Fire in the Corn: Farmer’s Best Crop of Lifetime Burns Day Before Harvest

When David Monk, 78, lost the best yielding corn of his life to fire, he took the loss on the chin and remained a farmer grateful for his community.

By Chris Bennett

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March 31, 2021 09:14 AM

“I knew I was in big trouble the moment I saw smoke. I didn’t know how bad it was—but I knew something awful was coming.”

In the late spring and summer of 2020, David Monk raised the finest corn of his life. After 60-plus crop seasons, he anticipated the highest yields of his career, but inches from the finish line, the script was flipped a single day before harvest. On Oct. 14, David’s corn burned to ash. Gold to black, the Illinois farmer’s top yield hopes went up in flames.

Yet, Monk, 78, was unflappable as some of his best grain burned, and he bulldogged a simple calculus—stop the fire or lose it all. His loss is a lesson in leadership, perspective, and preparation, and plain testament to the behavior of rural farming communities during crises. Reflecting on the aftermath, Monk is a grateful farmer: “Over and over, when things go wrong, the people around us in farming come running. This isn’t just an attitude from 100 years ago, it’s still just like that today, and what happened to me is proof.”

Iron: The Only Weapon

Outside Danforth, in east central Illinois’ Iroquois County, David works an island of dryland corn and soybeans with open edges bleeding onto neighboring farmland. Black dirt atop remarkably flat topography, his ground displays roughly 3’ of elevation difference across the operation, and is split by a central drainage ditch and peppered with patterned tile.

Typically punching corn seed in the ground at 32,000-35,000 plants per acre, David slightly turned up the dial in 2020, climbing to 37,000 ppa. Alongside his son, Kevin, David watched as the corn grew stout from the get-go. “I’d planted some early corn on headlands, and that was good, but the later maturities were outstanding,” he describes. “My early corn was about 210, way below my average, but the later corn was the greatest I’d ever seen. We harvested one plot and it hit 288, and I knew there were some big numbers waiting.”

Kevin, an ag tech consultant and owner of The Monk Approach, LLC, keeps one foot in corn and soybeans, and the other in the realm of precision ag technology, and attributes the stellar yields to a combination of genetics and weather. “We had such good growing conditions in 2020 and had no delays in nitrogen application, even though it was so dry in July and the first three quarters of August. Seed companies take a bad rap sometimes, but their genetic results are incredible, and you can see it in the year over year yield increases. No question, we knew we had a bumper crop waiting to be cut.”

On Oct. 6, the Monk farming pair cranked a Case IH 1660 combine and began harvesting early corn, and next moved into a domino chain of soybean maturities staggered at 2.8, 3, 3.2, and 3.4. Eight days later, soybeans were near completion and 150 acres of corn remained to be cut.

On Oct. 14, with temperatures in the 80s and peak wind gust reaching 49 mph, conditions were ripe for trouble. While Kevin drove a load of soybeans to a nearby elevator, David stopped the 1660 to unload at roughly 4:20 p.m., and stared into the distance, transfixed on the southwest horizon. Roughly 4 miles following the crow, he spotted the unmistakable outline of a rising cloud. Within three to four minutes, the dark spot metastasized, tripling in width.

Smoke, strong winds, high temperatures and dry grain, David recognized the primal elements of a potentially devastating harvest fire. He shut down the auger and drove the combine approximately a mile to a machine shed housing the only weapon at hand: iron.

Action, action, and action. Behind the wheel of an AGCO White 6144 tractor, a disk in tow, David turned back toward the southwest horizon and drove toward the fire. “No time to waste,” he recalls. “I knew what was on the way and I had to keep a clear head. I said my prayers, asked for God’s help, and got ready.”

Driving Blind

Driving toward the elevator approximately 7 miles south, Kevin caught sight of a plume in the distance. He got on the scale, dumped, and drove back home. “A mile from the house I realized it was so close to us now, and prayed for protection for our land.”

Reportedly, a hot bearing in a combine caused the fire—one of several burning the same day across the tri-county farmland of Champaign, Ford and Iroquois counties. “Never seen a day like it with that many fires,” Kevin remembers, “but everything about the conditions was ripe.”

By 4:56 p.m., the pillar of smoke (initially 4 miles away) had crossed a series of corn and soybean stubble fields and arrived on Monk farmland as a 100’ stretch of flames at the turnrow. “Think of an intersection,” Kevin details. “Our farm was on the northeast corner and the field on fire was on the southwest corner.”

Driving his truck toward the smoke, Kevin could see his father in the 6144, disking parallel to the line of flaming soybean stubble, ripping ground to create a fire block. However, inside the cab, David was almost driving blind, cloaked in smoke—and the fire was ready to jump.

No Cards to Play?

“I couldn’t see anything but the hood of the tractor,” David describes. “The only thing I could do was keep going, trying to disk beside my neighbor’s bean stubble, but it was like steering with a blanket thrown over the cab. At least I was on an old tractor that didn’t automatically shut down at the smell of smoke like some of the newer models.”

“By this time I had two neighbors tearing up ground too, trying to block the fire,” he continues. “Neighbors, fire departments, and fertilizer companies were all trying to get to us, but the fire was something else.”

Pushed by wind, the burn maintained a consistent march through the soybean stubble and residue, and kept walking toward the Monk’s corn, threatening to cross the road. David, operating at near-zero visibility, accidentally veered out of the field, and struck the blacktop with the tillage equipment, rocking the tractor, wobbling the disk, and loosening some of the disk gangs. Kevin exited his truck, ran to David, and began trying to tighten up the bolts with a socket set. Covered in ash residue, mixed with sweat and grime, the father-son duo was running short of cards to play. “No way,” Kevin exclaims. “We couldn’t stay there because the heat was all around and you could even feel it radiating from the ground. My nerves were tight and adrenaline was surging, because we didn’t know what the flames would do next.”

The Red Sea

“Next” was a jump of the flames over the road and into the Monk’s dry corn—almost the last 150 acres left to cut on the operation—and took the fire from a murmur to a roar. Motored by the strong wind, the fire line turned into a growling conflagration, as separate arms of flame raced one another through the corn, leaping 30’ in the air, settling, and then jumping again, spreading all the while. “It was more like an explosion than a fire,” David says, “and burned stalks clear to the ground, right down to 6” off the dirt.”

“My heart sunk,” Kevin adds. “We’d fought hard, and I was actually thinking the crisis was averted—and suddenly there was a huge fire in the corn.”

Despite the dire situation in the Monk’s corn, reinforcements had arrived in the form of multiple fire departments, a fertilizer company hauling water tanks, and several key neighbors.

Just as the fire seemed poised to claim the entire field, two neighbors—Harold Wilken and Ryan Anderson—performed a Red Sea parting of the corn, driving their own disks into the standing crop. Around the flames, Harold and his son, Ross, drove two disks on an east path, and Ryan drove on a west path, creating a last-ditch, wide swathe, preventing further loss. “Never in my whole life did I dream I’d enjoy seeing a neighbor disk our standing corn,” Kevin recalls, “but that protected the rest of the field.”

“My neighbors were wonderful and there were at least six that helped,” David explains. “We had 16 fire departments involved in some way and these were all volunteer firemen. I can’t say enough about a rural community working together.”

Action

David lost just under 40 acres of corn. “At least I had insurance, and I know things could have been much, much worse, just like the drought year of 1988 when we had $30,000 less income than expenses. It makes you realize how much people care about you, and it also teaches you to be prepared. Have a plan and be ready for action. Think hard about where you need insurance on your operation.”

Action was a dominant takeaway for Kevin: He witnessed a patriarch stand strong in a crisis. “From the start to the end, Dad kept his head, was bold and gave others encouragement. He was like Patton on a tractor, determined to save his corn. I got a great lesson in leadership from my Dad and the neighbors. When things reach a breaking point, you can’t hem-haw or sit on the fence; you must react without delay. Look at my neighbors seizing the moment and driving into our standing corn: They didn’t pause and they knew what to do. Had they not been so quick to get on equipment and come to our place, and then dive into our crop, we’d have lost the entire 150.”

Afterwards, David displayed the same attitude of calm, Kevin continues. “He lost his best corn ever, but replaced disappointment with appreciation for what was saved. That is a life lesson about strength and confidence. Get up tomorrow and be grateful to farm again, because that’s what he loves.”

Rally of the Farmer

In agriculture, truly, a single day can cripple a crop. Guarantees are few and far between, but the Monks point to a certainty borne out during the Oct. 14 fire—the perennial rally of the American farmer. “Sickness, death, or even fire, as farmers we try to take care of our communities,” David concludes. “That’s the way it was when this country started, and that’s how it is today.”

“It’s not fake or empty words,” Kevin echoes. “Farmers helping farmers when the chips are down is real-life. It’s lost in many other parts of society, but not in farming.”