Reflection...

Late June: The caretaker of The Farm has died. Nola is suddenly and unexpectedly gone. There is way too much to say about her tenure here, and excepting one subject, this is not the place to do it. That exception is The Farm. Nola was born on The Farm. She never lived anywhere else in her 60+ years. She was taught to work the farm, and I mean do all the work; feed the animals, muck out pens, milk the cows (back before there were milking machines, mind you), slop the hogs, till the soil, plant crops, bail hay, maintain equipment, harvest crops, know when to call the vet, and the list goes on and on. The volume of knowledge required to successfully run a family farm is, well, voluminous. Her teachers were her parents, Otto and Meta Wieland, and her uncles and neighbors. And, I believe, her most important instructor was the land itself.

Looking at The Farm, it is easy at this juncture in time to say "That is Nola". That is both accurate (metaphorically) and incomplete. It is much more. It is the sweat and blood (literally sometimes), the pride and joy of the efforts of many stretching over generations. Each of those people learned from the land. The land is the most harsh and loving of instructors. Each of the individuals that took responsibility for the care of this land has had to become the land, and let the land become them. Those folks have to have the temerity to endure what the land endures, the intelligence and scope of understanding to be able to take what they feel of the land, what they see, and make decisions that are balanced. Decisions that are hard in the short term sometimes, harsh. They have to take risks and recognize the risk that they are taking. All these things we all do every day of our lives, in our jobs, our families. But for me, The Farm is where these are things that I live, not just things that I do. I am just scratching the surface of all that, it has only been a quarter of a year.

I have joked with my friends at AmFam that I am going to start a country called "Wie Land'. It will be located in a place near a town called Lancaster in Grant County, Wisconsin. And my brother Ed and I will reign over that country. There will be no law except that of Rational Anarchy. The land itself will rule. But in a way that is already the way it is. Perhaps I will expand on that some day.

Now, the responsibility has fallen to my brother and me. We have to, and are, learning a lot very fast. I can't know whether we are learning enough fast enough. Time will tell(I hate truisms that are cleche!, detracts somehow from the meaning).

At any rate, our first order of business was to get probate going. That is scary. We have not had to face that before. We are fortunate that there are very few complications. The PR is wonderful. The Lawyer, calm and competent.

Day to day operations fell to me. Our neighbors have been indispensable, supportive, and genuinely concerned. First order of business. Assess what we have in the fields, what resources we have to work with, and get a flexible, scalable plan in place to finish out the year. Again, our neighbors are invaluable. John B., Gary S., the Nimitz family, and many others contribute. The winter wheat comes out in July, and we sell it out of the field. Thirty one acres that yield very well. We don't get much straw though, and John B. is disappointed, he could have used a lot more I think. The early drought we had stunted the plant growth. Just after Nola died, we started to get rain. The corn had been starting to curl, and then we got rain. And crops thrived.

July also sees that last of the corn from previous years come out of the bins. Close to 8000 bushel. The money is needed. There are a lot of bills to pay. We now have a break to get ready for this years corn. The bins get cleaned, we mow the grass breaks around the corn fields. Equipment is made ready. And all the while, we are assessing, finding out how to contract the harvest, contracting fuel, trying to budget for next year, and taking care of probate issues...., they never seem to end.

In the mean time, I was liking my job at AmFam. The work was challenging, the people are simply fantastic. My teammates have become friends. We laugh, argue, joke, analyze, trying to fit this odd ILP thing into the standard process. It truly is like trying to plug a 3 prong plug into a two prong socket. Either you have to cut off a lug, or re-wire the house. But it can work. The domains need to be re-defined.

The strain on my family is telling though. I have the utmost confidence in Oxana and Yulia, but this situation is a strain. They have incredible strength! And Oxana's pragmatic point of view challenges me to not over-focus. The Farm can consume people too, even more so than a job. The Farm is more than a job, it is a life of its own, and it will devour you if you let it. Oxana prevents this. Without her, I would not be able to keep my balance.

It got to be corn time. I took a week off of work, except for one day when we could not get into the fields, too wet. But we got it all out, 90 some acres, yielding an average of 210 bushel per acer. Better than 18,000 bushel of corn. Both bins are full, and I do mean full! No major breakdowns, no injuries (except missing skin here and there). I learned a bit about running the combine, a lot about running the drier.

Now all that is left is the beans. We are of course worried. They should be out of the field by the 31st of October and it is still too wet to get into the fields. The rain that saved the wheat and corn just does not seem to want to stop. We have had well over a foot of rain since July. All we can do is wait and hope for 5-7 days of dry weather.

I can imagine my teammates at AmFam are perhaps somewhat relieved that they don't have to hear about commodities pricing, or field conditions, or equipment concerns. I am so grateful to them, they listened when I needed to talk. I already miss them more than they can know. But I am back with my family again after 13 months of weekends only, and sometimes not even weekends. We have survived and in fact are thriving, a very good thing!

And there is this thing of having something behind us that we know we can always go back (or forward) to. The Farm.