always had, checking for disease, checking for pests, feeling the stalks for stock rot.
Everything looked right.
Clare walked her fields, too.
The sunflowers were extraordinary.
They had taken to the sandy ground in a way that corn never had.
Their deep tap roots, some of them going down four and 5 ft, according to the research she had read, pulling moisture from layers of the soil profile that corn roots never reached.
In a dry week in late June, when the corn in the adjacent field showed the first signs of moisture stress, the sunflowers showed none.
They stood straight and dark green, their heads not yet formed, growing at a pace that surprised even Clare, who had read what to expect.
The veetch on the drainage strip had done what it was supposed to do.
It had fixed nitrogen.
It had suppressed weeds.
It had held the soil on a strip of ground that had eroded visibly in two of the last five wet springs.
Clare had taken soil samples in April and would take them again in the fall, and the comparison would be in the notebook.
The pest pressure that summer was, by the standards of the previous several years, moderate.
The western corn root worm population in Tama County had been building for a decade.
The predictable consequence of continuous corn and corn soybean rotation in a county where the rootworm had learned through simple evolutionary pressure to lay its eggs in soybean fields so its larve could hatch into the corn that would inevitably follow.
The root worm was not a crisis in 1987.
It was a cost.
It was the cost of $14 per acre in soil insecticide applied at planting across most of the corn ground in the county.
It was the cost of yield drag on fields where the application had been uneven or the population had been higher than expected.
It was a cost that everyone paid and nobody questioned because it was the cost of being a corn county.
Claire’s 40 acres of sunflowers paid no part of that cost.
Western corn root worm does not feed on sunflowers.
It cannot complete its life cycle on sunflowers.
The 40 acres of sunflowers in the northeast corner of the Gustiffson farm were from the rootworm’s perspective a dead end and the rootworm population in that corner of the farm reflected it.
Clare had not expected this to be visible in a single season.
It was visible in a single season.
She wrote it in the notebook.
The sunflowers came off in the third week of September.
Clare had arranged to borrow a rowcrop head from a farmer in Marshall County who had grown sunflowers for 3 years, and she ran the combine herself, starting at 6:00 in the morning when the dew was still on the heads and finishing at 4 in the afternoon when the shadows were long across the field.
The yield was 1,510 lb per acre, 110 lb above her projection.
She hauled three loads to the elevator in Marshalltown at 11.
2 cents per pound and came home with a net of $97 per acre after all inputs and hauling costs.
Her father’s corn on comparable ground, the light sandy acres he had in the south field had netted $44 per acre that year.
She put both numbers in the notebook and sat at the kitchen table and showed them to her father.
Carl Gustoson looked at the numbers for a long time.
He picked up his coffee.
He sat it down.
He looked at the numbers again.
The veetch data won’t be complete until next spring, Clare said.
I know, Carl said.
But the sunflower numbers are real.
I can see that, Carl said.
He did not say she was right.
He did not say he had been wrong.
He picked up the notebook and looked at the soil sample comparison from the drainage strip and asked a question about the nitrogen fixation rate, a technical question, a question that meant he was thinking about it seriously.
Clare answered it.
They talked for an hour.
When Ingred came in from the garden, she found them at the table with the notebook between them and the seed catalog pushed to one side, and she poured herself a coffee and sat down and listened without saying anything, because she had already said what she had to say.
Let me tell you about the winter of 1987 and the spring of 1988, because the story doesn’t end with one good harvest.
Jean Crowley heard about the sunflower yield the way news travels in a small county through the elevator in Marshall Town which mentioned to someone who mentioned it at the co-op where it arrived one Thursday morning in November and was received with a particular kind of silence not the silence of men who have nothing to say the silence of men recalibrating.
Jean said the yield was good for a first year and that the market for sunflowers was thin and that one good year didn’t make a rotation.
He said this with less certainty than he had said things at the co-op counter before and the men around him were quiet in a way they hadn’t been quiet before.
And Gene noticed the difference and didn’t like it.
But there was nothing to be done about it.
The numbers were the numbers.
Carl Gustiffson came to the co-op that November and said nothing about the sunflowers.
He bought his seed corn for the following year, the same hybrid he had been buying for 3 years, and he talked about the weather and the harvest and the equipment.
But when Jean asked him whether Clare was planning to expand the sunflower acres, Carl said he thought she might be.
And the way he said it, not dismissive, not apologetic, just factual, was noticed by the men at the counter, and the noticing was noted.
Clare spent the winter doing what she had spent the previous winter doing, reading.
Doctor Voss had sent her three papers on crop rotation economics in the upper Midwest and a preliminary report from a Nebraska field trial on integrated pest management in a diversified systems.
She read them at the kitchen table and wrote in the notebook and planned the following year’s rotation.
She wanted to expand the sunflowers to 80 acres and add a small grain component.
oats on the wet strip after the veetch was turned under.
And she wanted to begin a formal record of the rootworm population pressure across the farm using sticky traps and emergence counts that Dr.
Voss had described in one of his papers.
She brought the plan to her father in February.
Carl looked at it.
He said he needed to think about it.
Ingred, who was in the kitchen when this happened, did not say anything, but she looked at Carl in a way that communicated something.
And Carl looked back at her in a way that communicated that he had received it.
And 3 days later, he told Clare she could expand 120 acres.
120 acres out of 480, a quarter of the farm.
Let me tell you about the spring of 1989 because 1989 was the year the argument stopped being theoretical.
The western corn root worm had been building in Tama County for a long time and in 1989 it built past the point where management could contain it.
The population had been elevated for 3 years.
The variant that had learned to lay eggs in soybean fields, the rotationresistant variant, the aronomists called it, though farmers called it by other names, had been spreading quietly through the county since at least 1985.
And by 1989, it was present in significant numbers on farms that had been rotating corn and soybeans faithfully for years.
Farms that had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
Farms that had paid their $14 per acre insecticide bill every spring and believed it was enough.
It was not enough.
The summer of 1989 was warm and dry, the kind of summer that favors rootworm emergence and feeding.
The larae fed on roots through June and July, and the damage showed in August when the corn that had been standing straight in July began to lean.
The farmers in Tama County called it lodging, and they had seen it before in bad root worm years, but they had not seen it like this.
Fields that had been clean in July were leaning by the second week of August, and some of them were falling.
The root systems compromised enough that a wind event on the 14th of August, not a severe storm, just a line of thunderstorms moving through from the northwest, pushed significant portions of those fields flat.
The aronomists called it rootworm induced lodging.
The farmers called it a disaster.
The county extension office estimated in a report published in October of 1989 that Tama County lost an average of 34 bushels per acre on corn ground with significant rootworm pressure against a county average yield of 142 bushels per acre.
On the worst fields, the loss was 60 bushels or more at a corn price of $2.
40 40 cents per bushel.
That was an $82 per acre loss on the worst ground and a $48 per acre average loss across the affected fields.
The county lost by the extension office’s estimate somewhere between 11 and 14 million in crop value in a single season.
Let me tell you about the Gustoson farm in the summer of 1989 because it was not the same story.
Claire’s sunflower ground, 80 acres of it by then, the full northeast corner plus the expanded strip along the south fence showed no root damage.
There was no rootworm damage to show.
The rootworm population in those fields was by the sticky trap counts Clare had been running since 1988.
Approximately 30% of the population on the adjacent corn ground.
The sunflowers broke the life cycle.
The oats on the wet strip broke it further.
The hairy veetch, now in its third year on the drainage strip, had produced a soil biology so different from the adjacent corn ground that the extension office aronomist who visited in August stood at the field edge for a long time without saying anything.
The corn on the Gustoen farm, the 360 acres that Carl still planted in corn and soybeans was not unaffected.
The rootworm pressure was real and it crossed fence lines and Carl lost some yield.
But the fields adjacent to the sunflower and oak ground showed measurably lower pressure than fields further from it and the loss on the gustoson corn was by Carl’s estimate about half the county average.
He lost 17 bushels per acre on the affected ground.
The county lost 34.
The sunflower harvest that fall was 1,480 lbs per acre.
The price had moved to 12.
1 per pound.
Clare netted $119 per acre after inputs and hauling.
Her father’s corn on the best ground netted $68 per acre.
The sunflower ground had outperformed the best corn ground on the farm by $51 per acre.
In a year when the corn county had been devastated, Clare sat at the kitchen table that October and opened the notebook and put the numbers side by side and she did not feel triumphant.
She felt something quieter than that.
She felt the particular feeling of a person who has been right about something important and who knows that being right about it does not make the people who were wrong about it bad people and who is not sure what to do with that knowledge except to keep the notebook and keep the records and let the numbers say what the numbers say.
Carl Gustiffson sat across from her and looked at the numbers for a long time.
When he looked up, his eyes were the eyes of a man who has revised something fundamental, not dramatically, but permanently, the way a river revises its course.
Not all at once, but in a direction it doesn’t reverse.
You were right, he said.
Clare nodded.
The rotation, Carl said.
The diversification, the whole thing.
The data was right, Clare said.
I just read it.
Carl was quiet for a moment.
Then he said something that Clare would remember for the rest of her life, something that she would repeat years later at a podium in front of 200 farmers.
Something that she wrote in the notebook that night and underlined twice.
“You decide the rotation,” he said.
“All of it.
whatever you think is right.
That was the moment the farm changed.
Not the sunflower harvest, not the rootworm counts, not the soil samples from the drainage strip.
The moment the farm changed was when Carl Gustoson, who had farmed 480 acres in Tama County for 15 years, the way his father had farmed them before him, handed the rotation decisions to his 24year-old daughter and meant it.
Let me tell you about what happened at the co-op that fall, because the story doesn’t end in the kitchen.
Jean Crowley had a hard autumn in 1989.
His customers had lost money.
Some of them had lost a great deal of money.
He had sold them the insecticide programs, the hybrid selections, the nitrogen schedules, all of it calibrated for a corn county doing what a corn county does.
And it had not been enough.
And he knew it had not been enough.
And the men at the co-op counter knew it, too.
The Thursday morning, conversations were quieter than they had been.
Howal Thornon had lost 58 bushels per acre on his worst field and had said at the counter one morning that he was going to have to talk to the bank and the way he said it was the way a man says something he has been trying not to say for weeks.
Jean had heard about the Gustiffson numbers.
He had heard about them from the elevator in Marshalltown and from the extension office report which mentioned the Gustiffson farm specifically as an example of diversified rotation showing reduced pest pressure.
He had heard about them from two different farmers who had driven past the Gustoson northeast corner in August when the rest of the county was leaning and seen Claire’s sunflowers standing straight and dark against the sky.
He drove out to the Gustoson farm on a Tuesday morning in November, 3 weeks after harvest.
He parked his truck at the end of the lane and walked up to the house and knocked on the door and Clare answered it and he stood on the porch with his cap in his hands and said he wondered if she had a few minutes.
She had a few minutes.
They sat at the kitchen table, the same oak table, the same window looking out over the south field, the same scratches and stains.
And Jean Crowley said that he had been looking at the numbers from the season, and that he was thinking about what he was recommending to his customers going forward, and that he thought he might need to understand the rotation work better than he did.
Clare looked at him for a moment.
She was 24 years old and she had been rotted about something important and the man who had laughed at her at the co-op counter was sitting at her kitchen table with his cap in his hands and she could have said any number of things.
She said the thing she had decided to say, the thing she had thought about saying since August, since the day she walked the sunflower field and saw it standing while the county leaned.
Jean, she said, “Do you remember what you said at the co-op in April of 1987?” Jean Crowley looked at the table.
“I remember,” he said.
“You said sunflowers in a corn county.
” Clareire said, “You said it like it was the punchline to a joke.
” I know what I said.
Jean said, “I’m not saying it to embarrass you.
” Clareire said, “I’m saying it because the lesson isn’t that sunflowers are better than corn.
The lesson is that any farm that grows only one thing is a farm that needs only one disaster to fail.
” That’s what the data said in 1987 and that’s what the rootworm said in 1989.
And it’ll say it again in a different way in a different year.
and the farms that are still standing when it does will be the ones that listened.
Jean Crowley was quiet for a moment.
What would you recommend? He said for a 600 acre corn soybean operation, someone like Hal Thornon.
Clare opened the notebook.
They talked for 2 hours.
Jean asked questions and Clare answered them.
And when she didn’t know the answer, she said so and told him where to find it.
She gave him copies of the Illinois field trial data and the Minnesota revenue study, the same papers she’d put on the co-op counter in 1987, the ones he had looked at without reading.
He took them and folded them carefully and put them in his jacket pocket.
And when he stood up to leave, he looked at the notebook on the table and asked if he could borrow it for a few days.
Clareire said she’d make him a copy.
Let me tell you about the years that followed because the story doesn’t end at the kitchen table.
In 1990, four farms in the northeast quarter of Tama County added sunflowers or small grains to their rotation.
In 1991, it was nine farms.
By 1993, the county extension office had published a rotation guide for diversified systems in central Iowa that drew substantially on data from the Gustiffson Farm.
And Clare had been asked to present her findings at the winter meeting of the Tama County Farm Bureau, which she did standing at a podium in a room with 200 farmers in it with a slide of the 1989 per acre comparison on the screen behind her.
Carl Gusten sat in the third row.
When Clare finished speaking and the room applauded, Carl stood up.
He didn’t say anything.
He just stood.
But Clare saw him and she understood what it meant and she put it in the notebook later that night.
Not the applause, not the slide, not the numbers, just Dad stood up.
Jean Crowley came to that meeting.
He sat in the back row and listened to the whole presentation and did not say anything during the question period.
But afterward in the parking lot, he found Clare and told her that he had changed his standard rotation recommendation to include a third crop option for all customers with sandy or poorly drained ground, and that he had used her data to make the case to his seed company rep.
He said it without ceremony, the way a man says something he has thought about for a long time and is finally ready to say out loud.
Clare thanked him.
She meant it.
Howal Thornton had added oats and a small sunflower plot to his rotation in 1991.
By 1993, his per acre net on the diversified ground was running $28 above his corn soybean average.
He told Carl Gustoson about this at the co-op one Thursday morning, and Carl said that sounded about right.
And the men at the counter did not laugh because there was nothing funny about $28 per acre, and because the year before had been dry, and the Thornton sunflowers had stood straight through July, while the corn showed stress, and everyone at the counter had driven past and seen it.
Let me tell you one last thing about the Gustoson farm, because the story has one more turn.
In the spring of 1997, Clare’s daughter, she had married a farmer from Harden County named Tobias Lindgrren in 1992, and they had moved back to the Gustiffson place to farm with Carl was 8 years old and already following her mother through the fields the way Clare had followed.
Carl.
Her name was Anna, and she was a serious child who asked questions that her parents had to think about before answering.
That spring, Anna came home from school with a library book about hemp production in Canada, and she sat at the kitchen table, the oak table, the same one, and told her mother that hemp had a deeper root system than sunflowers and fixed more organic matter per acre than veetch.
and that there was a new federal pilot program allowing limited production in the certain states and that Iowa was on the list.
Clare looked at her daughter for a long time.
She looked at the library book.
She thought about a Thursday morning in April of 1987 and a co-op counter and a laugh that had been patient and almost affectionate and somehow worse than contempt.
She thought about a notebook and a professor named Dr.
Voss and a sentence she had written on the inside cover of that notebook.
Monoculture is a loan you take out against disaster.
She looked at Anna and said, “Show me the data.
” Anna opened the library book to a page she had dogeared and Clare leaned over and read it.
And then she went to the shelf and got the notebook, not the original, which was in a box in the barn, but the current one, the one she had been keeping since 1993.
And she sat down at the table and opened it to a blank page, and she wrote the date at the top, and she said, “Okay, let’s start from the beginning.
” Tobias Lindrren, who was sitting in the corner with his coffee and had not said a word through any of this, looked at his wife and his daughter at the kitchen table with the notebook between them, and he smiled, the smile of a man who has seen this before and knows how it ends.
The Gustiffson farm still runs 480 acres in the northeast corner of Tama County.
The rotation changes every few years as the data changes and the markets change and the knowledge accumulates.
The notebook is on its sixth volume.
The sunflower ground is still in sunflowers mostly, though some of it rotates through hemp and winter critical now, and the soil organic matter on the old sandy northeast corner has risen from 1.
8% 8% in 1987 to 3.
1% today, which the extension office says is not possible in that time frame and which the soil samples say happened anyway.
Gene Crowley retired in 2001.
Before he did, he changed his standard rotation recommendation one more time, adding a fourth crop option for all customers in the county.
He told the local paper in a small article about his retirement, that the best agronomic advice he had ever received had come from a 22-year-old with a notebook, and that he had been slow to listen, and that the slowness had cost his customers more than he liked to think about.
Clare Gustiffson planted sunflowers in a corn county.
They laughed.
The rootworm came.
The corn leaned and fell.
The sunflowers stood.
The notebook is still open.
