Rural Life

Building the Future: Partnerships Bring Essential Infrastructure to Rural Areas

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 19:14:01 GMT

There’s a $6 billion funding gap in essential infrastructure needed in rural communities. That’s according to Jase Wagner, CEO of Compeer Financial. Since 2006, the farm credit cooperative has been working on pilot projects to show how new partnerships and funding bridge what’s needed.

One of its latest example projects is at Lafayette Hospital + Clinics in Lafayette County Wisconsin (and the only county-owned hospital in the state) where a 84,000 square foot facility was built to double the size of its previous hospital.

“At Compeer Financial, we are a part of the farm credit system, which has consistently supported rural communities and agriculture,” Wagner says. “As we’ve looked at the trends and environment around rural communities recently, they need an extra boost of support.”

Its pilot projects have included critical access care hospitals, nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

To enable the project in Wisconsin, Compeer Financial partnered with the regional Clare Bank and USDA to secure a $50.87 million financing package.

“We are ecstatic to introduce our region’s residents to our new Lafayette Hospital + Clinics, formerly known as Memorial Hospital of Lafayette County,” said Marie Wamsley, CEO of LHC in a press release. “The facility upgrades the technologies and services we’re able to offer our patients and the region’s healthcare providers, and the new location gives us room to grow. We’re grateful for the partnership with Compeer Financial in helping secure funding so we can continue to provide our rural community with the comprehensive, around-the-clock medical care it has relied on for more than 70 years.”

Citing a pattern of success with its pilot projects, Compeer is supporting legislation called The Investing in Rural America Act, which could be part of a “Skinny Farm Bill” in the near-future.

“We need to provide more permanent financing and long-term support for this market. Agriculture needs rural communities as much or more than rural communities need agriculture,” Wagner says. “The Investing in Rural America Act is a targeted bill to allow us to invest in a subset of essential community facilities. It’s primarily focused on health care, but also includes libraries, community centers, and other gathering places for communities.”

Another project currently underway is in Galena, Ill., as Compeer led a $25.75 million financing packing to expand and renovate Midwest Medical Center. This project will bring new medical providers and services, a new fitness center and new infusion clinic.
Wagner explains the nationwide $6 billion gap is the result of decades of underinvestment to keep essential facilities up-to-date across rural America.

“When we see these turn over and get new facilities in town, it’s just amazing,” he says. “It’s a rebirth kind of energy. The ability to hire people goes way up, and the ability to have good care in these areas goes up, which creates its own rural prosperity.”
Wagner is optimistic in a fly-wheel effect with cooperation across a coalition of institutions.

“As we prove this out, we can get a broader set of investors investing in rural America, which then really helps everyone. Rural America is such an essential part of the overall operation of the United States, and I think people understand that more and more, but you need to invest in it in order to make it stay that way.”

Outraged Farmers Blame Ag Monopolies as Catastrophic Collapse Looms

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 13:32:58 GMT

Farmers are not crying wolf. The wolf is real and right outside the door in the form of generational collapse.

The inescapable crop math of sustained crippling commodity prices and high input costs has many growers screaming for immediate relief, potentially via aid payments in late 2025 or early 2026. However, bailouts are Band-Aids over bullet holes.

Alarm has turned to extreme despair on many operations. On Sept. 2, 2025, a telltale farm meeting went nuclear. Field representatives from the offices of Sen. Tom Cotton, Sen. John Boozman and Rep. Rick Crawford, along with a rep sent by Gov. Sarah Sanders, initially intended to speak with a handful of growers in Brookland, Ark.

Instead, 400-plus farmers packed the house to overflow on a Tuesday — despite the pressing demands of rice and corn harvest and a mere three days’ notice — and unleashed a chain of grievances.

Where does blame lie? Where to begin digging for a long-term solution?

Amid the fallout of the Sept. 2 meeting, three farmers sound off on markets, monopolies, moratoriums and mismanagement in U.S. agriculture. They spare no sacred cows.

Adam Chappell: “This is the Worst Economy of My Lifetime ...”
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, says Adam Chappell. “Year after year of sweeping all this s*** under the rug and pretending it’s not happening has got us to this point. Years of barely squeaking by, surviving with a bailout and then doing it all again. That is the definition of insanity.”

Behind closed doors, Chappell says federal politicians acknowledge “monopoly influence.”

(Photo courtesy of Chappell Farms)

Growing 2,400 acres of soybeans, rice, and corn in east Arkansas’ Woodruff County, Chappell , 46, accuses USDA of head-in-the-sand policy: “I’m sick of USDA graphs saying agriculture income is set to rise. They’re baking cattle and coming payments into their recipe and pretending things are good. Bulls***.”

“This is the worst agriculture economy of my lifetime over at least the past three years, and right this minute, guys are going under — as in bankruptcy or leaving the farm,” he exclaims. “The solution is supposedly another bailout or a gap payment the following year? Wake the hell up: Where do you think that money is gonna go? It won’t go to farmers. It’ll go into supplier’s pockets.”

The entire agriculture industry — a bedrock of U.S. security — rests squarely on the shoulders of the American farmer. Ironically, that same farmer is the only player in the ag chain who cannot pass costs down the ladder.

Blame partially belongs on “Big Ag,” Chappell contends.

“Seed, chemicals or fertilizer, it’s all in the hands of a few companies that are the only game in town. You want to fix farming? Start a federal investigation on those big companies. Booming quarterly earnings and big stock dividends make no sense when farmers can’t pinch a penny.”

Farmers gathering at the benchmark Sept. 2 farm meeting in Brookland.

(Photo courtesy of Bailey Buffalo)

“If corn prices were to suddenly jump this month, nitrogen prices will magically rise the following year,” he continues. “If soybean prices explode to $15 tomorrow, a bag of beans will climb to $90. Guaranteed. Potash will hit $1,000. The monopoly problem is real.”

Behind closed doors, away from microphones and cameras, Chappell says federal politicians acknowledge “monopoly influence.”

“They all tell me they’re aware of a monopoly problem, and they don’t deny it exists. But they do nothing. Instead, we get bailouts and the money slips right out of our hands and into the big corporations we owe the money to — the monopolies. Meanwhile, those same corporations lobby for us to get the bailouts. Get it?”

“This is real talk,” Chappell describes. “This is what farmers know and experience. You can bet your ass, the monopolies will get their money. If you think otherwise, you’ve got blinders on.”

Kenneth Graves: “At Every Level of Agriculture, There Must Be a Reckoning.”
The Sept. 2 farm meeting, held a stone’s throw outside Jonesboro at Woods Chapel Baptist, was monumental, says retired Dewitt grower Kenneth Graves, 71. “I’d say 400 people or so showed up, maybe more. We’re talking about people standing outside the building in the middle of harvest. That tells you all you need to know.”

Dwarfing expectations, the line of overflow attendees wrapped around the building on Sept. 2.

(Photo courtesy of Bailey Buffalo)

Graves, chairman of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association , understands severe hardship. He farmed through the anemic ag crisis of the 1980s. However, the current unrest is a “coming disaster” unlike anything he’s witnessed across a 50-year career: “I’ve never seen this kinda look in farmers’ eyes. It’s fear. And it’s based in undeniable facts.”

In August 2025, Graves sent an open letter to media and politicians, pleading for attention to eye-popping numbers. “My letter told what things are like right now. In our geography, it looks like you need to yield 100-300-300 to stay ahead,” Graves describes. “That’s 100-bushel beans, 300-bushel rice and 300-bushel corn. Basic Arkansas averages are 56-bushel beans, 166-bushel rice and 175-bushel corn. In a nutshell, we are going over a cliff. Banks are forecasting farm bankruptcies at 25% to 40%, and the dirty secret is out. Everyone knows it; everyone feels it.”

How does the industry even begin to crawl out of the hole? Start with markets, Graves urges. “Our international competitors play under the table and get hidden subsidies. The whole dynamic is off. At every level of agriculture, there must be a reckoning. That certainly includes seed, chemical and machinery companies. Back off.”

Death of a thousand cuts, according to Graves: “It’s been building over time and now it’s on the doorstep. You can argue that guys will be able to get back in their fields next spring, but that’s just denying the inevitable. Whether this year or next year or the next, there’s a crash coming.”

“In a nutshell, we are going over a cliff,” says Kenneth Graves. “Banks are forecasting farm bankruptcies at 25% to 40%, and the dirty secret is out. Everyone knows it; everyone feels it.”

(Photo courtesy of Graves Farms)

Graves advocates for immediate political intervention. “I’m urging legislators at all levels to act now,” he says. “We’re talking about our food and agriculture security, and when that tanks, the economic effect will spill over every rural region in the country.

“Remember when that Chinese spy balloon flew over the U.S. in 2023, and our politicians did nothing? They made a lot of noise and acted too late, shooting it down after it collected data across the country,” Graves adds. “It’s past time to act. Our politicians either recognize this now or let us be some other country’s economic hostage later.”

Bailey Buffalo: “Farmers, Not the Giant Agriculture Manufacturers, Are the Ones Hurting.”

Adios to fifth- and sixth-generation farmers?

Yes, says Bailey Buffalo, 40, owner of Buffalo Grain Systems in Jonesboro, and president of Farm Protection Alliance .

“Horror stories. The pain is unreal. Worst farming situation I’ve seen in my life,” Buffalo says. “Look at Extension [University of Arkansas] numbers — corn growers losing $240 per acre; soybeans losing $144 per acre; and rice losing $380 per acre. The cotton growers may be worst of all.”

Agriculture’s handbrake must be pulled, says Bailey Buffalo, with an economic reversal contingent on a deep look at consolidation, moratoriums, and diversification.

(Photo courtesy of Buffalo Grain Systems)

Storms can be weathered during agricultural tumult, Buffalo maintains — except when a thumb rests on the scale. Consolidation, he says, has turned a market rut into a debacle.

“Basic macroeconomics (CR4) tells us that if the top four competitors in any sector control more than 40% of the market, abuses become likely and that sector is approaching a monopolistic risk. That’s where I believe we’re at in farming,” he explains. “We can’t climb out of this mess partly because we’re at the mercy of agriculture monopolies.

“Take corn, cotton, rice and soybean seed. They’re at 70% to 90% control by corporate cartels, in my opinion. Take fertilizer where the top four players control about 82% of the market,” he adds. “If 40% of any sector is a monopoly risk, then what the hell do our agriculture percentages tell us?”

Despite Buffalo’s alarm, the input market contains exceptions, he notes: “I can name small seed suppliers and fertilizer suppliers who are providing very high-quality products at fractions of what those much larger corporations are charging. The farmers just have to put the extra work into finding them and into getting their orders in early as possible. They are proving that it’s possible for small operations to sneak into corners of the market.”

Yet, exceptions do not move the overall dial. “Farmers are literally losing money per acre while Big Agriculture is making hundreds of millions of dollars and more,” Buffalo says. “How can that be sustainable? You can make all the excuses or justifications you like, but any fair-minded person knows the situation is way out of balance.”

“At every level of agriculture, there must be a reckoning,” says Kenneth Graves. “That certainly includes seed, chemical, and machinery companies. Back off.”

(Photo by Chris Bennett)

Bailout cash is a “gross Band-Aid,” according to Buffalo.

“The subsidies send farmers back to the pit, over and over. The money trickles to lenders, loans, suppliers, banks or somewhere else in chain. Bailouts are the same as kicking the can down the road,” he adds.

That “can” has grown exceedingly heavy and the end of the road is in sight, Buffalo says: “Some people blame tariffs. Some blame the current president. Some blame the last president. Some blame other politicians. In the background of all this blame, nobody is looking at where farmers spend their money. Farmers pay monopolies and often feel they have no choice.”

Agriculture’s handbrake must be pulled, Buffalo says, with an economic reversal contingent on a deep look at consolidation, moratoriums and diversification — via both a federal and state lens. In his opinion, the following four changes are in order:

1. Start with monopolies. “State constitutions have anti-trust legislation. Create smoke at the state level and force USDA and the feds to follow.”

2. Put an indefinite moratorium on all mergers and acquisitions in the food and ag sectors. “End consolidation and demand long-lasting change.”

3. Get a handle on D.C. lobbyists. According to a 2024 report, Cultivating Control : Lobbying by the agribusiness sector has steadily increased: In just the last five years, the agribusiness sector’s annual lobbying expenditures have risen 22%, from $145 million in 2019 to $177 million in 2023. And each year, agribusiness spends more on federal lobbying than the oil and gas industry and the defense sector.

A five-year “cooling off” lobbying period should be set in stone for any government official exiting office, Buffalo says: “Defense, SEC going to Wall Street, any of them, including agriculture. You should never, never be allowed to retire from an ag committee in Congress and then run over to a board at Tyson, Cargill, ADM, John Deere or any other company.”

4. The grain industry must diversify. “I think diversification must be part of any solution. I’m talking about an effort to grow all our food in this country. Our grain goes to feed and ethanol, but we need a structure to grow our own edible food as well, and protect our national security like never before.”

The entire agriculture industry—a bedrock of U.S. security—rests squarely on the shoulders of the American farmer. Ironically, that same farmer is the only player in the ag chain who cannot pass costs down the ladder.

(Photo by Chris Bennett)

At the Sept. 2 spillover meeting in northeast Arkansas, Buffalo was present, listening to the plight of the common grower. The meeting was noted by media and politicians as evidence of a dire “agriculture crisis.” Ironically, no such crisis exists, Buffalo asserts.

“They don’t get it and therefore they can’t properly find the solution,” he says. “Right now, if I was to walk into Congress and ask all the senators and reps, ‘Who thinks the agriculture industry is hurting to the point of collapse?’ all the hands would go up. Instead, the question should be, ‘Who thinks farmers are hurting to the point of collapse?’”

“There’s a giant difference between the two questions, and that difference is indicative of the separation between local Ag and Big Ag,” Buffalo concludes. “Farmers, not the giant agriculture manufacturers, are the ones hurting to the point of going belly up. There’s no solving any of this until that difference is recognized.”

For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

Family Farm Wins Historic Case After Feds Violate Constitution and Ruin Business

County Shuts Down 15-Yr-Old’s Bait Stand on Family Farm, Threatens Daily Fines

City Gov to Seize 175-Year-Old Farm by Eminent Domain, Replace with Affordable Housing

Ghost Cattle: $650M Ponzi Rocks Livestock Industry, Money Still Missing

Game of Horns: Iowa Poacher’s Antler Addiction Leads to Historic Bust

Farmer Unearths Lost Treasure, Solves WW2 Mystery

How the Deep State Tried, and Failed, to Crush an American Farmer

Sisters of Farm Fraud: How 4 Siblings Fleeced USDA for $10M

Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told

How the Trending #FarmGirlSummer Is Educating Viewers About Rural Living

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 20:07:34 GMT

Sporting dirty boots and a deep-rooted love for the land, a new wave of female farmers is making waves on social media under the trending hashtag #FarmGirlSummer. Step beyond the sunsets and tractor selfies, and this viral movement is offering something deeper: a window into the real day-to-day of agricultural life.

The Packer spoke with four influencers who are using their platforms to share more than just aesthetic glimpses — they’re educating followers about rural realities, farm work and what it truly means to live off the land.

Miranda Neville and her husband, Douglas, are dairy farmers in Pennsylvania on his family farm.

(Photo courtesy of Miranda Neville)

Miranda Neville, Dairy Farmer

I want others to see my content and know that even though we work long, tiring days, it’s still important to make time for the things we enjoy.

Miranda Neville and her husband, Douglas, are dairy farmers in Pennsylvania on his family farm. In addition to farming, she also works an off-farm job in agricultural conservation, while balancing family life. Neville says she enjoys sharing her life on the farm on social media and all of the joyful chaos that comes with it.

The Packer: What does #FarmGirlSummer mean to you personally?

Neville: There is rarely a slow day living on a farm, especially if you have livestock. For me, #FarmGirlSummer is about finding the peaceful moments during the busiest time of year. Some examples of that might look like unloading hay in the summer heat but then watching animals graze on the lush, green pasture. Showing dairy cattle at county fairs while making memories that will last a lifetime with friends. Working tirelessly to get crops planted but making time to deliver meals to the field and having a sunset ride in the tractor. Farming can be difficult, so #FarmGirlSummer is about romanticizing my life while doing farm chores and appreciating the land that surrounds me.

How do you think social media is shaping the way people see farm life or rural living?

Historically, there have been so many misconceptions about farmers and ‘country life.’ With social media, we are able to show firsthand what we do and why we do it. Yes, it’s a simpler life — in that we aren’t living in a busy city and bustling traffic— but we work long, hard days to improve the lives of our families, our livestock and crops. We are able to share ideas, educate and build connections with so many different people from all walks of life. It’s giving a voice to farm life and rural living in a way that has been limited in the past.

What message or feeling are you trying to share when you post with #FarmGirlSummer?

Through my social media, I show the realities and struggles of life on our dairy farm, but I also try to focus on the most beautiful parts of farm life — particularly in the summer. I want others to see my content and know that even though we work long, tiring days, it’s still important to make time for the things we enjoy.
Follow Miranda: Tiktok (Miranda.neville); Instagram (Miranda.neville1)

Erica Loesel balances a career as an oncology nurse with Michigan farming.

(Photo courtesy of Erica Loesel)

Erica Loesel, FarmHer

Even if the photos are pretty, the message is: this is real. Real effort. Real life. Real beauty in the mess and the mud and the moments between.

Erica Loesel balances a career as an oncology nurse with Michigan farming.

The Packer: What does #FarmGirlSummer mean to you personally?

Loesel: For me, #FarmGirlSummer evokes a vivid, grounded kind of freedom. It’s not just a hashtag — it feels like a celebration of hands-in-the-dirt simplicity, sun-kissed days and a deeper connection to the land and hard work.

Personally, it looks like:

Early mornings with dew on the fields and coffee steaming in a Yeti cup.
Cutoff jeans, dusty boots and tan lines from hours in the sun.
Quiet, golden sunsets after long, labor-heavy days — and a satisfaction that city summers just don’t offer.

It’s about living a little slower, working a little harder and feeling a whole lot more connected to what matters.

How do you think social media is shaping the way people see farm life or rural living?

Social media is massively reshaping how people perceive farm life and rural living.

By romanticizing the rural lifestyle, platforms like Instagram and TikTok have popularized the ‘aesthetic’ of farm life — think slow mornings, tractor rides, sunsets over fields of gold. It’s drawing people into appreciating a simpler, more grounded way of living.

Visibility and connection. Farmers, especially women and younger people, are sharing real stories and daily routines, creating communities and challenging outdated stereotypes (like the idea that farming is only for older men or men in general).

And through education and awareness, audiences get to see how food is grown, the labor involved and the realities of sustainable or ethical agriculture. It helps bridge the urban-rural disconnect.

What message or feeling are you trying to share when you post with #FarmGirlSummer?

When I post with #FarmGirlSummer, the message I’m trying to share is a blend of realness and reverence — a celebration of resilience, connection to the land and the gritty joy that comes from a life rooted in tradition.

Here’s what I hope comes across:

Grounded joy: Not everything is picture-perfect — there’s sweat, dirt and sometimes hard days — but there’s real joy in that. A joy that comes from doing something meaningful with your hands and heart.

Empowerment: #FarmGirlSummer isn’t about being delicate or curated — it’s about being strong, capable and unafraid to show up exactly as you are, whether you’re driving tractors or making homemade jam. It’s femininity without fragility.

Simplicity with soul: It’s about slow mornings, honest work and choosing presence over polish. It’s a lifestyle, not a filter.

Authenticity over aesthetic: Even if the photos are pretty, the message is: This is real. Real effort. Real life. Real beauty in the mess and the mud and the moments between.

In short, it’s not just “look at this cute farm outfit,” it’s “here’s what it means to live close to the earth, close to the truth and be dang proud of it.”

Follow Erica on TikTok (thecodebluefarmher)

Anne Sneller lives in Earlham, Iowa with her husband, John, and 11-year-old son.

(Photo courtesy of Anne Sneller)

Anne Sneller, Ag Advocate

I am passionate about advocating for agriculture and the opportunities 4-H and FFA offer youth and the skills they can learn from participating.

Anne Sneller lives in Earlham, Iowa. She works as a fraud and claims operations senior manager for Wells Fargo, leads a 4-H club of 75 members called Penn Prize Winners, and is also active supporting FFA, from mentoring members to judging contests at State FFA. Her husband, John, and she have an 11-year-old son who shows pigs and goats.

The Packer: What does #FarmGirlSummer mean to you personally?

Sneller: #FarmGirlSummer to me is helping my son with his show livestock, running on the pavement and gravel roads of Madison County, enjoying the agriculture, helping on my family’s cattle and row crop farm, and fishing and four-wheeling with my son any chance we get.

I am passionate about advocating for agriculture and the opportunities 4-H and FFA offer youth and the skills they can learn from participating.

Follow Anne on TikTok (chasingthatrunnershigh)

At home, you’ll find Topanga Dailey raising her 8-month-old son Owen while helping her husband farm wheat, soybeans and milo in McPherson, Kans.

(Photo courtesy of Topanga Dailey)

Topanga Dailey, Farmer

It’s a reminder — to myself, my family and my community — that life is bigger than your newsfeed. It’s proof that I’ve stepped away from the trap of constant scrolling and hopefully encourages others to slow down, take a breath and enjoy the moment.

Topanga Dailey is a senior digital marketing specialist. At home, you’ll find her raising her 8-month-old son Owen while helping her husband farm wheat, soybeans and milo in McPherson, Kans.

The Packer: What does #FarmGirlSummer mean to you personally?

Dailey: To me, #FarmGirlSummer is a conscious choice to be more in touch with the real world — making things from scratch, getting soil under your fingernails, embracing natural materials, wearing less makeup, stepping away from screens and reconnecting with what real work looks and feels like. Life can feel stressful, exhausting and even scary when you’re glued to a computer all day. The farm reminds you that life moves in seasons — some good, some hard — and that things take time and nothing is permanent.

How do you think social media is shaping the way people see farm life or rural living?

Social media has helped romanticize the farm. #FarmGirlSummer is one of the latest “vibes” people are chasing — a form of escapism and a search for meaning in what can feel like an overwhelming world. Now, people can see farms and rural life right from their phones and reframe what was once seen as an undesirable lifestyle into something idyllic — especially for those feeling overstimulated by city life. Rural living is naturally beautiful and social media has made it easier than ever to show just how special it is.

What message or feeling are you trying to share when you post with #FarmGirlSummer?

It’s a reminder — to myself, my family and my community — that life is bigger than your feed. It’s proof that I’ve stepped away from the trap of constant scrolling and hopefully encourages others to slow down, take a breath and enjoy the moment. Farm life offers that shift in perspective perfectly.

Follow Topanga on Instagram (reallifetopangadailey).

Overcoming Burnout in the Agriculture Industry

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:56:36 GMT

Burnout isn’t always about doing too much. Sometimes it’s about doing the wrong mix of work or carrying all of the mental load on top of the physical. That’s according to Kacee Bohle, who runs AgriMinds , a group coaching business for members of the agriculture industry.

“You can still have a full plate and feel fine, especially if you’re doing stuff that energizes you,” she says. “But what happens when every single part of your day feels like a chore, even the stuff that you used to love? That’s when you know stuff is starting to get off. You can feel burnt out, even when you love or loved the type of work that you do.”

For business owners, farmers, ranchers and ag professionals, Bohle says people often judge themselves for having negative thoughts about the work they have chosen to do in a field they love. There is pressure to carry on the family legacy and love every part of it, and to feel proud of the work.

“Burnout doesn’t care who you are,” she says. “Burnout doesn’t care who’s in charge. It shows up when you’re over extended, misaligned, and you’re trying to carry all the things all the time without any support,” she explains.

Sometimes the work isn’t optional. The gate needs fixed. The field work needs done. The livestock need fed. Bohle points out even when the tasks can’t change, the conversation can. Sometimes it’s not the physical work that is causing burnout, but the mindset surrounding the work.

“What I mean is I want you to start noticing what expectations, pressure or guilt that you’ve been piling on top of the already heavy stuff,” she explains. “Sometimes what’s extinguishing you isn’t the work, it’s the story that you’re telling yourself about the work.”

For example, it could look like thoughts that are similar to: I should be able to handle this. I shouldn’t be tired. I chose this. I don’t have time to feel burnt out. I just need to push through this. It’ll eventually go away.

As Bohle points out, pushing through only works so long.

“There’s only so much you can brush under the rug before it starts seeping out, bulging and tripping you up,” Bohle says. “Eventually, your energy runs out, and if your mindset isn’t giving you any grace or flexibility, everything is just going to continue to feel harder.”

Can you extinguish burnout? Start with what you can control.

An exercise to address burnout is to create two lists. Write down what gives you energy and what drains you, Bohle suggests.

Notice one item on this list that drains you that you can shift or do differently, she says. Then look at the list of things that gives you energy and intentionally add back in something that gives you energy — even if it’s for just five minutes.

“This is not about trying to fix everything,” she explains. “It’s not even about trying to fix stuff overnight. This exercise is just about noticing what’s going on beneath the surface, giving yourself permission to make some small shifts here. Control what you can control.”

Four mindset shifts to keep in mind:

You’re not lazy or failing.
You’re likely mentally, physically, and emotionally maxed out.
Focus on awareness and small, intentional changes.
Remember, the goal is not to fix everything overnight, but to start noticing and making small, manageable changes.

Your next read: Overcome the No. 1 Challenge in Passing Down Your Family Farm

Grit, Grease, and Gears: Meet the Colorado Teen Breathing New Life into Old Tractors

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 20:43:14 GMT

Colorado teenager Tyson Hansen is a shining example of that old saying “If you start them young…”

That’s because Hansen, 17, has cultivated a rare passion for buying and restoring classic tractors. It is a passion passed down from his great grandfather, who started the Hansen family farm and pieced together a massive tractor fleet over the years.

“He had over 200-some tractors, mostly two-cylinder, and when he passed, they had the big auction and my dad bought one to remember him by, and well now it’s our family tractor,” Hansen remembers. “My dad still talks about the first day he let me drive it, and he always says since that first ride, I was just hooked.”

The tractor that launched his lifelong love for tractors - the 1934 John Deere GP in all its glory.

(Photo courtesy of Mecum Auctions)

That first taste of classic tractor heaven was on the hardened steel green seat of a 1934 John Deere GP, a popular two-plow row crop setup John Deere built and sold from 1928 to 1935.

The high school junior says he’s wrenched on about 16 to 17 classic tractors at this point, all while participating in his high school FFA program and wrestling for the varsity team. And it’s not a hobby he tackles alone in a dusty, dark barn – his dad, stepmom, and brother all pitch in and help out. Because everyone knows nothing brings a family closer than bonding over busted knuckles and stripped chassis bolts.

Tyson says his family is “pretty much a John Deere family” but that he has started to feel the pull from other legacy brands.

“I started out as a John Deere guy, but I don’t even actually own any John Deeres,” he says, adding that right now his personal collection consists of two classic Case IH tractors and two Farmalls.

That doesn’t mean a young man can’t dream big, though, and Tyson’s big dream restoration project is to someday fix up a John Deere Model R.

He purchased his latest tractor, a Case 400 Super Diesel Western Special Edition with a hand clutch – one of only eight ever built, he says – with the goal of fixing it up and flipping it to raise enough cash to make that dream a reality.

“Once I got that tractor I went online and looked up some Facebook groups where the guys are all about Case, and I didn’t know anything about them at the time, so I just started asking guys for help and next thing I know within an hour I had about seven or eight texts from guys asking to buy that thing off me,” he says. “That’s when I realized that 400 is a little rarer than I figured it would have been.”

His Case 400 is also going to end up helping his fellow students in the FFA program. Tyson’s FFA teacher has asked him to bring the 400 in and is going to let the young man lead his classmates through a lesson on how diesel engines work.

Work is a key word in any farming family, and the Hansen family is no different.

“I don’t know why, my dad always tells me I won’t like it when I am out of high school, but I like to work,” Hansen says. “I guess I’ve just got a working mindset – I’m not the biggest fan of sitting in the house.”

Check out Tyson Hansen’s latest Tractor Tales spotlight below, where the teen shows off his rebuilt Case 400 tractor. And subscribe to the Farm Journal YouTube channel to get all of the latest Tractor Tale videos.

Also keep an eye on U.S. Farm Report every Saturday morning for the debut of the newest Tractor Tales feature.

Your Next Read: 2001 John Deere Smashes Record With $132,500 Price Tag

We Asked, You Answered: What I’d Do With A Tesla Robot

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 14:52:56 GMT

Back in October, we asked our readers to give us examples of how they would put one of Tesla’s new Optimus robots to work around the farm. The responses – at least the ones that are suitable to print – certainly did not disappoint.

Here’s a handful of quotes from AgWeb.com readers:

“I need two of them to help me out here in the maintenance building. For the past 17 years it has been a one-man shop, which is a challenge when there is no one to hold the other end, but I managed. I am getting older now and would be willing to train my replacements on how to build, operate, maintain, and repair agricultural equipment…”

“Walking Beans”

“My list would be long and sweaty. But I would need an educated “bot”. One with lots of letters behind his/her name....like PhD....for Post Hole Digger!”

No Hazmat Suit Necessary

(Illustration: Lori Hays)

“Spot spraying weeds.”

“Check grain bins, pick up rocks, clean fence lines, mow the lawn, help shovel and sweep bins out, help clean equipment up spring and fall, you name it him and me would be busy.”

New Year, New Gloves: Here's How to Find the Right Glove for the Job

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 20:33:27 GMT

Leather work gloves are often considered “consumables” on farms and ranches due to the frequency with which they wear out or go missing. Farmers and ranchers can buy fewer gloves, that last longer, if they know how to match glove design and type of leather to their job description.

According to Mike McGuire, agricultural sales manager for Wells Lamont:

Cowhide leather is the standard for durability and comfort in farm and ranch gloves. Split cowhide is slightly more durable than smooth-grain cowhide.
Calfskin gloves are softer than cowhide, more supple than cowhide, but more prone to punctures and cuts.
Deerskin gloves are the top seller in many farm stores. Deerskin is by nature softer and more flexible than cowhide, but not as resistant to punctures and rough use.
Goatskin is thinner and nearly as tough as cowhide when it comes to abrasion, but susceptible to puncture by thorns or barbed wire.
Pigskin isn’t as supple as other leathers, but is breathable and relatively puncture resistant.
Buffalo-hide gloves, made from water buffalo leather, are noted for good durability, a stretchy “feel,” and are somewhat water resistant.

Design-wise, many leather gloves are labeled “drivers gloves,” not to be confused with “driving gloves.”

According to Clark Carlile, with Bear Knuckle Gloves, the driving glove made its appearance during the 1890s when auto drivers wore gloves because cars were unheated and steering wheels were made of bare metal. Cowboys adopted that style of gloves to protect their hands during cattle drives, and driver gloves became standard in farm and ranch work.

The leather in most driver gloves is between 0.9 mm and 1.1 mm thick. Carlile says his company offers 1.4 mm thick gloves made of cowhide.

“They’re durable,” he says. “Firefighters, brick-layers and guys working with barbed wire like the protection and toughness a thicker glove offers.”

Price is a fair indicator of quality. “Gimme gloves” gifted by seed corn dealers or other farm retailers cost around $12 per pair. Standard farm store gloves retail for between $15 to $25, depending on type of leather, reinforcing of fingers/palms, and other features. Fitted leather work gloves found on the internet sell for between $35 and $45 per pair.

“Economy gloves need to be broken in to be comfortable,” Carlile says. “If you buy quality gloves and match the type of leather to the work you’ll be doing, you’ll have comfortable, durable gloves that will last a long time.”

As for “lost” gloves — ask your dog.

How a Farm Journal Ad Led to Love and Legacy

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 23:12:49 GMT

Before there was eHarmony and Match.com, and before people were swiping right or left to find the love of their life, there was Farm Journal.

In August 1984, a Farm Journal story, “Finding a mate got you buffaloed?,” coupled with personal ads created a farming legacy that is still alive and well on at least one farm today.

In the aftermath of that article, a farm girl in southwest Iowa named Pat would find love all the way in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in Fort Ann, N.Y. Under a listing that began: “My worst habits are losing gloves and sunglasses and tracking dirt in the house,” Pat first learned of Douglas Fuller, a young dairyman who was also looking for love. She circled the listing and wrote “yes” above it.

Soon after, they started corresponding through letters.

“Her letters were well-written, and she started sending chocolate chip cookies with them,” he recalls.

Their cross-country courtship lasted only three dates before Pat packed up her truck for New York for good to marry Doug.

Thirty years later, the legacy of that single piece of magazine print is still alive. Though Pat passed away in 2020, Doug now works alongside their daughter, Olivia, and her partner, Tom, to continue the family’s farming tradition in now the fourth generation of Fuller Acres Farm.

“I’ve always felt a deep connection to agriculture and feel lucky to have farming families on both sides,” Olivia says. “I was lucky to grow up knowing what it meant to be a steward of the land and everything that went into raising our food.”

Though returning to Fuller Acres Farm has been far from easy, Olivia says it has been the best decision of her life.

Visit Fuller Acres Farm to learn how she is carrying on her family’s legacy and elevating conservation efforts.

Do you know someone who found love like Doug and Pat Fuller thanks to Farm Journal’s August 1984 story, “Finding a mate got you buffaloed?” and personal ads? Or maybe they connected through the Rural Singles Directory Farm Journal published in the mid-1990s. If so, we want to hear about it. Send an email to editors@farmjournal.com.

Your Next Read: Is Now The Right Time To Ditch Tradition On The Farm?

Monster Deer Madness: Iowa Farmer Nabs Antler Thieves, Busts Multistate Shed Ring

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 14:40:10 GMT

Lathered in sweat and eating distance like a hot-nose coonhound, Steve Snow’s blood surged as he zigzagged through timber and followed a trail of fresh boot prints outlined in mud and ice—the telltale, fresh tracks of a shed poacher.

Spilling from the tree line where the prints withered in matted grass, whitetail legend Snow checked up and stared into the expanse of a 4,000-acre Iowa farm. Cemetery silence. Zero wind. He could feel, but not see, his quarry. Through cupped hands, Snow shouted a stone-cold warning across the pasture: “Billy Switek, you’re a piece of s*** thief. I’m coming for you.”

Reap the whirlwind. When Snow collared Switek* (suspect’s name changed; no court conviction), he exposed an organized ring of out-of-state bottom feeders stealing tens of thousands of dollars in antlers from multiple landowners across at least three years of theft, guided by aerial maps and insider tips, and devoid of prosecutorial fear.

“Law enforcement warnings and tiny fines don’t stop these kinds of thieves,” Snow says. “We caught them red-handed, and they won’t be back, but more are coming in their place. More always come.”

Welcome to hot pursuit in a wooly tangle of stolen sheds—and a dose of frontier justice.

A Bare Cupboard

Whether Bass Pro Shop wall hangers or Boone and Crockett winners, some of the finest U.S. whitetail on record hail from a chain of counties in southern Iowa. The region is the realm of thick-necked bulls wearing bone crowns—magnificent antlers that drive outlaws to lust and larceny.

Every late winter, according to God’s clockwork, bucks lose their antlers in mid-January to mid-March. The fallen horns—sheds—are Easter eggs to many sportsmen who legitimately hunt farms or woods by checking trails and bedding areas for specimens.

In 2009 and 2010, Steve Snow was alarmed by the near complete absence of freshly dropped sheds. Giant, big, tweeners, small, all gone in hit-and-run raids.

(Photo by Jon Jackson Bennett)

Particularly on high-management operations, sheds are the history of a herd, and invaluable provenance of health and vitality, i.e., DNA on a rack. In southern Iowa, a given landowner might spend $20,000 on the low end for deer management—food plots, minerals, and progression of a herd to an older age class. Fostered over generations of landowner effort, the results are mature, healthy deer with magnificent antlers, and thereby, beautiful sheds.

“A shed record ties in directly to land value because it shows what’s in your herd,” Snow explains. “When someone steals sheds, they’re also erasing the biography of your operation and taking your data. Literally, the theft impacts your land value, because potential buyers may want to see a succession of sheds.”

Awaiting the annual guarantee of antler drop, thieves arrive in shed season like bees to honey, hopping private property lines to steal from those who manage. Parasites.

“It boils down to money,” Snow says. “Trespass on someone else’s land; rob their antlers; sell them online; pocket $150 to $350 per antler on the nice ones, or way, way more. A truly big or unique antler can bring some serious money. And if they get caught, they can pay the fine with eBay proceeds, and have plenty of profit left to make it worthwhile. And do it all again the next year.”

“Bank robbers want to break into vaults with lots of money,” he adds. “Shed thieves want to break into whitetail versions of Fort Knox and take everything, and they know the law will do nothing beyond a small fine. Do the math: Robbing sheds is well worth it to these sonuvabitches.”

Snow doesn’t waste words. In 2009 and 2010, across his meticulously managed deer population, he was alarmed by the near complete absence of freshly dropped sheds. Giant, big, tweeners, small—all gone in hit-and-run raids. The cupboard was picked bare.

Greed Grows

Snow’s name is synonymous with monster deer—and by extension, monster sheds. With a hunting career often spent in the spotlight of video, television, and radio, Snow is a renowned bowhunter distinguished by his outdoor prowess and whitetail knowledge.

Traumatic shoulder injuries forced him to give up the bowstring, but in 2009, the lifetime farmer (raised in the Minnesota dairy industry) managed a 4,000-acre operation specifically for whitetails and row crops, along with his 1,400-acre farm in Decatur County—both locations home to superb whitetail genetics.

“There are millions of wonderful people involved in hunting, but also a few bad apples,” says Snow.

(Photo courtesy of Steve Snow)

The 4,000-acre farm contained south-facing slopes: In winter, deer grazed and then bedded on the sun-soaked grassy hillsides. Therefore, the bulk of sheds dropped on the slopes. Yet, in 2009 and 2010, when Snow tried to collect sheds in mid-March (an effort to ease pressure on the herd and allow all antlers to fall), he found the slopes denuded of specimens. Best estimation: Poachers hit in late February or early March.

“Two years running and we found almost nothing from the finest antlers to the smallest, and those were critical to management. For example, if you see a 30”-jump between sheds from a buck, it’s clear evidence of giant potential.”

Theft was evident, but what Snow didn’t know, what he couldn’t know—the bone collectors originated 500 miles to the northeast. And their shed greed was only just beginning to grow.

How was Snow to respond? File police reports? More posted signs? No and no, he explains. “My only long-term solution was to catch them, sheds in hand.”

But on big acres with big calendar windows of opportunity, nabbing poachers is a tall task, sometimes eased by a tipoff. In January 2011, Snow’s cell screen brightened with an unrecognized area code from a nearby Midwestern state. An unfamiliar voice crackled on the line: “Mr. Snow, everything I’m about to tell you is what you don’t want to hear.”

The Hayfield Buck

Snow had tapped a leak. Over the phone, Will Rutland* (name changed to protect identity), a legitimate shed collector, poured out a buck-wild tale. Rutland claimed that while hunting antlers on public land, he met a horn hunter from Milwaukee, Wisc., who boasted of finding massive sheds of quantity in southern Iowa. The Wisconsin collector described county, land, farm, and deer associated with the claims.

Rutland’s in-person conversation led to a continued online acquaintance where the Wisconsin collector emailed shed pictures and provided further detail: I parked by a cattle pasture and crossed the blacktop to a big farm where they do video stuff.

Wildlife outlaws are repeat offenders. Seldom does a poacher repent on the Damascus Road, and almost never does a poacher pull a one-and-done.

(Photo by Chris Bennett)

Aware of Snow’s media presence, reputation in the whitetail community, and approximate location in Decatur County, Rutland connected the dots and became convinced the Wisconsin collector had stolen from Snow.

Every word from Rutland resonated with Snow. “It was a match—all of it. I had a source from out of state telling me about a thief from another state, and the source knew about sheds from a special, special deer we called the ‘Hayfield Buck.’ Nobody, and I mean nobody, could have known such detail.”

Rutland assured Snow he would stay in contact with the Wisconsin thief and keep an ear to the ground. True to his word, Rutland called back weeks later: “March. Steve, he’s going to steal from you close to Saturday, the first week in March. His name is Jim Jacoby* (suspect’s name changed; no court conviction).”

Bingo. Patience to bow hunt; patience to catch a shed thief. Snow would be ready. “It’s an upside-down world,” he says. “A guy from Wisconsin was driving seven or eight hours and 500 miles to rob us, but I knew that somebody would twist things to make me be the bad guy. But one thing for sure, I’d be waiting for him.”

No Honor Among Thieves

With roughly eight lookouts spaced along a blacktop road, per Rutland’s warning, Snow waited to trap a rat. Clear morning, first Saturday of the month, Snow and company were in position and on red alert.

In less than an hour, Snow’s cell buzzed. His crew had found a vehicle parked at the butt of a dead-end road, across the blacktop from the farm—a sedan with Wisconsin plates. The unlocked car’s contents revealed a stunning scope of theft. Sprawled across the backseat, aerial maps rested in plain view, including maps of the 4,000-acre farm, maps of Snow’s 1,400-acre farm, and maps of Lee Lakosky’s nearby highly esteemed ground. Snow’s pulse raged as reality dawned: He was dealing with a rattlesnake, not a sticky-fingered local amateur.

In 2024, the Iowa legislature passed a new law, doubling the fine for a first offense hunting trespass from $265 to $500. A second offense was bumped to $1,000.

(Photo by Jon Jackson Bennett)

On pace with the map revelation, Snow’s cell flashed with a notification from a camera positioned in the middle of the farm. He stared at a real-time photo of a backpack-toting individual, Jim Jacoby, bending over to steal a shed. The antler in Jacoby’s hand had been purposely placed by Snow several days prior as bait to capture imagery of a potential thief via the lens of perfectly hidden trail-cam.

“In that instant, I literally knew right where he was standing,” Snow recalls. “The man in the picture sure as hell wasn’t one of us, and he was roughly 1 mile into the property.”

“Things came together because this same day, the farm owner and one of his buddies were on site to hunt sheds,” Snow continues. “I called and asked him to drive near the location of that camera and rev his 4-wheeler. The rest of us waited on the road for the thief to come out.”

As expected, Jacoby sprinted across a pasture toward the dead-end road and his parked escape vehicle—where he was collared by Snow’s waiting help. To Snow’s surprise, solo was duo. Jacoby was accompanied by a partner in crime, Michael Mahoney* (suspect’s name changed; no court conviction), and both men were clad head to toe in camo.

Livid, Snow approached Jacoby: 30-something, stockily built, tattooed, and the apparent leader of the twosome.

“You wanted to meet me? Here I am,” Snow snapped.

In possession of Snow’s antlers, as well as maps depicting numerous properties, and guilty of theft across at least a three-year span, the first words from Jacoby’s mouth revealed a total lack of remorse: “F*** you.”

Coldblooded. Unrepentant.

Snow balled his fist, stepped toward Jacoby, and disincentivized a return trip in the manner of Woodrow F. Call.

In the background, Jacoby’s confederate, Mahoney, crumbled. No honor among thieves. Mahoney talked: The pair were associated with other thieves as well—a web of theft. Presumably, they were hitting farms beyond Iowa, and possibly active on the road from the start to finish of shed season.

“I saw red and wanted these guys to pay in blood,” Snow says. “It all got splashed on the internet by the social media cowards, making me out as the one in the wrong. People behind a keyboard are desperate to excuse thieves, but if you want to protect what you’ve worked for your entire life to own, you better be self-reliant. These criminals were predators, searching for private property to abuse, and they factored the risks to be worth any penalties. At least I made certain they’d never come back to our county. Then again, I never dreamed a different one of the bunch would show right back up to steal from us the following year.”

And this time the shed trail led from the farm to a motel room cache.

No Shame

Fast forward 12 months, up to the beginning of March 2012. Freakish weather. Snowfall followed by 70-plus degree days produced a near-complete melt in Decatur County, except for patches of 1” powder hiding in heavy shade and timber.

Ready for a day collecting sheds, Snow was pumped for the hunt when he spotted a car parked across the blacktop on a wet gravel road. Polk County (Des Moines) plates. Odd. Incongruent.

Curiosity building, Snow pulled in behind the vehicle and copied the license plate number. Boot prints stamped in gravel sludge led toward the blacktop. Crossing over, Snow found the tracks again in gravel, stretching 50 yards parallel to the road, jumping a ditch, and entering the farm property. No doubt. A shed thief.

“Do the math: Robbing sheds is well worth it to these sonuvabitches,” says Snow.

(Photo by Chris Bennett)

“I started moving fast, following these prints in timber. Most trespassing shed thieves wait until all snow has gone, but this guy was too greedy and got in before complete melt. I called my wife and told her to call the law, let them know we had a trespasser, and run the plates. She called back and said the car was a rental out of Des Moines, registered to Billy Switek.”

Inside the timber, Snow’s rage doubled at the site of more tracks, but outlined with less definition, crisscrossed beneath the fresh prints. No question, Switek walked the path a day before. He had already stolen sheds.

“I came out of the trees on top of a hill to a south-facing grass field that catches sun and had no snow. No boot prints. Everything was perfectly still and quiet. You could hear a pin drop. Knowing Switek would hear me, I yelled a threat as loud as I could to scare the hell out of him.”

Snow then doubled back to Switek’s car, prepared to play the waiting game. Assisted by his son, Snow wedged the rental car bumpers between two old Chevy three-quarter ton trucks. Switek was pinned.

“A sheriff’s deputy drove out to take a look and said that I had Switek’s vehicle in false containment. The deputy said if Switek walked out with antlers, he’d write him a trespass ticket. I said, ‘That’s it?’ and he came back with, ‘They’re just deer antlers.’ I had choice words for the deputy.”

“One, I knew Switek wasn’t coming down the road with antlers because he knew I was waiting. Two, even if he was crazy enough to do so, I couldn’t prove in that instant that he stole them from us. I knew Switek would stash the antlers before he got on the blacktop. He could even stash them in a road ditch right-of-way, and that’s country property, and we would have no recourse.”

Exhausted after hours of a winding cat-and-mouse game, and wet to the ears, Snow left his son on sentry duty, and zipped home in his truck for a change of clothes. Slipping on dry socks with 30 minutes of daylight left, Snow’s phone vibrated: “Dad, the guy is walking down the road from the opposite direction, approaching from the north away from the farm.”

Engine roaring back to the gravel road, Snow was face-to-face with Switek just two minutes after the call.

“You’re a trespasser and a piece of s*** thief,” Snow raged. “You and me on this gravel, right now.”

Dressed in camouflage, roughly 60 years old, Switek crumbled, begging for mercy. “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. I’ll pay you for what we took. I’ll come and work for you for free.”

“You’re a damn liar. Just show me where the sheds are.”

“I’ll go get’em.”

“Hell no. We are going to get them together. In my truck, now.”

As Switek groveled in the cab, Snow drove a quarter mile. “He tells me to stop the truck and we got out and walked on our property about 100 yards along a creek,” Snow recalls. “On the ground, there was a backpack with a half-dozen sheds sticking out.”

Climbing back in the cab, Snow delivered an unexpected ultimatum: “Now, I want our antlers from yesterday.”

“Yesterday?” Switek feigned.

“Don’t give me that s***. I saw your other boot prints. Blink, or try anything other than telling the truth, and you’re not getting out of this truck.”

Switek’s memory instantly cleared: “They’re in my motel room.”

Indeed. Switek had flown from Milwaukee into Des Moines, rented a car, and holed up in a Clarke County motel.

Pistol on hip in case of trouble, Snow drove to the motel, and frog-marched Switek to the room, where the thief opened the door on an antler cache. Sheds blanketed the bed, but the prize was hidden.

Switek grabbed a bedside suitcase and opened the lid, revealing a carefully wrapped monster antler. “It was a 100” antler from the Hayfield Buck,” Snow says. “He had it packaged and ready to go. By itself, it might have brought $2,000 at the time. I have zero doubt he had more sheds than what were in the motel room, but I never found them.”

Recovering his stolen property, Snow gave Switek a final warning. “I made it crystal clear to him. Never, never return to our property or anywhere near it.”

Despite Switek’s pleadings, was he genuinely contrite?

A brazen answer came months later. Snow’s mailbox clinked with a letter from Switek, asking to buy the Hayfield Buck antler for $5,000.

“That shows the mindset of these thieves,” Snow says. “No shame.”

Damascus Road

Every deer season, Snow attempts to guide a youth hunt. Harvesting a deer, particularly for young teen who might not otherwise have the opportunity, can be a formative experience, Snow says. “Hunting should be about true love and respect of the outdoors. Across this country, there’s so many wonderful people involved, but the few poachers and trespassers don’t care about what’s right. If I stole sheds from them, you can rest assured they’d take action. Myself and most property owners just want to be left alone. Again, there are millions of wonderful people involved in hunting, but also a few bad apples.”

What might be an appropriate penalty for deer shed theft on private property?

In 2024, the Iowa legislature passed a new law, doubling the fine for a first offense hunting trespass from $265 to $500. A second offense was bumped to $1,000.

“Bank robbers want to break into vaults with lots of money. Shed thieves want to break into whitetail versions of Fort Knox and take everything,” says Snow.

(Photo by Utah DWR)

Snow doubts the deterrent effect. He recommends a $1,000 fine for the first offense; $2,000 and 5-year loss of hunting privileges for a second offense. And no verbal warnings.

“All the people I know with great deer and farm properties busted their asses to build what they have. Take a step back and look at the big picture. Taking sheds is theft and fundamentally wrong, end of story. If the antlers are big enough and worth enough, fines alone will not stop thieves if the math works in their favor.”

Wildlife outlaws are repeat offenders. Seldom does a poacher repent on the Damascus Road, and almost never does a poacher pull a one-and-done. With a lifetime volume of stories in his pocket, Snow has witnessed offenders of all stripes.

“Several years ago, I got a call from an out-of-town neighbor who got a cell camera notification of trespassers on his land. I crept over a hill and spotted a man strapped with a .44 pistol, with two kids—probably a 12- and 4-year-old. They packed my neighbor’s ground blind, along with a ladder sticks, antlers, and a tree stand—all they could carry.”

“I came out of hiding and hollered out, ‘Nice haul, %#%#%#.’”

Snow walked the trio off the land and to the nearest road, into an adjacent church parking lot, allowing the adult to assume the landowner (a sheriff’s deputy was in route) was on the way. Moving 50 yards away to ease the tension, Snow watched as the sheriff’s department vehicle came into view.

“The guy grabbed his pistol, gave it to the 12-year-old, and pointed for him to go hide it behind the church building,” Snow recalls. “The deputy pulls up and this guy lies that his name is ‘Jack Black,’ just like the movie actor.”

However, the deputy recognized the thief as Justin Mason—a convicted poacher—and Snow had helped nab Mason over a decade prior.

“About 15 years earlier, I heard a gunshot at 5 a.m., found his truck headlights, and followed him into town,” Snow recalls. “Long story short, the wardens raided him and found 52 racks. It became one of the biggest poaching stories of the last 50 years.”

However, on this occasion, Mason faced no charges. “Crazy, crazy,” Snow exclaims. “I caught him in action, but because all the stolen goods technically never left my neighbor’s property, he was allowed to walk.”

Paying the Price

What advice does Snow have for other landowners or land managers?

Cameras play an important security role, but are only a partial answer. “You can’t put cameras on big acres and solve anything,” Snow contends. “There’s nothing unusual about shed thieves putting on ski masks and staring right into your cameras. No, even if they work to perfection and don’t ever go down in service, they will not stop a determined thief that pulls a grab-and-go. If you have a lot of acres to protect, some other technology is needed.”

“Law enforcement warnings and tiny fines don’t stop these kinds of thieves,” Snow says. “We caught them red-handed, and they won’t be back, but more are coming in their place.”

(Photo courtesy of Steve Snow)

“I’m hoping satellite technology becomes available that can cover an entire operation. If it really worked, guys would pay a tremendous amount for that kind of security.”

In the meantime, Snow stays vigilant. “Sometimes in the public’s eye, everything gets turned around if you don’t react meekly. You become the bad guy for protecting private property, but I’m willing to pay that price. Shed poachers are the sort that’ll do anything when they think no one is looking. I’ll never hesitate to say they’re liars and thieves.”

For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man

Ghost in the House: A Forgotten American Farming Tragedy

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud

Evil Grain: The Wild Tale of History’s Biggest Crop Insurance Scam

Fleecing the Farm: How a Fake Crop Fueled a Bizarre $25 Million Ag Scam

The Arrowhead Whisperer: Stunning Indian Artifact Collection Found on Farmland

Skeleton In the Walls: Mysterious Arkansas Farmhouse Hides Civil War History

Harvesting the Good Life: Pennsylvania Farmer Continues to Run Silage Chopper at 96 Years Old

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 15:06:10 GMT

2023 Harvest of Thanks is a special edition of both AgDay and U.S. Farm Report. The show helps celebrate and honor traditions, while also sharing stories of gratitude. 2023 Harvest of Thanks is sponsored by Case IH and BASF .

Under a grey overcast sky, a mist is falling, coating every step as Paul Dotterer grabs the ladder rails of his Claas Jaguar 900. He throws his cane to the top platform and wills his knees into position on the damp metal rungs. Sturdy arms, flex with a lifetime of experience, as he pulls himself to the top of each step and eventually into the captain’s chair.

“I spent a lot of hours in this thing,” Dotterer says as he grabs the controls. “We got this new in 2001.”

He turns the key and the machine roars to life one more time. He won’t get much done in these muddy fields today, but he’ll move it into position to start chopping once the rows dry out.

“Now a days we can take a harvester out and do in an hour what used to take you two weeks,” chuckles Dotterer as his eyes survey the Nittany Valley in Pennsylvania.

At 96 years young, Paul has been harvesting these fields for decades and he’s still running hard.

“He still drives and so he’ll run for parts or whatever,” says son John Dotterer. “I think that he does pretty well for 96.”

“I like to drive my truck and my boys send me everywhere,” adds Paul. “I’m here or there to get stuff. I’m the gopher.”

A Difficult Path

Paul and his wife Jean were married in 1949. A couple of years later, with help from his father-in-law they bought a small 15 cow dairy farm in Mill Hall, PA for $12,500.

“Before I even got married, I said I’ll never marry a farmer because I was raised on a farm,” laughs Jean now 93. “We did well. It was a lot of work but the kids helped when they got older.”

Together they tackled the chores. Paul handled the farming, custom harvesting, milk hauling and machinery work. Jean did most of the milking in those early years.

“My biggest asset was my wife,” Paul says with heartfelt admiration. “She helped me so much and if wouldn’t have been for her I don’t know if I’d made it.”

Together the family and the farm grew.

“We always laugh about how years ago our Surge dealer said one day you might get as high as 35 cows,” says granddaughter Katie Dotterer. “I’m literally standing where there’s 1200 cows that are milked three times a day every day.”

Today, 3 generations work together with a continuous focus on making this a diversified business. Through the years the Dotterers have found success in everything from custom fieldwork, to hauling milk, running an Allis-Chalmers equipment dealership, and now agritourism.

“My brother started a sunflower maize and got into selling sweet corn,” says granddaughter and dairy feed manager Lori Butler. “We have a lot of custom businesses and aren’t all in one business which is a good thing financially.”

Balancing all of these moving parts has always been a challenge.

“We just always try not to spend any more we absolutely have to,” adds son Larry Dotterer. “Sometimes I think we trip over a lot of dollars to pick up nickels.”

That frugality, a gift from family heads, Paul and Jean, continues to pay dividends.

“I just have to keep pinching myself because I think things are going too well sometimes,” says son John Dotterer with a smirk. “It’s fun and it’s better than a real job.”

As the third generation finds their feet, this well-oiled operation is hoping to build on its solid foundation.

“We’ve cobbled things up just to get through some hard times but we’re now getting to the phase of the farm where we’re going to redo and remodel some dairy barns,” says grandson Douglas Dotterer.

Today’s growing and modern farm isn’t lost on Paul. He knows building this business now would be much more difficult.

“If [young people] want to get into it today they better have a lot of money, a lot of effort and a lot of ambition,” says Paul. “It won’t come easy.”

A Viral Sensation

Back in August, dressed in his work whites on day 1 of harvest, his granddaughter, Lori handed him a sign and snapped a photo.

“I was like Pop we’re just going to do a quick photo,” recalls Butler. “He was just, we’re doing what? So, we took that quick photo and it kind of just blew up.”

A glimmer of glee twinkled in his eye as Paul wrapped his hands around a plaque most often used in those ambitious back-to-school photos.

“It’s just the look on my grandfather’s face,” says Katie. “You can just tell how happy he is.”

That joy, proudly posed in front of his Jaguar 900 found its way to social media and burned a viral path across the internet. His story and pure zeal for harvest on full display as the comments and shares poured in.

“I never won any prizes for my good looks,” laughs Paul.

“He can’t put in the hours he used to, but I think it would literally kill him if he couldn’t come here every day,” says Katie. “The farm is what keeps him going and this has been his passion his entire life.”

A Lifetime of Lessons

With the hustle of harvest on pause today, Paul takes time to reflect and appreciate the quiet moments.

“It’s just unbelievable the amount of change that has come in my lifetime,” he reflects. “The equipment makes a big difference in what we do and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. It used to be a lot of sweat and a lot of tears. Now, it’s just sitting in an air-conditioned cab.”

After a lifetime of sharing, his team continues to turn the lessons Paul taught them into action. When asked what they’ve learned from his example, the pattern is clear.

“Don’t take anything for granted and work hard,” says Douglas.

“When the sun shines, make hay and if you have weather, move, move, move,” adds John.

“Enjoy your vacations, but come back ready to work,” laughs Lori.

“Do what you got to do, and the cows come first,” follows Larry.

If you ask Paul what he’s learned from his decades amid the rows and amongst the cows.

“You just learn to appreciate what you’ve got,” says Paul. “Some year’s harvest wasn’t near what we’d like to have, while in other years it would be plentiful.”

As he drives toward his next field and his next harvest he might be slowing down, a little.

“I had to take his motorcycle from three years ago,” adds Larry. “No, really!”

Paul will tell you he’s nowhere near his final pass.

“I’m convinced if you like what you do, don’t sit down when you retire,” John says reflecting on his father’s legacy. “You won’t last long.”

Watch More Harvest of Thanks Stories:

Rare Tractor Treasure Kept By Virginia Family For Nearly 100 Years Symbolizes the Grit And Toil of 7 Generations

Hall of Fame Football Coach Credits Indiana Farm Roots

For more human interest stories, read:

The Best Halloween Costumes Tie Back to the Farm

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 14:46:03 GMT

Halloween: an opportunity for parents to squish their adorable children into itchy, feathery, sequin-filled works of art in an attempt to capture that perfect moment and share it on their social media feeds. Maybe it’s because I’m a farm kid at heart, but I think the best costume ideas come straight from the farm. And I’m not the only one on our team here at Farm Journal who feels that way.

In case you are still looking for that perfect costume for Halloween (or just enjoy cute kids on Halloween), here are some farm-friendly ideas shared by our team at Farm Journal.

“Farmer” aka Baylee from Indiana
Baylee’s mom, Joelle Orem, is the editor of AgFax and design director for The Scoop.

“The Pollinator” aka Hank from Texas
Hank’s mom, Kristin Lore, is the editor of The Packer.

“A Combine, Cowgirl & Cow” aka Hayden, Harper & Henley from Iowa
Their mom, Kayla Lichty, is the events manager at Farm Journal.

“Hungry Piglet” aka Harper from Illinois
Harper’s mom, Jennifer Shike, is the editor of Farm Journal’s PORK.

“Popeye holding a gallon of MILK” aka Tyler of Illinois
Tyler’s mom, Karen Bohnert, is the editor of Dairy Herd Management and Milk Business Quarterly.

“Combine” aka Grant of Wisconsin
Grant’s mom, Annie McCullough, is a national accounts manager for livestock at Farm Journal.

“Lil’ Corn Cob” aka Kinsler of Missouri
Kinsler’s mom, Tyne Morgan, is the host of U.S. Farm Report.

“A Pig Showman, Judge, Ninja Turtle and Pig” aka Curtis, Colin, Keegan and Crosby of Missouri
Their mom, Katie Humphreys, is the content director for Farm Journal.

We’d love to see your great “farm-themed” costumes. Tag us on social #FJHalloween.

Read More:

5 Tips for a Spooky, Safe Halloween

6 Spooktacular Beef, Pork and Dairy Treats for Halloween

An Ode to the Grain Cart Driver

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 14:42:59 GMT

I watch in awe as my small-framed, five-foot, seven-inch daughter drives our John Deere 8345R, pulling the 1,050-bushel grain cart like it’s her business. Which is good because that was her job this past weekend. And, when she pulled up next to the semi-truck and trailer that her father and I were in to unload it, I nervously said to her father, ‘She is so close.’ He assures me she is exactly where she needs to be.

I then watched Cassie evenly unload the grain cart into our hopper bottom trailer and quickly make a mad dash, driving away to hustle back to the combine. Once again, she is only a couple of feet away from the 8-row corn head with one hand steering and the other one taking another a call from the combine driver. Her grandfather.

Stubborn and a tad grouchy with rain on the horizon, Grandpa Jim gives her orders on where she needs to go. She sternly replies, “I know where I need to be.” Not too many people get away with talking to my husband’s 68-year-old father like that, but his 17-year-old granddaughter does. After all, she kinda runs the show.

Cassie is reliable and quick, and her driving skills have always turned heads. At age 11, she helped her grandfather haul round bales off a field. Cassie drove the dully and flatbed trailer around the field as her grandfather stacked round bales on the trailer. The twosome did this for hours, and then when they were done, Cassie pulled up around the barn and backed the truck and trailer in between two semi-trailers and dropped the trailer. The men watched her in awe. Soon after she was promoted to grain cart driver.

As a grain cart driver, Cassie must be a great mind reader. She must understand all those hand signals that are hard to interpret and hard to see when the sun is blaring through the window. Grandpa Jim likes to communicate with radios; Cassie does not. The day those radios mysteriously went missing, Cassie received 20 phone calls.

Those who have ever had this job understand all too well that the grain cart driver often is the person that takes all the blame. “Why is corn on the ground?” And demands you to speed up, then slow down and don’t drive through that. And, yells where the heck are you? That’s when my Cassie replies, “Grandpa, I can only drive so fast.”

Over two days, Saturday and Sunday, Cassie clocked in more than 20 hours. Only farmers will understand that isn’t a typo and only a farm kid will appreciate those long hours equal a heck of a paycheck, making it all worthwhile.

Paul Harvey said, “God made a Farmer,” but what he didn’t say, is that God also made a grain cart operator who can stand the toughest situations. Even when the operator is a high school senior, who I remind if you can successfully run the grain cart, then you can do anything.

Leadership Advice: Ask For Honest Feedback

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 15:29:44 GMT

Since receiving his Masters of Entomology from the University of Arkansas, Keith Vodrazka has served over 20 years in a number of U.S. and global agribusiness roles. Today, he’s leading Evoia, a biostimulant business that uses fire to turn waste wood chips into biochar and then extracts the plant beneficial compounds for use as a liquid seed treatment. It’s an entrepreneurial startup with big plans and different leadership challenges than he experienced during his days in big agribusiness.

Q: How would you describe your leadership style?

A: “I would call it authenticity. Talk is cheap — it must be backed with action. I think part of what goes with that is integrity, and doing what you say you’ll do, when you say you’ll do it. I found when leaders did that, I trusted them more and the effect of that trust on the organization was very beneficial.”

Q: What’s the most challenging thing about running a ‘new’ brand or company?

A: “As a smaller company, losing focus and having complexity are two things that can really take us way off track. There’s always the temptation to chase a shiny object. There’s a lot of new, innovative, creative ideas about how to approach the market with things like biostimulants and biofertilizers. The most challenging thing is staying focused on what we need to accomplish without being distracted. Secondly, I think it’s hard to keep things simple or reduce complexity.”

Q: What are your favorite business tools?

A: “I like something I can use for good communication and collaboration and something to keep up with numbers. The ability to hop on Microsoft Teams and communicate easily with people, not just in the U.S., but even globally, is of immense value. I’m also an old Excel or spreadsheets fan.”

Q: What does success look like to you?

A: “We measure success by hitting numbers, achieving goals or reaching key milestones. But if you leave it at just numbers, you’re missing something. We all have to deliver some value to stakeholders. That’s obvious, but sometimes we miss the fact that success also has to be measured in terms of having an organization of people that are inspired, passionate and eager to come to work.”

Q: What’s your best advice for others looking to take on a leadership role?

A: “Get honest feedback. You need to ask for it, and I don’t think we do that enough. I was in a situational analysis group where they asked: “If you were in this or that situation, what would you do?” Some senior leaders in the organization were there making observations to tell you where you could improve. It had such a positive impact on me that I’ve never forgotten it.”

Q: How do you relax and de-stress?

A: “Spending time with my three grandchildren isn’t always de-stressing, but it is in the sense that you get the perspective of the world they see. Another way, when I have more time, is I like to go fly fishing.”

Wild Pigs Inflict Freakish Damage On Alabama Farmer’s Crops And Cattle

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 13:42:31 GMT

Another dead calf. Another deep hole. Another strafe-bombed pasture. Welcome to a farm where the wild pigs roam.

A plague descends nightly on Carl and C.J. Jackson’s land as scores of wild pigs emerge from adjacent river bottoms, intent on rooting row crops and bulldozing fields. The level of destruction is stunning. “It’s taking us to a breaking point,” Carl says. “We’re getting close to wild pigs making it impossible to farm and when you add in deer damage, the costs are crazy.”

Multiple modes of trapping, electric fencing, and thermal shooting—yet the wild pigs thrive. “All of those help, but’s there’s no real solution,” C.J. explains. “The pigs are part of our farming reality. The only question is, ‘How bad will they get?’”

In an era when wild pig depredation is common in agriculture, the father-and-son farming duo have endured a freakish level of damage, periodically losing entire crop fields. “We’re at a place where if a piece of farmland becomes available, our first question isn’t, ‘What about soil or drainage?” C.J. adds. “It’s, ‘What about pigs and deer?’”

Calf Killers

In a realm of heavy timber, Spanish moss, and big gators, the Jacksons run 200 cows and grow 800 acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat on leased, sandy ground in Wilcox County bottoms that rub the Alabama River in the southwest quarter of the Yellowhammer State.

“The turning of the ground by the pigs is something you’ve got to see with your own eyes to truly understand,” says C.J. Jackson.

(Photo by Double J Farms)

Against the ink of rural nightfall, in the glow of a thermal ATN scope mounted atop an AR-15, C.J. counts 25 wild pigs—multiple sounders of sows and piglets, and several boars—laced through his cattle herd. Beyond the simple differences in size and morphology, the pigs are easily distinguished from cows: The pigs are never still.

Churning out a steady chatter of grinding, grunting, huffing, and squealing, and wearing coats ranging from classic black Russian to spotted whites and reds, the pigs are on a hunt for groceries—capable of foraging roots to feasting on row crops to eating tree nuts to consuming the remains of dead mammals to functioning as predators. The pigs are vacuums—daily eating 3% to 5% of body weight. “Typically, we see 200 lb. sows and boars that get much, much bigger,” describes 28-year-old C.J.

Extraordinary diggers, wild pigs sport an hourglass nasal bone floating in cartilage that provides backing for the snout pad, enabling them to lean in with stout neck muscles when rooting pasture and farmland, leaving a pocked, ravaged appearance across the flipped ground. (Yet, the same backhoe-like snout is also highly sensitive to smell, picking up scents from 5-plus miles away, or several feet beneath the soil.)

Pasture and hay field damage on the Jackson’s operation is widespread—and deep enough to trap livestock. “I’ve lost several calves to the pigs,” C.J. says. “They root grass and sometimes go down 2’ deep. The calves get stuck on their sides in the hog root holes, can’t get back up, and die. The turning of the ground by the pigs is something you’ve got to see with your own eyes to truly understand.”

“There’s one guarantee in the future and it’s not toxins, birth control, or a wipeout disease,” says C.J. Jackson. “No, the guarantee is the pigs are here to stay.”

(Photo by Double J Farms)

Repairs to rooted acreage are incessant, a steady drag on the flow of production, Carl concurs. “That ground has to be smoothed back over—money, time, and manhours. Try bailing hay across a root when you’re stuck in first gear when you should really be going about 7 miles per hour.”

“People who think you can trap or shoot your way out of the problem don’t have a clue,” Carl adds. “I know for sure we’ve got hundreds of pigs around us, but it seems like thousands. These creatures have intelligence and adaptability like nothing I’ve seen in my lifetime, and they come back smarter every time.”

“They Destroy Everything”

The wild pigs watch and wait for the opening bell of planting season.

Strip tillage on 30” rows doesn’t fare well under a wild pig’s feet, and replants are a given for the Jacksons. “In winter, the pig pressure drops,” C.J. notes. “They root covers, but nowhere to the extent of cash crops. But at planting, they’ll show up, every time. They can go down the row and get every seed in a straight line for half a mile.”

The wild pigs watch and wait for the opening bell of planting season.

(Photo by Double J Farms)

Once a crop is up, the pigs press harder. “They’re bad on corn like nothing else,” he says. “They don’t root in a pattern, but they’ll take out a row, move over a row, and knock down three more rows and keep it random. In just a couple days, you’re dealing with five or six acres with 50% stand. Do nothing and the damage explodes.”

“They destroy everything,” C.J. continues. “They don’t only consume a crop like deer.”

Strong words, considering deer take a sizable bite of C.J.’s grain yields: 75 deer munching in a 100-acre field is not unusual on his ground. “We’ve got relatively small deer, but tremendous numbers, and deer predation is terrible, especially in soybeans on the ends.”

Corn also takes a deer hit, Carl echoes. “There are so many deer that we’ve had them eat the small stalks, then the silk, and then the kernels when the corn was drying. We cull with permits and that’s a big help, but although deer damage is very significant, it doesn’t compare with wild pigs. With the pigs, we either stay active or we’re out of business.”

In 2013, Carl put electric fencing charged by 10,000 volts around three of his most heavily hit fields—a partial pig deterrent. “The electricity keeps the family groups out, but not the boars,” he says. “The big boars crash right through it. In those three fields, we couldn’t grow a crop if we didn’t have the electric fencing because of the pig pressure. Period.”

Typical wild pig damage on the Jackson operation—and the holes are sometimes significantly deeper than pictured.

(Photo by Double J Farms)

“A single pig will get in and knock down 30 stalks of corn and bite just four ears,” Carl notes. “Or he’ll root an area as big as a living room in one night in soybeans. Potentially multiply that by hundreds of pigs over time and the math is a nightmare.”

“We could go out literally every night and kill pigs,” Carl adds, “but there’s only so many hours in a day and only so much you can do against such an adaptive creature. For example, if you shoot a sow and the piglets get away, they don’t die. Instead, they can get adopted by another sow. I’ve seen sows with three different size piglets with my own eyes. That’s adaptation like nothing else.”

Shangri-La

In the early 1980s, wild pig presence covered 25 counties in Alabama. Today, every county in the state has wild pigs—a total population estimated at 250,000 that inflicts $55 million in agriculture damage per year, according to ACES. (Nationwide, the U.S. wild pig population, per APHIS, stands at 6 million-plus and inflicts over $1 billion in annual agriculture damage.)

“With the pigs, we either stay active or we’re out of business,” says Carl Jackson.

(Photo by Double J Farms)

Wilcox County, heavily timbered with ample bottom ground, is a wild pig Shangri-La. In Carl’s lifetime, Wilcox County has moved from rare wild pig sightings to wild pig roadkill regulars.

“Supposedly, some Russian boars were released nearby in the 1960s and 1970s to kill beavers,” he says. “Those same pigs never moved and thrived in the swamps. Then they exploded outward. Combine that with intentional releases from some hunters and the population went wild.”

In the early 1990s, Carl spotted the first wild pigs of his life—a pleasant curiosity at the time. “I thought they were kind of cool, just like another animal to hunt. I’d have never believed it if someone had told me destruction was following right behind.”

Bay of Pigs

Wild pigs reproduce at an exceptionally high rate, with sows often delivering two litters (six piglet average per litter) in 15 months. Females are reproductively capable at five to six months. Most wild pig biologists place the “control” bar at roughly 66% to 75%. Therefore, if a given region has a wild pig population of 100,000, then 66,000 to 75,000 must be killed each year—to keep the population at the floor of 100,000.

Trapping is an effective tool, but by no means a turnkey solution, C.J. describes. He uses net-style Pig Brig traps and electronic door traps, sometimes bagging entire sounders. “The traps work well, but the pigs still come back in waves and suddenly we’re covered.”

“Trapping, electric fencing, and shooting are what we have to do, but it’s two steps forward and three steps back because we’re not hurting their overall population. We either work to keep the pigs at bay or we don’t farm.”

Kill On Sight

Wild pig and deer damages are factored into the Jackson’s farming budget: yield loss, labor, equipment, and a tremendous load of time.

“When you see the damage up close, sometimes on a daily basis, it’s so disheartening to work so hard, pay the rent, pay the input prices, and then have a dern pig eat your seed or root your hayfield,” Carl says.

The Jacksons have deployed multiple modes of trapping, electric fencing, and thermal shooting—yet the wild pigs thrive.

(Photo by Double J Farms)

“Our wildlife expense is factored in our cost per acre to farm,” C.J. explains. “Let me put it this way: It’s a very significant number.”

At 28, how does C.J. see the wild pig equation in the future? “I hear about potential toxins and baits, but I’m not too hopeful. I don’t think anything will pan out long-term to make an overall difference.”

“There’s one guarantee in the future and it’s not toxins, birth control, or a wipeout disease,” he continues. “No, the guarantee is the pigs are here to stay. It’s only a question of their quantity and effect. Personally, I don’t see their numbers going down.”

Carl concludes with unvarnished advice: “I realize every state has its own hunting laws and views, but the only common-sense solution is to take out the pigs whenever possible. Kill on sight.”

For more articles from Chris Bennett ( cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

American Pie Reborn: How An Iowa Farmer Saved Buddy Holly

Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told

American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Power vs. Privacy: Landowner Sues Game Wardens, Challenges Property Intrusion

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm

The Life of the Iconic Butter Cow Lady

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 13:34:32 GMT

The Iowa State Fair in Des Moines is known for its corn dogs, livestock shows, and one particularly unique tradition—the iconic butter sculptures. Today, many people think back to “The Butter cow Lady” when going by the fair’s iconic butter sculptures.

Norma “Duffy” Lyon was more than okay with being known as the “The Butter Cow Lady.” Afterall, for nearly a half century, Lyon sculpted the butter cow and other creations at the Iowa State Fair. Her last sculpture was in 2005 and her creations over the years have included just about everything—from cows, Garth Brooks, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, Elvis and even Jesus and his disciples. She even once made a cheese bust of David Letterman.

Away from the fair’s limelight, Lyon enjoyed life on her family farm in Toledo, Iowa with her husband, Joe, and their nine children. Known for their nationally recognized herd of Jerseys, the Lyons were well-known figures in the dairy industry. Lyon’s butter cow status broadened that recognition even further.

Breaking Barriers
Before Lyon wowed fairgoers with her butter creations, she attended Iowa State University with the intent to study Veterinary Sciences. Her plans were thwarted, though, by a ban on women in the program. Instead, she pivoted to animal science and took up sculpture under the guidance of Christian Petersen. These skills would later serve her well in life.

Lyon’s journey with the butter cow began in 1960 when she took over from Earl Dutt. Known for her supreme standards, she famously remarked on Dutt’s work, “It was a good farm cow, but it wasn’t a show cow,” she once said to the Associated Press back in 1999. Her drive for perfection solidified her status as a fair icon.

An Enduring Legacy
The tradition of the butter cow at the Iowa State Fair dates back to 1911, but it was Lyon who truly brought it into the hearts of Iowans. In 1960, Lyon brought a new level of artistry to the Butter Cow, that was well admired from all corners of the earth, crafting it from U.S. Grade A salted butter.

Lyon was well-known beyond the Hawkeye State. She once publicly backed Barack Obama for president and appeared in campaign ads for him in 2007. She also appeared on the Today Show, Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman.

Sarah Pratt took over for Lyon in 2007 after an apprenticeship under Lyon starting when she was 14-years-old.

Lyon passed away in 2011 at the age of 81. Her daughter, Michelle, once said her mother loved for people to know her work and said simultaneously it was good public relations for the dairy industry, too.

2024 Iowa State Fair
The iconic Iowa State Fair butter cow will share her cooler with notable nighttime personalities this year. Long time Iowa State Fair butter sculptor Sarah Pratt, along with her apprentices Hannah and Grace, will be sculpting the likenesses of Iowans Johnny Carson and Steve Higgins as well as a sky glider seat to commemorate the 50th year of the Main Sky Glider. Steve Higgins is the announcer on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, so Jimmy Fallon will be joining the crew too.

The butter cow, along with butter versions of Iowans Steve Higgins and Johnny Carson and To-night Show host Jimmy Fallon, will be featured alongside an iconic sky glider chair as the main Sky Glider celebrates 50 years in 2024.

The butter sculptures will be on display in the John Deere Agriculture Building from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., during the Iowa State Fair, August 8-18, 2024.

Tale Of Survival: Kentucky Farmer Shares About His Rescue From A Grain Bin

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 21:42:05 GMT

On a mild summer day in mid-June, Doug Omer enjoys a few minutes in the shade with his family just outside Morganfield, Ky. It’s a precious moment he nearly missed during a life-threatening, nearly seven-hour ordeal back in 2022.

“We thought we were being safe, and we let our guard down for a second, and it almost cost me my life,” Omer says.

Omer and his father, Mike, started that day hauling corn. While he waited for Mike to return, Omer went to the top of the bin to look at the farm below.

“The bin was a little over half full, and we were on red alert because we had a little bit of a scum starting to form on top of the grain,” Omer explains. “We were afraid a chunk might flow down over one of the floor holes and choke everything up and so I was using a length of 1.25" pipe, 20' long, to smack the clumps when they came down.”

It wasn’t his first time doing this, and he knows it’s common in farm country.

“When I pulled in on the second load, he was sitting up top and said I’m going in the bin,” Mike recalls. “I said, OK!”

Typically, loading a semi is just an eight-minute job. Omer eased into the bin to watch for clumps while Mike turned on the auger to load. A rope was there, but, for whatever reason, Omer didn’t tie off.

“We were running for probably 20 seconds, and I hear this shh behind me,” Omer says. “I was standing about the top of my boots deep in corn but when it hit me, I dropped to the bottom of my pockets and the collapse moved me roughly 20' over the hole.”

A Sound He Will Never Forget

Luckily, Omer was next to the bin wall.

“I’m not real smart, but I knew I didn’t have enough Doug hanging out to last eight minutes, so I was beating on the wall,” he says. “As I sunk to my chest, the pressure started squeeze the life out of me. Jesus and I had a good talk, and I thought, Doug, this is how you’re going to die. In this freaking bin of corn.”

The realization gave him the strength to gather his breath for one last frenzy of banging on the bin wall.

“I heard a big bang, and I thought a bucket had come off the leg,” Mike says. “Then I heard another bang, and I knew the bucket hadn’t come off the leg because I’d already shut the leg down.”

“I got down to about my chin, and I laid my head back to give me a few extra seconds,” Omer recalls. “I still hear it in my dreams almost every night, that breaker kicked off at the top of the bin.”

All Hands On Deck

Everything stopped. Omer was trapped, buried and fighting for breath as the pressure continued to squeeze the life out of him.

“It’s 66 steps to the top of the bin, and my dad was 72 years old, but it seemed like a split second and he was up there,” Omer says. “He said, ‘I’m coming in,’ and I said, ‘If you come in here, it’ll bury me. You have to stay outside.’”

Doug Omer Rescue

(Doug Omer Family)

Mike called 911 and raced up the hill to grab Omer’s nephew. When the much younger Logan jumped in the bin, the grain indeed slid down covering Omer. He carefully dug the corn away and helped Omer catch his breath.

Once he wasn’t buried, Omer wanted to call his wife.

“I answered it, and it was Doug,” recounts his wife, Samantha Omer. “He said, ‘I just called to let you know that I’m drowning in the grain bin,’ and I said, ‘what?’ He told me again, and he said, ‘I just wanted to call and tell you I love you.’”

That started the clock on a six-hour race to save Omer’s life. More than 200 emergency personnel, neighbors, family and friends worked to pry him from grain’s grip and death’s door.

Emergency crews brought the only two bin rescue tubes in the county. Two bucket trucks showed up to help ferry tools, people and medical supplies from the ground to the top of the bin.

Two hours of rescue efforts went by.

“The way I was sitting, I wouldn’t fit in the tube, and they hit my right kneecap with the auger,” Omer says.

The team had to add a second set of tubes and move even more grain. Meanwhile, medical experts decided Omer needed IV’s and oxygen. By hour five, he was ready to do anything to be free.

“I wanted to cut my legs off,” Omer says. “I told them I’ll end this. I’ll just stick a saw down there and cut until something pops off. I was hurting that bad.”

At the six-hour mark, a team finally grabbed Omer’s harness and pulled.

“I went to screaming, you moved me, you moved me,” Omer says. “Instantly they hit me again, and they moved me about 6". They hit me a third time, and on the third pull I was standing up inside the tube.”

His hips, knees and ankles were dislocated from the pull’s force. They lifted him to the top of the tube, and his joints were pushed back in socket. Omer climbed on all fours to the top of the bin and was helped out of what nearly became his tomb.

“Everybody started cheering, and it took him a while to get down the steps, but he walked down each step,” smiles Samantha remembering the moment.

“We were just glad he was alive,” says an emotional Mike as the wave of relief crashed over him once again.

Omer’s family met him at the bottom of the bin, and he was ferried to a life flight helicopter standing by in the field. While in the air, the quick change in elevation sent his body into shock. The hours of pressure mimicked deep sea diving.

“I ran my hand up my headset, and it was full of blood,” Omer says. “I told the medical crew, this can’t be good.”

He had the bends or decompression sickness. The helicopter dropped elevation, flying as low as possible to Evansville, Ind. Doctors rushed Omer into the hospital. There, he was stabilized, his joints were reset, his vitals monitored, and at 11:30 p.m. that night, he walked out of the hospital and headed for home.

Doug Omer Family

(Clinton Griffiths)

Take Time to Slow Down

Two years later, the gift of life, continues for Omer thanks to hundreds of unnamed hands.

“Everything just worked out so perfectly,” Samantha says. “Some folks don’t think your hometown people can be heroes, but they were our heroes on that day.”

If you ask them their advice for other farmers working around grain bins, they’ll say you can never be too careful.

“Don’t think it can’t happen to you because he was 54 years old, and he’s been around them all of his life,” Samantha says. “It was that one incident that almost got him.”

Omer admits he was just in too much of a hurry that morning on what was typically a quick and simple job. He should have stayed out of the bin or at least tied himself off with the rope.

“Just stand back and look at it before you bale in there,” Omer says. “I mean, most farmers just get wound up and are in a hurry.”

He says if his story does anything, maybe it will encourage others to take a moment to think about safety, even on small jobs. That extra few seconds could be the difference between a quick end and a long and happy life.

Wells Fargo Report: At-Home Hamburgers 3x Cheaper Than Dining out

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 23:08:31 GMT

The annual Wells Fargo Fourth of July Food Report revealed for this year’s holiday home-cooked burgers would be three times cheaper than dining out.

The Agri-Food Institute team at Wells Fargo collected data showing the current cost of ingredients to prepare a quarter pound hamburger at home is $2.16 per burger (which includes cheese, tomato, and lettuce) whereas, the average of five popular quick service restaurants has a price of $6.95 for the same quarter-pound hamburger.

The team at Wells Fargo highlights the mid-June 2024 Consumer Price Index (CPI) for Food at Home rose by 1% compared to mid-June 2023 when this same index was rising at 5.9%.

Courtney Schmidt, Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute Sector Manager says food inflation has mostly moderated, but the increased labor, transportation and capital costs are weighing on the dining out industry.

“When you go to dine out, of the total cost that you’re paying, only 30% of that is food,” she says.

For food away from home, the mid-June 2024 CPI rose by 4%

The analysts at Wells Fargo say that the longer the mismatch in inflation for food at home vs. dining out continues, the more consumers will be economically incentivized to eat at home.

“You’re still paying more for your food when you go into the grocery store than a few years ago, but you’re seeing a slow down in that food inflation. This time last year, we were at nearly 6%. Food inflation is not going negative, and we’re still paying more, but you’re seeing a slowdown considerably in that food inflation,” Schmidt says.

The Wells Fargo Fourth of July Food Report highlights two categories that did see declines in prices at the grocery store compared to last year: potatoes (for potato salad) and avocadoes (for guacamole).

“Both of those markets have just seen more production out there. So you’ve seen more potato production; you’ve seen better avocado production. That’s just been helping those wholesale prices that have just transferred into the retail side,” Schmidt says.

Courtney Schmidt

(Wells Fargo)

Regarding elevated beef prices through the summer grilling season, Schmidt says we could see many months to a few years of elevated prices for beef.

“You’re seeing those elevated beef prices because we had that drought back in 2022 where we saw the cattle herd dropped to very low numbers. We really need to start seeing that herd rebuilding before we’re going to start seeing improvement in those prices,” Schmidt says.

She does offer that with lower corn prices leading to lower feed prices, for the animals processed beef production is up because producers are putting more weight on cattle.

“That’s added to the beef production, and we’ve also seen more imports of beef. So while we are seeing lower supplies of beef compared to where we were at last year, it’s not as bad as it could have been based on the size of the cattle herd,” Schmidt says.

She adds, “I think we’re still a couple years out before we’re going to start seeing some of that significant herd rebuilding.”

American Pie Reborn: How An Iowa Farmer Saved Buddy Holly

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 14:48:17 GMT

In April 1959, a pair of black, horn-rimmed eyeglasses was found in an Iowa cornfield. Plucked from the dirt during preparation for planting and given to law enforcement, the mangled specs were sealed in a manilla evidence envelope and tucked into a courthouse basement—forgotten for decades. The iconic frames belonged to Buddy Holly, the greatest creative force in the history of early rock music.

Two months prior, on Feb. 3, 1959, Holly, 22, prodigy Richie Valens, 17, and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, 28, died on impact when their airplane plunged into the same cornfield. The daisy chain of events that preceded the crash comprise a heartbreaking narrative too implausible for fiction. Likewise, the cast of characters directly involved or tangentially affected—from Waylon Jennings to Bob Dylan to Don McClean—is a roll call of the surreal.

A decade after the crash, in the same field where Holly was killed, Iowa farmer Jeff Nicholas walked rows of grain every summer of his youth, but had no inkling the soil beneath his boots covered a jagged scar that seismically changed U.S. culture.

Over 60 years later, Nicholas has added a key chapter to the mammoth tale. The rural crash site, surrounded by the silence of farmland, is protected and shepherded by Nicholas. Along a turnrow, a simple memorial marks the spot open to the feet of thousands of annual visitors.

The story of Holly and his cohorts ended on farmland—and was reborn on farmland. Nicholas helped turn a tragedy into an American triumph. “The music died on the farm, but it didn’t die forever,” he says. “We’re done mourning and now we celebrate, honor, and preserve a legacy. Stories come and go, but this one strikes a chord that’s still reverberating.”

Where to begin? Roughly 1,000 miles southwest of Iowa corn in Texas cotton.

Behold, The Comet

Born in 1936 to the flats of northwest Texas in Lubbock, Holly spent his teen years soaking in a musical alchemy of country-western, gospel, and rhythm and blues, while honing his guitar skills and singing at car lots, skating rinks, or high school auditoriums.

The boy from Lubbock idolized the boy from Tupelo. In 1955, Elvis Presley performed in Lubbock, and the two nascent stars, only a year apart in age with similar social backgrounds, became fast friends. However, Holly was a far cry from a sleek, streamlined Presley clone. With 145 pounds stretched over a 6-foot frame topped with forehead curls and rockabilly glasses to compensate for 20/800 vision in both eyes, Holly’s physical appearance was akin to a soda jerk or drive-in carhop, rather than a breakout rock star.

In May 1957, Holly and his fledgling band, The Crickets, released “That’ll Be The Day,” rocketing Holly into the stratosphere of musical influence as a giant who wrote, created, and performed his own material. The No. 1’s and hit records flowed at a furious pace: Peggy Sue, Oh Boy, Not Fade Away, Rave On, It Doesn’t Matter Anymore, It’s So Easy, Maybe Baby, I’m Gonna Love You Too.

As the prototype for a rock ’n’ roll band, Buddy Holly and The Crickets blitzed the industry in 1957-58, performing with Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, The Everly Brothers, The Drifters, and a host of top-tier artists. Worldwide tours followed, including 25 concerts in England, where young teens John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards took in shows, stunned by the stratocasting Holly. (The Beatles and The Rolling Stones formed several years afterwards, significantly molded by The Crickets,)

Holly was a comet. The bespectacled boy-next-door with a soft Texas drawl forever changed the calculus of music—all within an outrageous 18-month timespan—a dramatically smaller window than any comparative musician of the era.

On Jan. 26, 1958, at 21, holding the world by the tail, Holly made his second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (just over a year after Presley’s benchmark first appearance). Roughly a year later, at the height of fame and promise, Holly and two other rock’n’roll princes fell from the sky.

The Secret

Jeff Nicholas, 65, grows corn and soybeans in northcentral Iowa’s Cerro Gordo County, just outside Clear Lake. His grandfather (William H. Nicholas) began farming in the 1920s and purchased large acres as a major pioneer in the turkey industry, establishing seven hatcheries and a processing plant: A Nicholas Turkey stayed in-house almost from egg to Thanksgiving plate.

In the early 1960s, Nicholas’s father (William L. Nicholas) added several farms to the family operation including the purchase of a slightly rolling, average-yield field roughly five minutes northwest of Clear Lake. At the time, bushels were irrelevant. “My dad bought the place without much concern about yield,” Nicholas explains. “We’d take 40 to 80 acres and break it into 10-acre pens to raise turkeys. They provided manure for the soil, and when we moved the turkeys, the ground was naturally fertilized, and then we transitioned it back to corn and soybeans.”

As a farm boy during the late 1960s in Cerro Gordo County, Nicholas often hooked a flatbed trailer to a Farmall 350 tractor and drove slowly across the field, focusing on six to eight rows with each pass as he hunted for equipment-damaging rocks—mostly between a potato and volleyball in size.

Hauling load after load of rocks out of the field, Nicholas had no clue the dirt harbored a secret: It was the precise spot where the music died in 1959. “We had no idea Buddy Holly’s plane came down right here,” Nicholas says. “My dad bought the farm a couple years after the fatal crash, but the details slipped by. Even into the 1970s, I was in that field picking up rocks, but I never knew.”

“Everything that led to the crash that night, and everything afterwards is too overpowering for words,” Nicholas describes. “Even now, you can stand in that field and feel what happened.”

Gold For The Price Of Bread

In late 1958, Holly split from The Crickets and moved toward potential music production in the bright lights of New York City, alongside his bride, Maria Elena. However, money woes drove him back on tour, where he recruited the “New Crickets,” including fellow Texans, Waylon Jennings (bass) and Carl Bunch (drums), along with Oklahoman Tommy Allsup (lead guitar).

The four Southwest natives signed as the headliner for the Winter Dance Party, a package including Richie Valens, charging hard on “La Bamba,” an epic hit for the ages; J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson of “Chantilly Lace” fame; Dion and the Belmonts; and Frankie Sardo. The tour opened Jan. 23, 1959, in Milwaukee, Wisc., slated for the dead of a particularly bone-chilling Midwest winter—24 stops in 24 days with thousands of road miles in between.

In a logistical nightmare, the tour crisscrossed the ice and snow of Iowa and Minnesota aboard unheated, reconditioned school busses—essentially vehicles ready for the scrapheap, sometimes crawling at 25 miles per hour. The first 10 days of travel required a succession of five bus replacements as night temperatures dropped to -30 and spurred a stream of breakdowns.

The subzero temps exacted a heavy physical toll on the band members. Along the Michigan-Wisconsin border, drummer Carl Bunch was hospitalized after suffering frostbite in his feet (while wearing six pairs of socks) and forced off the tour.

Despite the brutal weather, Holly’s name, along with the notoriety of his heavyweight counterparts, filled seats to capacity at each stop. Bob Dylan, three years away from his first album release in 1962, caught the Jan. 31, Saturday night performance on the front row of the National Guard Armory in Duluth. Forty-eight hours later, Holly was dead.

In 2016, Dylan paid homage to the memory: “If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about 18 and he was 22. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him…”

“He was the archetype,” Dylan continued. “Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be.”

On Feb. 2, at 9 a.m., The Winter Dance Party departed Green Bay, Wisc., for a 350-mile jump to Clear Lake, Iowa, the eleventh stopover in the chain. The date initially was supposed to be a day of rest, but the money was irresistible. Once again, 25 miles outside of Clear Lake, a bus broke down.

Following the mechanical delay, Holly and his bandmates staggered into Clear Lake at 6 p.m. and prepared for an 8 p.m. to midnight concert split into two sets. Over 1,500 fans were packed and stacked for the show of their lifetimes. At a mere $1.25 per head admission fee, they bought gold for the price of bread.

The venue site was magnificent: The legendary Surf Ballroom , a rock ’n’ roll Shangri-la. Holly prepared to take the Surf’s elevated stage and crank his sound across a 6,000 square-foot, recessed dance floor lined in hardwood, flanked by faux palm trees, surrounded by booths and pillars, all under a barrel ceiling painted to blue sky. He would play for the Surf’s largest-ever crowd—a remarkable attendance number considering the date was a Monday evening marked by foul weather. There would never be an encore.

Sympathy’s Seat

Bone-tired, Holly reckoned with the unfolding math: The Surf show would end at midnight and the boys would clamber back in the wheeled metal tube with no heater for a 12-hour drive to the next gig—500 road miles northwest in Moorhead, Minn.

No dice. Holly bucked.

He asked Carroll Anderson, manager of the Surf, to charter an airplane to the next stop. Anderson dialed Dwyer’s Flying Service in nearby Mason City, requesting a flight to Fargo, N.D., a sister city to Moorhead, just across the Red River. Pilot Roger Peterson, 21, was tagged to make the trip. Starstruck, but with 700 hours on the clock and wary of nighttime flight in nasty weather, Peterson called veteran pilot Duane Mayfield and offered the cockpit controls. Mayfield declined to fly the rock stars, allegedly stating: “No thanks. I’m more of a Lawrence Welk fan myself.”

Inside the Surf Ballroom, Holly, Valens, and Richardson tore down the house. Outside, at the Mason City Airport, Peterson prepped a v-tailed 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza 4-seater for the flight to Fargo. At $108 total, each ticket cost $36. The three passenger seats were reserved for Holly, Waylon Jennings, and Tommy Allsup.

As the first set wrapped at 10:30 p.m., Holly telephoned his wife, Maria Elena, who was six months pregnant with the couple’s first child. Off-stage, hours from another slogging bus ride, Richardson and Valens approached Jennings and Allsup several times, anxious for a seat on the plane. For several days, Richardson had battled flu. Jennings, seeing Richardson’s struggles, surrendered his airplane seat out of sympathy. Richardson would be dead within three hours; Jennings would climb to the pinnacle of country music fame.

The second set ended close to midnight. Lacking roadies on the lean-running tour, the bands closed shop, exited the rear of the Surf Ballroom, and loaded their gear onto the Moorhead-bound bus.

In a telltale farewell with Holly that haunted Jennings to his final days, the pair of Texans said their goodbyes.

“I hope your damn bus freezes up again,” Holly said, grinning.

“Well, I hope your old plane crashes,” answered Jennings.

Turn of Silver

Climbing into an airport-bound station wagon parked at the back of the Surf, Allsup opened the vehicle’s rear door, surprised to see Richardson in the backseat, along with Holly in the front passenger seat and Surf manager Carroll Anderson behind the wheel.

Holly pivoted and delivered a life-changing request, asking Allsup to go back into the Surf and make certain no equipment was forgotten. Allsup re-entered the building and encountered Valens standing at an inner doorway, signing a final autograph for a lingering fan. Valens spotted Allsup and asked once more for the airplane seat. “Come on, guy, let me fly,” Valens said, according to Allsup.

Leaving the decision to the turn of silver, Allsup pulled a fifty-cent piece from his pocket. He flipped the coin and told Valens to make the heads-or-tails call. Ben Franklin vs. the Liberty Bell. Valens took heads.

Ben Franklin appeared. Valens died and Allsup lived.

The Widowed Bride

A few minutes before 1 a.m., Holly, 22; Valens, 17; Richardson, 28; and pilot Peterson, 21, climbed through the Beechcraft Bonanza’s single, right-side door and taxied toward the Mason City Municipal Airport runway, anticipating a 45-minute flight followed by a meal, laundry, and hotel sleep.

With the temperature at 18 F and dropping in 35 mph winds, the Beechcraft took off south into light snow, climbed to 800’, and turned northwest to Fargo. Jerry Dwyer, owner of Dwyer’s Flying Service, watched the small airplane fade into the night sky, noting a peculiar detail. In the distance, Dwyer observed a descending—rather than ascending—taillight glow in the darkness.

Dwyer’s taillight observation was no optical illusion or horizon anomaly. Whether by Peterson’s inexperience, a misread gyroscope, poor conditions, or mechanical failure, the Beechcraft crashed 5.2 miles after takeoff into 4” of snow atop farmland dirt—directly into the field owned today by Jeff Nicholas.

At 170 mph, roughly 3,000 lb. of metal smashed into the ground. The right wing struck first, just before the plane flipped and tore apart, skidding 500’ and ejecting Holly, Valens, and Richardson, while holding Peterson in the cockpit.

The crash site was grim; the death scene was gruesome. The Beechcraft was shredded—a mangled pile of metal. Parts were scattered 600’, with the fuselage wrapped around a barbed wire fence at field’s edge. In tandem, Holly and Valens rested 17’ away, and Richardson was found 40’ from the plane.

Roughly 10 hours after the accident, during an aerial search the next morning, Dwyer spotted the wreckage.

Details of the crash hit the wires before the families were notified. Maria Elena, six months pregnant, received the news of her husband’s death via a television broadcast bulletin. Overcome by the trauma, she miscarried two days later.

Almost 1,200 miles east of Clear Lake, in Rochelle, N.Y., a 13-year-old paperboy cut through cardboard wrapped around of stacks of newspapers in preparation for his daily route. He was stunned as banner headlines announcing Holly’s death spilled from the bundles. The young paperboy, Don McLean, owned three records. Two were by Holly.

Twelve years later, in 1971, McLean wrote and released “American Pie,” one of the greatest musical compositions of the 20^th century, with Buddy Holly’s death as the focus of the opening stanzas: A long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile. Holly’s loss was punctuated by McLean’s haunting “American Pie” refrain, repeated six times in the lyrics: The day the music died.

Forever 1959

Blood and dirt are baked into “American Pie.” Less than a decade after the song’s release, Darryl “The Mad Hatter” Hensley, KZEV-FM DJ and radio personality of Clear Lake, kicked off a Buddy Holly tribute in 1979, and Ken Paquette, a longtime Holly fan from Green Bay, Wisc., later gumshoed the precise location of the crash in Nicholas’ field.

“I grew up knowing Buddy Holly music and later listening to ‘American Pie,’ but I was too young to realize the song was partly about our farmland,” Nicholas says. “I was in college in the late 1970s when I found out Holly died in our field. As a community, people didn’t talk much about Buddy Holly in the 1960s and 1970s because they didn’t want to be known as the death town. People swept the whole thing under the carpet and moved on—but there was no way to hide something so powerful.”

In 1988, Paquette placed a simple memorial at the spot where the fuselage came to rest and Nicholas later erected a giant, steel pair of Holly-style frames just off the gravel road running parallel to his field, serving as a bearing for visitors from across the world. Nicholas keeps the turnrow clear, providing pilgrims a five-minute walk from the roadside frames to the memorial within the field. The memorial is composed of a cross, guitar, and three stainless albums—one for each musician. Additionally, a set of pilot wings commemorating Roger Peterson was added in 2009.

Declining suggestions from various interests to install lights, music, and pavement, Nicholas maintains the site as it was in 1959. No less, no more. “The memorial is simple because Buddy, Richie, and J.P. came from a simple time and were just starting out. Rock didn’t yet have the hard edges,” he explains. “They had no sophisticated gear and no entourage. I’ve left the property as it was in 1959—a corn and soybean field. When you stand out here and close your eyes, you can go right back to 1959.”

Sincerely. The site marks the first rock ’n’ roll tragedy and arguably the most poignant of music’s losses. Visitors decorate the memorial with a trove of personal mementos—glasses, guitar picks, rosary beads, loose change, pictures, flowers, and much more.

“Buddy’s story grips the soul of Americans and it always will,” Nicholas notes. “I see license plates out here from across the country, and people get emotional because they recall memories of where they were when they heard the news, or they recognize the enormity of the loss.”

Past is present in Nicholas’ commemorative field. However, the real time machine survives in Clear Lake: The music never died at the Surf Ballroom.

Surf Salvation

The Beach Boys, B.B. King, Robert Plant, ZZ Top, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Conway Twitty, and The Everly Brothers are a mere sampling of the names who have taken the stage at the Surf Ballroom . The Surf shares musical bona fides with few peers on the planet: It is the place where rock ’n’ roll pivoted in 1959 and shifted the timeline of cultural history.

The building is alive. Originally built in 1949 during the big band era, the Surf has been home to jazz, country, blues, rock, and all points in between. It retains the vintage look and feel of 1959—a place where history echoes off the walls and a visitor is forgiven for expecting Holly, Valens, or Richardson to round the corner at any moment.

“Architecturally, it looks cool to the eye, but the visuals are surpassed by an ambience that everyone feels when they walk inside,” Nicholas details. “I love taking people in the front entrance for the first time and watching them as they see the recessed dance floor topped by the barrel ceiling. Words can’t properly describe the emotion.”

However, the Surf was once on the razor’s edge of extinction. No coincidence, Nicholas was a key player in the Surf’s salvation.

“I grew up just down the street from the Surf Ballroom,” he says. “I literally traveled by it thousands of times as a child walking, or riding my bike, or driving with my family.”

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Surf fell on hard times, almost bulldozed for lake condos and a grocery store. “The Surf underwent the same erasure witnessed on many Midwestern main streets—facades covered with metal and wood, and painted to look modern,” Nicholas recounts. “By the 90s, there were walls covered with wood paneling up to 6’ high in places, carpet on some walls, and mirrors on others. It was time to go back to the original architecture.”

In spring 1994, the Surf was shuttered—chains draped on the front doors. As president of the Chamber of Commerce, Nicholas knew Clear Lake was on the cusp of losing a historical masterpiece. “A local family in construction, the Snyders, bought the Surf in 1994 and began research and restoration,” says Nicholas, who now serves as president of the Surf’s board of directors. “As a community, we knew we had to do something—not just financially, but culturally.”

In response, the Chamber revived the Winter Dance Party in 1995 and pumped life back into the Surf. “It was a total community effort involving so many people,” Nicholas continues. “In 2008, we applied for non-profit status and have been operating a non-profit since. In 2009, we had the 50^th anniversary of the Winter Dance Party, and we’ll keep going to at least 100. The Surf is restored in detail back to the very night Buddy, Richie, and the Bopper played.”

All Roads Lead to Holly

When Holly’s body was found atop farmland in 1959, his signature eyeglasses were not recovered—presumed lost in the snow or thrown beyond the search perimeter.

In 1980, while rummaging through filing cabinets in the basement of the Cerro Gordo County courthouse, Sheriff Jerry Allen discovered a sealed, manilla envelope, marked “Charles Hardin Holley, rec’d April 7, 1959.”

Allen opened the envelope and found the last remnants from The Day the Music Died: four dice, a cigarette lighter, a wristwatch belonging to Richardson, and Holly’s thick, black-framed eyeglasses—marred, twisted, and lacking lenses, but otherwise intact.

On April 7, 1959, after snow cover melted two months following the crash, the glasses were found and turned into the sheriff’s office, where they were catalogued and forgotten for 21 years, possibly due to the curveball thrown by the clerical use of Holly’s proper name, “Charles Hardin Holley,” rather than “Buddy Holly.”

In 1981, the glasses were given to Maria Elena. In 1998, the frames were sold for $80,000 to the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, where they are permanently displayed.

Holly’s legacy, once presumed to fade, only grows brighter with time. In many ways, his legacy was reborn on Nicholas’ land. Long after Nicholas has passed, Holly’s farmland memorial and the Surf Ballroom will remain. “Buddy Holly’s music was the trigger for everyone else,” Nicholas says. “There are more genres of music coming in the future and they will all connect back to Buddy Holly. We don’t have to promote this music; we just have to present it.”

“People come from across the globe to pay respect to Buddy, Richie, and the Bopper,” Nicholas adds. “I’m just a farmer, but I feel honored and privileged to promote the Surf and shepherd this special spot in my field.”

For more articles from Chris Bennett ( cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

Power vs. Privacy: Landowner Sues Game Wardens, Challenges Property Intrusion

Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told

American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm

Stunning Collection of 50,000 Farmland Marbles Began With 12 Boxes of Stolen Arrowheads

Fri, 24 May 2024 18:56:30 GMT

How did 12 boxes of superb arrowheads stolen from beneath a boy’s bed lead to the greatest collection of farmland marbles ever gathered?

Welcome to Wyman Atwood’s unlikely tale of obsession, deceit, and an astounding 50,000-marble haul.

Cottonmouth

In 1963, Wyman Atwood was born to cotton in Greene County, Arkansas, a stone’s throw from the Missouri Bootheel. Along Highway 49, outside the tiny town of Marmaduke, Atwood was raised on level land roughly 5 miles from Crowley’s Ridge, a geologic spine rising 250’ above the flats, running nearly unbroken for 200 miles from southeast Missouri to Arkansas’s Phillips County, and a sustained haunt of Native Americans for millennia.

Atwood’s grandfather, John Henry, spilled out of Kentucky in roughly 1900 and bought timberland outside Marmaduke. He cleared old-growth hardwood on 1,000 acres. “Our farmland had heavy Indian presence,” Atwood recalls. “When my grandfather was cutting trees, he uncovered so many stone tools that he’d carry the big ones to a fence line and drop them, just to get rid of the nuisance of rocks in the field.”

Atwood’s father, Earl, inherited the farm reins. In 1969, he bought his 5-year-old son a motorbike and loosed the boy on rough-and-tumble adventure. “Redneck kid on a Honda 50,” Atwood says. “I rode to ditches and sloughs all day and found fun. In a couple more years, from the moment my toes could push in a tractor or truck clutch, I was operating farm machinery.”

In 1979, an elderly farming neighbor introduced Atwood to a modest arrowhead collection—all pieces collected within a mile radius. Atwood went straight to his own farm and began walking rows. He hit a motherlode in a mere afternoon of searching: An inordinate amount of Native American points atop family dirt that had never been previously picked.

Shortness of breath; rush of blood; cottonmouth; and an uncanny sixth sense. Arrowhead fever roared through Atwood, and he welcomed the disease. Every waking hour of opportunity, he was a shadow in the spring or winter fields, marching the rows and finding absolute treasures: abundant Hardin and Dalton specimens—prehistoric points often in fantastic condition.

“I was hard core. There were days when I went out and filled a pocket in 30 minutes with beauties,” he explains. “No doubt our land was home to Indians for thousands of years. My hunting got to the stage where if a point wasn’t in great condition, I’d leave it right there in the field. It’s fair to say that I became obsessed. I didn’t care if they were worth anything. All I cared about was finding them for their own history and wonder.”

Within several years, Atwood amassed a phenomenal collection as the sole hunter on an arrowhead Shangri-La. He slept atop his most prize pieces, filling a dozen shoeboxes to the brim with tools magnificently crafted from jasper, flint, chert, quartzite, greenstone, and more. The boxes, lined head to toe down the side of Atwood’s bed, were a virtual museum.

“For a boy on a farm, life was so sweet,” he recalls. “Hunting those arrowheads became part of me and made things even sweeter.”

The sweet was about to go bitter.

Wink of Fate

The family farmhouse sat alone—always unlocked. Atwood and Earl typically worked minutes away, darting in and out to eat, use the phone, or grab a necessity.

In 1983, Atwood’s first cousin, likewise an avid arrowhead hunter, visited from Florida. Excited by the arrival of his relative, Atwood dashed to his bedroom, anxious to show off the collection of smokers.

Dropping to his knees, Atwood reached under the bed and pulled out a shoebox with no heft. Empty.

Down the line Atwood went, sliding out the boxes. Empty.

The twelfth box, the last in line, curiously was still full.

Time slowed down as the violation washed over Atwood. “I figured someone dumped all the boxes into a bag and maybe ran out of time on the last box. To this day, about 40 years later, I don’t know who stole my arrowheads and I couldn’t prove a thing,” he explains.

“I’ll never, never forget the feeling of realizing someone had stolen my arrowheads right from my own room in my own house—someone that had to be very close to me because it was an inside job.”

“It’s hard to put into words, but my arrowhead fuse was burnt from that day on. I’d still walk the rows sometimes, but my love of hunting points was never the same. It kind of died.”

Enter a wink of fate and Bertis Walker, the marble maestro.

Hooked

Well over a decade past the theft, Atwood was struck by the charms of Tanginna Walker, and fell in with her father, Bertis, a Greene County farmer who became more of a brother, rather than a father-in-law. The pair of men were inseparable. Find one, find the other, in a chain of hunting, fishing, riding gravel, and marbling.

Marbling?

Walker, whether by fixation or pure passion, was in the process of amassing a lifetime assemblage of tens of thousands of marbles plucked from farmland and old house sites.

Rekindling the collecting fires, Walker became Atwood’s marble mentor, patiently poring through the pages of marble collecting books, teaching Atwood marble history, type, rarity, origin, dates, and more. Atwood contracted a double-portion of the marble virus racing through Walker’s veins.

“I got hooked on marbles,” Atwood recalls. “I’d be in the rows looking any chance I got, going with Tanginna or going alone. Pretty soon, those marbles started adding up.”

Sincerely. But why are tiny, colored spheres—children’s toys—scattered in volume on farmland?

Keepsies

Before the advent of modern agriculture machinery, farmland was dotted with homes. “Every 40 acres or so had at least one house and some farms had clusters of sharecropper houses,” Atwood says. “When you look out today and see empty land, it might not have looked that way just 50 years ago or more.”

Within a given geography, for example, where timber was cleared in the late 1800s, and tenant families moved on and off the ground until the 1960s, scores of children spread across generations were associated with a particular shotgun or dog trot house, i.e., the actors changed, but the stage remained the same.

All those kids, regardless of family income level, possessed the ubiquity of childhood: marbles. In an age prior to television access, and decades before home computers, video games, the internet, or iPhones, kids shot marbles for keepsies in front or back yards, in barn dirt, under porches, and beneath shade trees.

Affordably priced, depending on the decade, at 5 cents to 20 cents per bag at general stores and commissaries, or acquired via giveaways at service stations and shoe stores, marbles were the great equalizer of childhood. Some kids had a little; most had a lot.

“I think all the time about the kids who owned these marbles I find,” Atwood says. “Many of those kids didn’t have too many other possessions besides those marbles and that makes me sincerely grateful for the blessings I’ve been given in life.”

The kids are gone. The houses are gone. The marbles remain. Agates, alabasters, cat-eyes, clays, glazed clays, and more, the marbles of yesterday hide under the dirt—waiting patiently to reveal their color and join the 50,000-strong collection of Wyman Atwood.

Past to Present

Whether climbing in a side-by-side for a short ride to a nearby house site, or driving a truck to more distant locations, Atwood’s blood pumps hard. “On my way to a hunt, I’m full of anticipation, not sure what I’ll find in the sandy dirt. Once I hit the rows, I go into deep concentration and leave the world behind. It’s all about the hunt—finding is just the temporary reward.”

“It’s a unique feeling where I think about good times gone by and great friends of my past, and it makes me appreciate what I have now,” he notes. “There is much more going on in those rows than nostalgia. I’ll have a talk with Jesus when I’m walking and I’ll know that’s right where I need to be.”

With every marble spotted against the mocha soil, Atwood bends over, pulls the sphere out of the past, and gently tucks it into a front pocket. “I love marbles as a hobby and I’ll buy some special ones from time to time, but the ones that matter are those that come out of the fields. Chipped or cracked or even crushed—it makes me no difference. I could care less about the value of the objects I find.”

But what if the value of the object is $15,000—cash on the barrelhead?

No Means No

On April 18, 1991, several years past the heartache of bedroom theft, Atwood walked into a field with random hopes—coins, bear teeth, clay pipe stems, or whatever curios the rows might offer. Minutes into the hunt, Atwood spotted a wide base sticking up from the sandy dirt. He pulled; the point didn’t budge. He wiggled; the point gave the barest sway. He pulled again; 4.5” of a knobbed Hardin slid from the soil and saw sunlight for the first time in several thousand years. A stunner.

Atwood knelt beside an adjacent gar hole and washed away dirt from the serrations, shocked by the quality of the smoker. Forgoing the relative safety of his own pocket, he kept the soft flesh of his hand clasped tightly around the Hardin and made for home, where he immediately deposited it into a foam-lined case.

Word travels fast. The next morning, to Atwood’s surprise, he heard a knock on his front door.

“There was this doctor on my steps from in town that was well-known to buy arrowheads,” Atwood details. “He said, ‘I want to see that arrowhead you found.’”

Atwood retrieved the case and pointed at the Hardin, declining to remove the piece. The doctor took one look and fingered a knot of hundred-dollar bills: “I want that arrowhead.”

“Not for sale,” Atwood answered.

The doctor peeled off 30 bills—$3,000—and placed them on a table.

“No, sir. Not for sale,” Atwood reiterated.

“I’ll be back. I’ll be right back,” responded the doctor, confident in tone.

True to his word, the doctor returned in 20 minutes with a bulkier knot.

“He slapped down $6,000, and I said, ‘No,’ again,” Atwood recalls. “He went right up to $10,000, and I told him politely, ‘No means no.’”

Three days later, Atwood again heard a knock at the door. The doctor was back with $15,000 in cash. Atwood turned it down.

“Everybody told me I was stupid,” Atwood laughs. “I may be stupid, but I told that man the arrowhead was special. I told him I was supposed to find it and it wasn’t for sale. End of story.”

“It’s true that I’m crazy, but it’s also true that I’m the guy who loves what he finds for the story of it.”

Uncovered

Atwood has lost count.

At a total between 50,000 and 75,000, his marbles rest in foam-bottom display cases, glass lamps, countless jars, and an end table with a clear top.

“It’s not about the numbers and it’s not about the value,” Atwood emphasizes. “We’ll pass these marbles on to our grandkids and they can do what they want.”

Beyond marbles or arrowheads, he urges others to foster outdoor interests of any type. “Take your kids and grandkids outside at every opportunity. Get them off the television and phone. If you spend time with them outside, then they’ll take an interest in nature or history or something, and that’s when you praise them, to help build that interest.”

Expect Atwood to stay on the hunt, patiently adding to his marble mountain.

“Life took me from arrowheads to marbles, and there’s so much in our dirt still to be uncovered,” Atwood adds. “It’s coming to the top and I want to be there when it pops out.”

For more articles from Chris Bennett ( cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

Power vs. Privacy: Landowner Sues Game Wardens, Challenges Property Intrusion

Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told

American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm

Farmer Survives 15 Years of Opioid Hell as Drug Crisis Ravages Rural America

Wed, 22 May 2024 15:33:04 GMT

With no one left to lie to, Nathan Casburn dropped to his knees and cried out to God—the plea of a dying man. Surrounded by an endless horizon of flat Delta cropland, Casburn was pulled from the deepest hole of a 15-year drug addiction.

Like a freight train through a veil, an opioid crisis has roared across rural America and farm country. Since 1999, over 1 million people have died from drug overdoses nationwide, with two-thirds of the deaths attributable to opioids.

Casburn is a most unlikely survivor. In plain fashion, he pulls no punches and tells a hellish tale of loss and triumph on the farm—without a shred of blame cast beyond his own shadow.

Clean. Redeemed. Grateful to the core.

“Never, never believe that you can’t get out of drugs,” he urges. “You’re never too far gone. The only thing you’re not coming back from is death.”

The Sentinel

In the pocket of the Mississippi Delta, Tallahatchie County (pop. 12,000) is blanketed by cotton, rice, and soybeans bordered by endless turnrows, irrigation ditches, and cypress sloughs. Simply, agriculture is the blood of the region.

Rubbing railroad tracks roughly five miles northwest of the dual county seat in Sumner, Casburn, 36, and his father, Rea, 72, grow 1,300 acres of wheat and double-crop soybeans, with corn sometimes popping into the mix.

In the early 1900s, the Casburn clan pulled stakes in Illinois, crossed the continent to New Mexico, and doubled back to Mississippi. They bought land in Tallahatchie County, cleared bottomland hardwood, constructed a sawmill, and built a Western-inspired farmhouse (mirroring a design from New Mexico) that became the anchor of an extensive operation including a commissary and scores of sharecropper dogtrots.

The house still watches over the property—a sentinel at the front of the farm. “I think about my forefathers a lot,” says Casburn, pointing toward the white stucco home, while leaning against the faded cypress boards of an old barn and crib, surrounded by wagon wheels and machinery skeletons. “What they went through to make a life makes me appreciate what I have all the more. They did it all with mules and single row equipment.”

Yet, Casburn once came within a few breaths of throwing away the legacy. “Have you ever tried to fill a God-sized hole with anything that’ll fit?” he asks. “That was me.”

Wink and Nod

Video games. In the 1990s, a keyboard, console, and controller hinted at a young boy’s susceptibility. “I played every waking moment I could, to the point of fixation,” Casburn explains. “I knew I was different from the other kids and not in a good way; I was geared toward escapes. In my case, an obsession with video games was a symptom of my unhealthy mindset.”

Into his teens, obsession jumped tracks from gaming to drinking, and Casburn’s transition was nuclear. Drink to a drunk.

“The first time I drank, I ended up on the floor—out cold,” he recalls. “That became my standard way of drinking. Looking back now, I was out of control right from the start, and that’s a razor’s edge in the Delta’s drinking culture with copious amounts of alcohol available. Everyone makes their choices and mine went from bad to worse to off-the-charts.”

Any time away from the crop rows or schoolhouse became the starter’s gun to crack a beer or turn a bottle. And then came marijuana. And then came cocaine and stimulants. A blitz of substance abuse.

In 2004, on backroad gravel, Casburn, a high school junior, broke two vertebrate in an alcohol-related car crash. The subsequent pain management became a party, legitimized by medical approval in the age of OxyContin.

Kicked back in a recliner, while the sounds of farming machinery grumbled in the distance, Casburn eyeballed the prescription label against the orange tint of an OxyContin bottle: Take one pill every four to six hours.

If one is good, three is better.

“I floated away from that recliner,” Casburn recalls. “Total euphoria. A flip of my brain switch. An artificial sense that all was well in the world. Every since I was a boy, this was the feeling I’d been looking for. This was the fill for the hole in my life and I wanted it forever.”

And when the bottle was empty? A quick dial to the doctor and a speedy script refill. All legit with barely a wink and nod.

Casburn was in love. Welcome to the wonder world of opioids.

Tap the Vein

Slipping deeper in the hole, Casburn was primed to shake and move in a faster lane than sleepy Sumner. To hell with the farm.

“I had no intention to stay on farm. I hated it. Everyone in the Delta knows everyone else’s business, and my business was self. Therefore, I resented my rural community instead of myself. That’s the bitterness of a fool.”

Next stop, 75 miles west to Ole Miss and Oxford, and a chain of descent in a college town: DUI’s, car wrecks, arrests, hospitalization, overdoses, academic probation, and legal woes.

Whistling past the graveyard, Casburn’s opioid use continued to climb.

“You can’t juggle addiction and work or do schoolwork or anything,” he says. “Eventually, the pieces crash. It’s only a matter of time.”

By 2014, with no job, no degree, and no prospects, Casburn was skinned: OxyContin and other legal pharmaceuticals were out of his price range. He responded with the most hellish economic decision of his life. Go home to the farm and tap the vein. Heroin.

Skin on Bone

“I was paying $100 or $150 per day for Oxy or other opioids. However, I knew I could switch to snorting heroin and my cost would drop to $20 per day. It sounds crazy, but I was so addicted that the numbers made sense,” Casburn explains.

Out of the heroin gate, Casburn’s estimate was spot-on—$20 per day to feed the devil inside. However, inside a single month, his heroin use exploded, and he was forced to find new means of using; new ways to get a bigger bang. The needle. Injecting.

Suddenly, his per day costs for heroin rose to the same level as script pills, yet the heroin sucked the life from his body at a far faster rate, ravaging Casburn’s frame from a lean 140 lb. to a ghastly 108 lb.

Skin on bone. The boy on the farm was gone.

“I remember putting the needle in my arm and thinking, ‘There is no coming back,’” Casburn says. “I was a full-blown addict, junkie, and whatever other description applies. All the lies I told, all the things I stole from family, all the deceit, all the time I wasted, all my overdoses, and all my betrayals of friends. There was literally nobody left to do wrong to, because I’d done wrong to everyone.”

Rain or shine, addiction woke Casburn at dawn every day, demanding a morning fix. In the rows, he was never without a pill or powder—some sort of drug band-aid to keep the addiction sated until noon. He worked just enough to keep from getting tossed off the farm. Whether irrigation, fieldwork, or driving in the cab, by mid-day, the cravings were screaming.

“I’d take right in the field if necessary. I’d leave if needed. I’d have the drugs delivered to the farm. If my dealer called and said, ‘Now,’ then I was gone. Anything to push back the pain. Imagine the worse flu times 10 or 20 that literally never leaves your body—except that you can make it disappear with a phone call.”

Casburn truly was alone. By his choice, a dead man walking the farm with no companion but guilt.

A Father’s Love

In 2017, at 29, Casburn’s body gave out. After two weeks in intensive care due to a heart valve infection derived from heroin use, he returned home by the slimmest of margins, and checked into rehab. No dice.

Three weeks after rehab, Casburn was back on the needle, injecting prodigious amounts of heroin to stay functional. Physically incapable of going to the fields, Casburn was holed up in the stucco farmhouse, sitting in a room lined with books—his father’s library—when he saw death.

“I had an out of body experience with no drugs involved,” Casburn recalls. “I saw everyone going on with life, and me stuck right there dying as an addict. Right then, in the library, I dropped to my knees and threw up a prayer in desperation, but I meant every word. I called out to God for mercy and forgiveness. I told Him that if He would help me, then I’d do everything He asked. That prayer was answered.”

The deceit was over. The self-pity was gone. Casburn had a toehold on life. “Despite all the terrible things I did, God never abandoned me. The separation I experienced was caused by me deciding not to seek Him.”

Casburn immediately reached out to former addicts and friends for help—one day at a time, step by step. “All the people around me in our farming community came to help me in one way or another. The same people I ran from were nothing but happy for me. I once was a maniac to get drugs, and I became a maniac to get off drugs. I went crazy fighting drugs because I was never going back in that hole.”

Seven years after crashing to his knees, Casburn has earned a stellar reputation and built a thriving farm life. Along with 1,300 soybean acres, he grows production vegetables, and tends a menagerie of livestock: 100 rabbits, 50 chickens, 20 quail, 8 goats, and 3 cows. In March 2024, he and wife Caitlin were blessed with a baby girl—Nora.

“I have nothing to escape from anymore,” he says. “I’m blessed with a beautiful, loving wife; a newborn; and a farm. I’ve regained the trust of my family and community. God has given me all of this even though I deserve none of it. I’ve been forgiven and I’m grateful beyond words for every member of my family and every friend I have. They all are what fuel my fire each day.”

As Casburn speaks of gratitude, his voice quivers at the mention of a particularly stalwart source of support—his father, Rea. “I wouldn’t be here today without the love of my dad. He refused to give up on me. In my darkest addiction, I used to wonder why my dad wouldn’t wash his hands of me and be done. Now I have a child and I found the answer. It’s only made me love my dad that much more.”

The Brink

The devastation evidenced in opioid statistics is staggering. From 1999 to 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 645,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. The deaths fit into three opioid overdose phases: post-1999 legal prescriptions, 2010-plus heroin use, and a 2013-plus synthetic epidemic anchored to fentanyl.

A 2017 survey by American Farm Bureau Federation and National Farmers Union noted that up to 74% of U.S. farmers have been directly impacted by the opioid crisis.

On average, 130 people die daily from opioid use, and Casburn’s opioid-farm story almost came with a toe-tag. “We all have choices. I made mine and paid a tremendous cost. I went my own way and it almost cost me my life.”

What advice does he have for farmers, or rural Americans, or anyone on the addiction path?

“You may live here in Mississippi, or up in Iowa, or some other faraway place and feel alone, embarrassed, ashamed, and guilty because everyone you were raised with is going to find out you’re a drug addict. They already know. Reach out for help now. ”

“The best time to quit was to never have started. The second best time to quit is right now,” Casburn concludes. “You’ve never done anything that God won’t forgive you for. It’s not true that you can’t get out of the drug hole you’re in. Never, never believe that it’s too late.”

Indeed. Spoken by a survivor back from the brink. A farmer reborn.

For more articles from Chris Bennett ( cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

Power vs. Privacy: Landowner Sues Game Wardens, Challenges Property Intrusion

Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told

American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm

How #88 Became the Most Popular Cow on Social Media

Fri, 17 May 2024 20:28:13 GMT

#88 is quite possibly the most popular cow on social media right now, and it was one social media post that started it all.

“It’s kind of a fun little deal. I put on X a little sarcastic clip about the eclipse, and I saw her walking through the field, and she’s a very large cow even at that time. And I just mentioned something about, ‘the eclipse is coming’ as she walked away,” says Clay Scott, a farmer and rancher near Ulysses, Kansas.

The eclipse is coming!! pic.twitter.com/OZfYESouM2
— Clay scott (@scottwestacre) April 7, 2024

From that one post in early April, to the massive following that’s grown since, what’s transpired in that time is even catching this Kansas farmer by surprise.

“I can’t even believe what it is today. It’s hundreds of 1000s of people a day looking at it. It’s in the millions per week,” says Scott.

88,ooo views - who would have guessed https://t.co/OhhhPHFTFu
— Clay scott (@scottwestacre) April 22, 2024

She’s a 5-year-old Red Angus cow that’s quickly become a social media sensation.

“It’s a very large audience right now. A lot of states and a lot of countries chime in from time to time. So, it’s quite the ordeal,” he says.

Scott raises row crops and cattle in southwestern Kansas. He says they’ve been talking about #88’s size on the farm since February, almost sure she would be the first to calve, but now, it looks like she could be one of the last.

“I am concerned about her size and the size of the calf. I don’t want her to struggle because the calf gets too big. So that’s why we’re actually limiting her intake right now to not cause any more trouble than she’s probably already going to have with her size,” says Scott. “I’m hoping for twins, to be honest. If it’s twins, I’ll feel a lot better.”

As the saga surrounding when #88 will calve continues, her following is tuning in to what transpires next. Many of her followers are now even answering questions for Scott, and it’s sparked a conversation between complete strangers that has been yet another surprise.

“I’m getting well over 1,000 comments a day on this. And people ask questions, or they ask the same question that was talked about a couple days before. And folks are starting to fill in those answers,” says Scott. “That’s very helpful to me, because I don’t have the time or really the desire to go through my social media and answer each one.”

#88’

She’s a trooper. We are planning to move everyone tomorrow as we have done about all we can with this three week limited diet. We bring in feed every morning for her group then watch consumption. She has been on a diet to help keep calf from getting larger. Time will tell pic.twitter.com/H7U301R6yX
— Clay scott (@scottwestacre) May 16, 2024

There’s no doubt #88’s following is growing, and Scott’s daily posts are no longer just updates. He’s now using it as a tool to educate those invested in her pregnancy journey.

“When this popularity started, I thought, ‘well, let’s tell them why we’re doing this, or what this band in her ear is, what that represents,’ and why we do things that are just good doctrine of taking care of cattle. We’re trying to fulfill that mission that we need to do a better job in agriculture about telling our story.”

#88’

Changes. We are looking for the signs of labor. A swelling udder or even dripping milk - relaxing in hips and softening on backside. Raised tailhead often portrays labor is soon
Some display this along with tail twitching - lying and standing often

Some display nothing pic.twitter.com/RDhob9sJyE
— Clay scott (@scottwestacre) May 16, 2024

Scott’s biggest challenge may be cramming that message into 280 characters per post, but he says it’s forced him to put more thought and meaning into what he posts each day. And now, sharing #88’s story in a short and concise way, is now sharing agriculture’s story far and wide.

“I thought it would kind of, you know, peak in about two or three days and then kind of go away. I didn’t think there would be the continued investment,” he says.

What Scott is doing in his part of the world is giving a glimpse at raising cattle in such a simple and intriguing way, and it’s now making meaningful connections that extend way beyond ag.

Mistrial Declared in Arizona Rancher’s Murder Trial

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 18:42:45 GMT

An Arizona judge declared a mistrial in the murder case of rancher George Alan Kelly, 75, who was accused of fatally shooting a migrant on his property near the U.S.-Mexico border.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Fink said the decision was made after jurors failed to reach a unanimous decision after two full days of deliberation.

Following the declaration, Kelly’s defense attorney Kathy Lowthorp revealed outside the courthouse to the media that there had only been one guilty juror in the group, which was why the defense team pushed for deliberations to continue.

“There was one hold out for guilty, the rest were not guilty. So seven not guilty, one guilty,” Lowthorp stated. “We believe in our gut that there was no way the state proved beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Kelly had faced second-degree murder in the Jan. 30, 2023, shooting of Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea, 48, who lived just south of the border in Nogales, Mexico. Kelly had earlier rejected an agreement with prosecutors that would have reduced the charge to one count of negligent homicide if he pleaded guilty.

“It is what it is, and it will be what it will be. Let me go home, okay? That alright with y’all?” Kelly told reporters outside the courthouse following the mistrial. “I will keep fighting forever. I won’t stop.”

Judge Fink had told jurors that if they could not reach a verdict on the second-degree murder charge, they could try for a unanimous decision on a lesser charge of reckless manslaughter or negligent homicide.

The Santa Cruz County Attorney’s Office can still decide whether to retry Kelly for any charge or drop the case all together.

A status hearing was scheduled for next Monday afternoon, when prosecutors could inform the judge if they plan to refile the case.

Related:

Arizona Rancher Rejects Plea Deal in Death of Migrant

Arizona Border Rancher Accused of Killing Migrant, Now Held With $1 Million Bond

Wild Pigs Kill More People Than Sharks, Shocking New Research Reveals

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 14:43:28 GMT

Hogzilla or Jaws? More humans are killed annually by wild pigs than by sharks, a startling new study reveals. By slice, puncture, hook, and gouge, the global number of fatalities from wild pig attacks is rising by the decade.

Between 2014 and 2023, the average yearly number of fatal shark attacks worldwide was 5.8, while the average number of fatal wild pig attacks was 19.7. In 2024 alone, there have already been seven deaths from wild pig incidents.

According to groundbreaking research published in 2023, the number of humans killed by wild pig attacks steadily climbed from 2000 to 2019, for a total of 172 deaths—including a freakishly grisly fatality in southeast Texas.

“Most of the public doesn’t know the facts about wild pig attacks on humans,” says John J. Mayer, lead author of the study and wild pig research pioneer. “It’s not sharks, wolves, or bears that kill the most people—it’s wild pigs, and the numbers are consistently trending up.”

1,532 Attacks and 172 Deaths

In 1973, well before the global pig bomb exploded, Mayer began noting wild pigs’ capacity for habitat destruction. At a steady drip, he also heard anecdotes of pig attacks on humans. Although many of the stories initially could not be verified, by the 1990s Mayer accumulated a folder bulging with confirmed encounters, and in 2013, he published research detailing wild pig attacks.

The public reaction to his findings surprised Mayer: “I got a significant number of negative responses from people who refused to believe wild pigs were dangerous. I had people telling me the stories of attacks on humans were pure nonsense. Interestingly, if you asked those same people about sharks, they would, to a person, say that sharks are dangerous.”

A decade later, after collating a global dragnet of sources with colleagues James Garabedian and John Kilgo, both USDA wildlife biologists, Mayer published Human Fatalities Resulting From Wild Pig Attacks Worldwide: 2000–2019 , and the report is packed with eye-opening detail: 1,532 wild pig attacks on humans from 2000-2019, resulting in 172 human deaths in 29 countries.

Of the 172 fatalities, 88% occurred in non-hunting circumstances; 77% of victims died due to blood loss; 86% of attacks occurred in daylight; 84% of victims were male and 62% of victims were adults; 38% of attacks involved farm workers engaged in agriculture; almost all attacks were by solitary pigs, except for 20 encounters featuring multiple pigs; and average pig size in each incident was 240 lb.

“Tigers, Indian elephants, Nile crocodiles, and venomous snakes kill more people than wild pigs, but wild pigs are certainly worse than bears, wolves, and all shark species put together,” says Mayer, technical program manager at the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C. “Wild pigs are nowhere near the worst of the worst, but they’re far more dangerous than people believe.”

“These attacks can be horrific,” Mayer adds. “Typically, wild pigs don’t bother anyone if they don’t feel threatened, but they can deliver tremendous damage to the human body in a matter of seconds in a very gruesome manner. We found that in fatal attacks, 55% of people died on the scene. A wild pig is at the waist to knee range for most humans, and when pigs slash in that area, they do tremendous damage to the arterial system.”

Sincerely. Boars deliver stab-and-slash wounds, often around the groin area, with tusks that operate as nails and razors.

7x Predatory

Boar tusks are extremely sharp, with 60-70% of a canine enclosed in the jaw and roughly 1”-4” outside the socket. The upper and lower tusks rub against one another each time a boar opens and closes its mouth, honing the lower tusks into cutters via a perpetual sharpening process.

“Boars punch holes with their tusks, making rough-edged slashes and gouges,” Mayer describes. “They can also break bones with a powerful bite. Sows have smaller tusks, proportionally almost like dogs, so a sow tends to bite, rather than stab or slash. Therefore, most fatal attacks are by males with large canines, and often to the inner leg and femoral artery. On top of that, they can run in short bursts up to 30 to 35 miles per hour.”

Mayer’s benchmark report makes clear that almost all fatal wild pig attacks are associated with defensive behaviors. However, he documented seven attacks “during which the pig’s behaviors appeared to be predatory.”

“If they can get their mouths around something, they’ll eat it. It’s rare, but without question, they sometimes attack unprovoked,” Mayer notes. “We found one case in India where a young girl was walking with her father when a wild pig emerged from brush, grabbed her and picked her up in its jaws, and carried her away. The father gave chase and caught up, but both the father and daughter ended up in the hospital and the little girl died from her wounds.”

“And then there was the 2019 case in Texas where a lady endured the worst,” he adds. “That case is as terrible as it gets.”

As in, maneater. Wild pigs as maneaters.

Feeding Frenzy

The Sunday before Thanksgiving, Nov. 24, 2019, arguably ranks as the most savage wild pig attack on record.

As caregiver at the home of an elderly couple living in rural Chambers County, Christine Rollins, 59, arrived to work at roughly 6 a.m., in clockwork fashion. Rollins parked a Chrysler sedan in the yard of the well-kept property, directly beside the driveway, and exited her vehicle. She likely was dead within minutes, partially consumed while alive.

At approximately 7:45 a.m. law enforcement arrived at the property and found Rollins—5’1” and 130 lb.—on her back against the manicured lawn, 6’ from the Chrysler. Rollins’ clothing was torn away. A shirt and jacket were bunched high on her torso; pants and shoes were gone.

Her body, head to toe, was a roadmap of injuries—bites, punctures, and lacerations, including large portions of her legs devoid of flesh. Gone. Eaten.

Arriving on site as an investigation unfolded, nothing in Sheriff Brian Hawthorne’s 35-year southeast Texas career prepared him for the scene.

“I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” he recalls. “Miss Rollins was annihilated. A third of her body was mutilated and in ghastly condition. We could see that she’d been attacked by wild animals and we could see clear signs of hog rooting in the yard. The area around the property was rural and partially wooded, and the elderly owners told us they had major wild hog problems.”

“The owners also had two dogs outside, a 14-year-old Lab and a dachshund, a classic wiener dog. The Lab was extremely friendly toward us and was happy to see the deputies.”

Designated as an “unknown death,” the incident automatically triggered a criminal investigation. Hawthorne reserved judgement, pending an autopsy.

The autopsy was telltale.

“It was tragic. Miss Rollins bled to death,” Hawthorne says. “She had wounds over her whole body, but the lower extremities were horrific. People tried to attribute the attack to dogs, but the evidence was clearly to the contrary. The pathologist found no canine bites on the body. There certainly were bites and tusk marks of all sizes and different widths, but they were made by hogs. Material was sent to labs for DNA testing, and those results confirmed the wild hog attack.”

“It can only be speculation, but we believe she exited her car while the wild pigs were coming around the house,” he continues. “Initially, she was an obstruction, but then became the center of a feeding frenzy by multiple adult hogs and multiple juveniles of various sizes. I’d compare it to the frenzy of domesticated pigs when slop is dumped in a pen, or the frenzy normally associated with sharks at feeding.”

Glaringly, the 2019 wild pig attack in Chambers County accords with Mayer’s research and study. “Every part of me wishes Christine Rollins’ death was attributable to something other than wild hogs, but every bit of evidence says it’s not so,” Hawthorne concludes. “This attack was an exception, but I tell people all the time: Wild hogs are problematic and a danger to be around. Period.”

No More Skeptics

Why do most of the attacks and deaths from wild pigs go unnoticed? Over half (51%) of all fatal pig attacks occur in India, followed by China (8%), with the U.S. well behind at six recorded fatalities in the past 100 years, as noted in Human Fatalities Resulting From Wild Pig Attacks Worldwide: 2000–2019 .

However, the attack rate is trending up everywhere, Mayer says. “In the last 30 years, the global wild pig population has exploded, and we expect encounters to climb alongside, and now the news media is also catching up and the data is more available. In America, for example, I’m certain there were more wild pig fatalities in the past century, but those accounts were never documented. No doubt, there are more lost in family histories.”

In the early 1970s, when Mayer first began giving presentations on wild pig expansion, he was met with puzzled looks and a frequent question: “Why study an animal with no relevance?”

Fifty years later, with the U.S. wild pig population ballooning to 7 million, and annual damage to the agriculture economy at $1.5 billion, according to USDA estimates, no one questions Mayer over the impact of wild pigs.

“You hear about shark attacks all the time in the news, but you almost never hear about wild pig attacks. I hope our study increases awareness about wild pigs and makes people more cautious,” he says. “Wild pig attacks are rare and fatal attacks are rarer, but the rate is still much, much higher than people think—high enough to place wild pigs over sharks in cause of death.”

Sincerely. By the numbers, Hogzilla defeats Jaws.

For more articles from Chris Bennett ( cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told

American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm

Spring Madness: In Farming and Basketball, Team Players Accomplish the Most

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:52:35 GMT

Drag the planters out of the barn, fire up the seed tenders, update the field maps and start your engines. It’s time to plant. No matter how you define this annual event, one thing holds true: It’s a race to the finish. As my ag teacher so eloquently put it in his greenhand livestock reasons orientation, “The wind blew and the mud flew. I place this class … ” We are certainly ready to see the soil fly (hypothetically) as it’s covered in green growing crops.

This season as you enjoy your packed lunch at about 10 a.m., take a moment to ponder the lessons learned from the hardwoods in March. This annual NCAA basketball tournament is a testament to quality leadership, perseverance, a will to win and tactical efficiency. It often isn’t the biggest, the fastest or the most highly praised players who emerge victorious. Rather, it’s the selfless and the team players who cut down the nets.

Here are a few concepts to focus on during the hustle of planting:

1. Leaders lead. If you are in charge, be in charge. Make a plan each evening and share it each morning. Of course, you’ll have to improvise from time to time, but starting on the same page is important.

2. Be a team. Nobody wins alone and that means you must trust your crew to handle their roles. If they know it’s OK to ask questions or ask for help, they’ll be more likely to do so. Together you’ll accomplish more than you ever could alone. Sometimes you will have to ask. Don’t assume everyone just knows what to do.

3. Make in-game adjustments. You can scout and you can scheme, but rarely does every game happen exactly as anticipated. Be flexible and make daily adjustments where warranted. That doesn’t mean cutting corners, but it does mean going with the flow.

4. Commit to excellence. Make your expectations clear, keep them high and stick to your standards. It’s OK for there to be mistakes as long as lessons are learned. A word of caution: If you set a high bar, you’ll need to meet it also. Be confident, but know difficult things have a way of keeping you humble.

5. Remember why you started farming. Your passion and your love of the profession will see you through difficult days. Take a minute to enjoy the experience. The game is hard, but the rewards are many.

Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 02:51:01 GMT

Riding a lightning bolt on a silver saddle, Roger Reaves forged the most astounding farm life of modern times as the preeminent drug smuggler of the 20^thcentury. From row crop poverty to moonshine to marijuana to cocaine, he amassed a $60-million fortune as the highest paid narco-pilot in history, carrying cargo for Pablo Escobar and a host of global kingpins.

Reaves was shot down twice in Central America, brutally tortured in Mexico, lost in the Amazon for 11 days, chased down every backroad on the planet, and incarcerated in 26 prisons in seven countries on four continents for 33 years, yet escaped five times.

Despite gaining phenomenal wealth and notoriety, Reaves never intended to leave his fields of corn, cotton, and tobacco. “All I ever really wanted was to be a farmer,” he explains with a heavy dose of humility, each syllable soaked in the smoothest honey of Southern accents. “I had a helluva life even before I transported an ounce of illegal drugs. In many ways, my farm story is tougher to believe than what came after, but it shaped who I am.”

If every man is a novel, Reaves is a library. He is a character beyond fiction, as if Huck Finn fell into the pages of Lonesome Dove and came to life in The Grapes of Wrath. “No matter if I was in the jungle, mountains, desert, or flying over the ocean, I could always hear the farm calling,” he says. “If you want to understand my life, go back to the farm.”

Tapping the Vein

In 1943, Roger Reaves was born to the central Georgia family of William and Hortense Reaves. William was a kind and firm father, and a farmer of the first order. “Daddy picked me up, took one look at his boy, and started bawling,” Reaves says. “He never told why.”

Hortense, extraordinarily beautiful with black curls and blue eyes, yet tough as whip leather, possessed keen intelligence that passed to her firstborn son. “When I was born, momma’s breasts swoll to unbearable pain,” Reaves describes. “Daddy crawled under the house, grabbed several new puppies from his speckled bird dog, slipped socks over their paws and claws, and those pups relieved momma’s hurt.”

In the pocket of Telfair County, the Reaves family set plow to dirt in a closed, rural realm dotted by unpainted, pine sharecropper houses atop bricks and wooden blocks, with swinging, solid-board windows on oversized, barndoor hinges. Spartan. A mule lot out back, corn crib alongside, Model A Ford truck from the late 20s-early 30s parked in front, and maybe a shade tree for the most blessed.

A notch above the sharecropper class, on a washboard road 5 miles north of Jacksonville, the Reaves owned 163 acres. On one side of the lane, behind three mules, the family worked 108 sandy loam acres of corn, cotton, peanuts, and tobacco, along with a tiny patch of sugar cane. Across from the farmland, they lived on a 55-acre stretch of woods and pasture.

Poverty was a given. No electricity. No tractor. No car. Wood-burning stove. Kerosene lamps. A two-hole outhouse with corn cobs—red and white—for toilet paper: red cob first wipe and white cob second wipe to see if another red was needed. A Sears & Roebuck catalogue was at arm’s reach, but the slick pages lacked the scouring power of corn cobs.

During crop season, Reaves wailed unless he could hit the fields with his father. “Daddy wired a board onto our Oliver plow, so I’d have a place to sit. We’d hit a tough patch of dirt and he’d urge me, ‘Ground is getting hard. Sit heavy, Roger. Sit heavy.’ I’d pull up on the board with all my might, convinced my pressure was the difference maker. Some of the finest memories of my life were in those fields with my daddy and his mules: Mike, Cora, and Slow Kate.”

Reaves, alongside seven brothers and sisters, ran barefoot all year, except for shoes at school and church. Sporting closely cropped black hair and baggy, blue overalls, he ran an endless maze of woods and bottoms in proximity to cousins, uncles, and aunts—the last of the family reserve, a mix of blood and water relatives, many of whom were holdovers from the previous century.

“My paternal grandparent’s house had bare pine lumber, a high-pitched roof, and cypress shingles,” Reaves recalls. “It was dark inside except for light shooting down from holes in the roof. Their clothes were hung on racks and covered by cowskins to always keep them dry. On the walls, small, cloth bags of garlic, sulfur, and strange ingredients hung on nails—kind of like magic to ward off disease.”

Visits to his aunt, Sadie Reaves, were even more surreal. Well into her nineties, Sadie often sought the services of a local pseudo-doctor, an expert with the blade and a specialist in bloodletting. On a long, creaking front porch draped in weeping wisteria vine, Sadie received the doctor in her rocking chair, arm propped at the ready. “The quack would bleed her good,” Reaves explains. “He’d slice a vein and the blood flowed—dark crimson dripping deep into a white enamel pan.”

Further down the dirt road, in relative isolation, lived Reaves’ cousins, Annie Parrish and her mentally ill younger brother, Charlie. Annie died unexpectedly inside the house, seated in a chair—undiscovered for weeks in the heat of summer. “The vultures literally gathered on top of the house from the stink before anyone noticed she was gone,” Reaves says. “When the authorities came and tried to get her out of the chair and into a body bag, she fell into parts.”

Death Knocks

River over a rock, stories cascade from Reaves. At 82, his ability to paint with words is remarkable. Throw him a tiny bone and he returns a massive meal—a never-ending tapestry of people, places, particulars, and peculiarities, all delivered with an easy, warm laugh, quick smile, and sweet cadence.

Simply, Reaves is a born raconteur. “As a boy, I loved to hear great stories. I was all ears and I listened better than everyone else. Every detail mattered; even the voice mattered.”

“You can tell a lot by a voice, by the way of delivery,” Reaves continues. “Even today, I can learn everything I need to know about a man just hearing his voice. Truth or lies are there.”

From his earliest years, Reaves believed he was different from other children. Calm in crisis. Calculating in the moment. “Deep inside, I knew I wasn’t normal, but until later in life, I never realized how different and wild my existence was on the farm.”

Reaves’ adolescence was a composite of countless, overlapping vignettes—Tom Sawyer brought to life in a theater of the surreal. Setting trotlines; attending cock fights; chasing wild pigs; catching cottonmouths and coachwhips; taking a string of bream to momma; watching the plow bust clods while killdeers skittered in front of the mules; poking holes with an iron buggy axle below near-fossilized lighter’d stumps to set dynamite; shaking poison-filled flower sacks in the rows as white dust layers caked on ghostly skin and hair; running a 25-cent watermelon stand at 5 years old; marveling over the purchase of a John Deere MT tractor at 7 years old; turpentine brews; blood feuds; towering yellow pines 100’-plus tall and 4’ wide; yard brooms made of gall berry bushes; tales of Grandpa Lee Reaves killing a man in open court—shooting him twice in the chest and setting the pistol on the judge’s bench—and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, but pardoned after going blind in a prison medical experiment, and more. Volumes more.

“Maybe it was poverty; maybe it was farming; maybe it was my environment; maybe it was my DNA. There are things you’re imprinted with and things you’re born with that you can’t discover for years. One thing for certain, I was born with abnormally sharp instinct. I had premonitions of what was to come.”

Premonitions. In 1952, seated in a patch of grass on Highway 441 alongside a bridge over a fishing hole, geared with cane pole and can of worms, 9-year-old Reaves felt the tug of dread. Obeying a palpable pull to flee the scene, he crossed the road for home, just before a flatbed truck carrying a sawmill motor rumbled down a dip toward the bridge: three men in the cab and five men laughing in the bed around the motor.

“All eight of the men were smiling and joking, enjoying life. There was a settling of the road just before the bridge. The front tires hit the spot and the truck went about 4’ in the air. The driver lost control and it was over. Men were tossed everywhere, even over the banister. The motor tumbled and smashed into the ground in the exact spot I was sitting minutes earlier.”

The boy who would one day ride horses, drive cattle, dine, and talk farming with Pablo Escobar—the most notorious drug lord in history, worth at least $70 billion in modern equivalency—was spared from death.

“I didn’t die that day because I listened when I was told to move,” Reaves says. “That was a guardian angel—the same one that protected me so many times throughout my entire life. Anyone would believe me if they saw the body parts slung over the road and bridge.”

The Lunatics

In the late 1950s, Reaves sacked groceries at a general store every Saturday for 14 hours, hitchhiking roughly 20 miles north to McRae. “Life was a struggle and it created an atmosphere where strange people entered or exited the scene. I remember all kinds of wild people, but there was a particular couple that stays fresh in my memory—the lunatics.”

Walking Highway 441 on an early morning, Reaves watched as a light gray, four-door sedan eased to the shoulder. He climbed in the back seat behind the driver and noted an incongruous pair: a clean-cut man decked in a crisp suit at the wheel, and a dowdy woman in the passenger seat—her face covered by a light-colored towel stained red in patches.

The man offered a bright greeting; the woman sat silent as a stone.

Hanging beside Reaves, directly behind the woman, was a brand-new suit. The man turned to Reaves: “Do you want to buy this suit—$5?”

“No thanks. I don’t even have $5,” Reaves answered.

In a flash, the woman peeled off the towel and exposed a bleeding, swollen face. She burst into explanation, telling Reaves the man was released from an insane asylum one day prior and the orderlies hadn’t “cured him one bit.”

Reaves’ skin crawled. He couldn’t discern who was crazy. Him, her, both?

The man drove in silence for several miles, until the vehicle passed a rest stop where a family was cooking a roadside breakfast: father, mother, and two teen daughters wearing shorts.

“The driver turned his head to look at the family, just like I did, but the passenger woman went nuts,” Reaves recalls. “She started screaming: ‘You’re a sunuvabitch. Look and lust because that’s all you can do.’”

With those words, the man struck the woman in the face with the back of his fist, hard enough to rock her against the sedan’s window. She draped the towel back over her head and slumped in submission. On they drove—again in silence—almost to McRae.

“Just before McRae, there was an old gas station called Nubby’s, because the owner had no legs from the waist down—railway accident,” Reaves details. “Nubby had been convicted of raping his own mother and the state locked him up for a long time. Anyhow, of all the places on the highway, that’s where the lunatics pulled over.”

“Right at Nubby’s, the lady started cussing the driver again, accusing him of all sorts of unmentionable crimes. He pulled into Nubby’s lot, turned off the vehicle, and started beating the hell out of the lady. He was trying to murder her, but she sat back and took every fist—never raised a hand.”

Bewildered, but convinced the woman would die, Reaves grabbed the man from behind and pulled hair and neck. “I felt his windpipe against my hands and arms; he kicked so hard the radio dials broke off. He slumped, and I hollered at the lady to run. She sat there silent, like her switch was turned off. He staggered out of the car, making choking noises, and stumbled into some woods beside the station. He had no idea where in the hell he was going.”

Reaves ran down the highway and alerted the sheriff. “The sedan never moved from Nubby’s for a month and then one day it was gone,” he says. “What happened to the lunatics? I don’t know and sometimes it’s better not to ask questions.”

Alone

Liquor drains many a farmer.

In the mid-1950s, Reaves’ father, William, pulled hard on the bottle. “I’d say he was a full alcoholic by the time I was 10. It reached a point where he loved liquor more than life.”

In 1957, during William’s descent into addiction, Reaves was stoked to sell a bumper crop of his father’s watermelons. The father-and-son pair loaded a semitrailer of black diamond melons packed 5’-deep in straw. Macon to Atlanta to Chattanooga (Tenn.), they sold almost the entire haul for a hefty knot of profit. On the final night of market, in Chattanooga, young Reaves crawled into the cab, covered himself in burlap bags for warmth, and fell asleep, while William walked away to drink with a couple of back-slapping locals.

By morning, William’s pockets were empty—robbed of an entire season’s gain. “My daddy was so ashamed,” Reaves recalls. “We had 47 watermelons left to our name in the trailer. We sold them and used the money to buy gas to get home.”

In 1961, at 54, William suffered a stomach aneurysm. Fading fast, William called each of his seven children to his bed. “I asked my daddy about his soul and if he was right with Jesus. I was crying my eyes out,” Reaves recalls. “He told me, ‘Roger, I don’t mind dying because I know you’re there to look after your mother and everyone.’ He was a wonderful man and father, but the bottle took him at 7 o’clock that evening.”

Reaves, a firstborn son, was alone on the farm. Very soon, he would need to kill a man.

Commode Cleaner or King

Larry McMurtry’s seminal Lonesome Dove character, Woodrow F. Call, is reborn in Roger Reaves: Polite to a fault, yet incapable of disregarding rudeness or slights. Reaves is slow to draw moral lines, but once the markers are laid, he adheres.

“I’m good to all, but don’t mistake kindness for weakness,” he describes. “I’ll sit on a bench and if you sit down and push against me, I’ll slide over and maybe even give you the money in my pocket. If you take up even more room, I’ll slide down even more without a word. But please don’t push me off the end of the bench. That’s the place you don’t want to go.”

“I’m a Christian, but I’ve never turned the other cheek very well,” he adds. “I’ve got thin skin and when somebody insults me, I remember that. Maybe that has to do with a stigma about growing up poor on the farm, maybe not, but that’s who I am.”

Despite a lifetime rubbing elbows with shakers, movers, and drug lords of every stripe, Reaves never forgets his origins. “Commode cleaner or king, I always treated everyone the same. You either lie or you don’t, and there’s no such thing as half-honest. You’re either a snitch or you’re not. You’re either pregnant or you’re not. There are certain lines you either cross or you don’t.”

On March 31, 1961, Reaves’ sister, Charlotte, 16, readied for her first date. Charlotte and her cousin, Barbara, were taken to the movies on a Friday evening by two teenage boys from Coffee County. Several hours later, Charlotte returned home in severe distress.

“Her dress was torn, and her chest was scratched and clawed,” Reaves notes. “The two boys had taken our cousin home, and then attempted to rape my sister. One sat on her head and the other tried to have his way. She fought so hard he couldn’t complete the act.”

“It wasn’t complicated. I would kill the sunuvabitch.”

Bliss and Blood

Vengeance on April 1. With no wheels, Reaves set out on foot, searching for a plan of action. He walked into Jacksonville, caught a ride with a buddy, and drove over the Ocmulgee River to a skating rink in Red Bluff—momentarily reducing his rage.

Inside the rink, roughly 100 people circled, and to Reaves’ utter surprise, he spotted the boy who assaulted his sister. “There he was, right in front of me,” Reaves recalls. “I saw him going around and around with a girl in a long, white dress.”

Intentions hidden, Reaves coolly walked to the concession stand, dropped a dime on a drink, and reached into the freezing slush of a Coca-Cola ice cooler, pulling out a dripping bottle. He rubbed away the moisture with a towel and proceeded to the skate floor as the blissful radio hit, “It’s A Cotton Candy World,” echoed across the rink:

Every day is a day of wonder never ever blue,
It’s a fine and dandy cotton candy world with you.

“I walked onto the floor and he came around once on the inside, then he came around again and I caught him. I swung as hard as I could with the bottle and hit him right between the eyes. His skates went up toward the ceiling and he skidded about 30’. I was running right behind and when he slowed, I laid into his face and beat him to bloody pulp. I couldn’t tolerate his kind of abuse.”

“There was blood everywhere, like a hog had got slaughtered,” Reaves continues. “The rink owner jumped in, but slipped in the blood and broke his glasses. Somebody pulled a knife and cut off the boy’s skates, and they drug him outta the ring.”

The surrounding crowd, frozen with hands over mouths, watched as a bloody Reaves regained his composure. “Roger, Roger,” several voices hollered. “Why did you do that?”

“April Fool’s,” he muttered, calmly walking toward the exit, with the sounds of “It’s A Cotton Candy World,” still hovering in the background:

You’re the prize I won,
You’re the apple on the stick.

Upon his arrival at home, Reaves’ sister, Charlotte, immediately understood the implications of his blood-stained clothes.

“He ain’t dead,” Reaves said, in a measured tone. “Just almost.”

The Bear

Twenty bucks a day cropping tobacco in Canada? Massive money.

Farms in Canada’s tobacco belt paid $20 per day, plus room and board, for hands—essentially a six-week season that bookended Reaves’ tobacco window, considering his crop typically was in by the beginning of July.

Belongings crammed into a pasteboard suitcase with a wire handle, thumb in the air, he set out for Canada, hitchhiking the East Coast to Niagara Falls and into Ontario.

“The tobacco work, the money, and the fellas I worked with were great—but I didn’t know it would all lead to the blessing of my life.”

During an off day from the rows, Reaves and several coworkers went into Tillsonburg, perched above Lake Erie, for a visit to the fall fair. Milling through the crowd, they passed a tent fronted by a large, bearded man with a loudspeaker baiting the passersby to take on his black bear in a cage: $500 to anyone who could wrestle the muzzled, blunt-clawed bear and get all four of its paws off the ground, and $10 to anyone who entered the cage and tried.”

“Sure, I’d do it,” Reaves remembers. “The bear looked small, sitting over in the corner. I was game for at least an easy $10. I’d grabbed plenty of hogs. Why not a bear?”

Sporting a white shirt and black slacks, Reaves stepped toward the cage. The bearded man chuckled and tossed an inquiry: “Where are you from?”

“Telfair County, Georgia,” Reaves drawled.

“I mighta known,” answered the bearded man. “These yellow-bellied Canadians are afraid of my bear.”

Greeting completed, the crowd surged as the man bellowed into the loudspeaker: “145-pound man against 600-pound beast.”

The cage door slammed behind Reaves. It was on.

“The bear got up and I couldn’t believe his giant size—ever bit of 600 pounds. I slammed right into him and things went wild. The cage bars and floorboards were purposely loose to make maximum noise, and the crowd went out of its mind. The bear hit me at the knees and laid me out. I kicked up as hard as I could into its muzzle, striking a lucky shot that instantly drew blood and made him crazy, and he mauled me all the more,” Reaves says.

“The bear was cut bad, out of control, and I was scrapping for my life—it was bloody and foamy and wasn’t the tidy, pre-planned performance that was supposed to go down.”

Infuriated, the bearded man entered the cage and snapped a chain on the bear’s neck, just before the animal turned on the owner, exploded out of the cage into the crowd, dislodged several support poles, and pulled down half the tent before getting wedged in the tangle.

Clothing in tatters, Reaves staggered from the cage and asked for $10.

The bearded man growled: “Go to hell.”

Carried back to the tobacco farm’s bunkhouse by his friends, Reaves was bedridden for two days in recovery—a loss of $40 in field pay, as well as his only set of street clothes.

A week later, hobbling with a cane, Reaves took an after-work trip to Turkey Point Beach at Lake Erie. He walked the pier and met Marrie—"destiny.”

“I got to the end of the pier and there were three girls sitting on towels, including Marrie, who would become my wife. My one and only. I am that fella who believes in destiny.”

“That was 63 years ago and Marrie is just as pretty as the day I met her. I could never, never have found a better wife. A saint. She prays for people and is a devout Christian, and her prayers are answered. Through all the peaks and valleys that were to come, she stood by me.”

Reaves married Marrie, and the newlyweds hoped for prosperity on the Georgia farm. In short time, they were as broke as a stick-horse.

White Lightning

Learning to fly was the Lord’s work. As a late teen, Reaves read Through Gates of Splendor, the best-seller about an attempt by aviation missionaries to reach a tribe in the Ecuadorian Amazon. “I wanted to do that: fly supplies in and out; fly sick people to hospitals,” Reaves says.

“I paid $10 to a crop duster in Douglas to start my flying lessons and I got hooked. It was a skill I had no idea how much I’d use later.”

Truly. Only a handful of years in the future, Reaves would fly across Latin America and the world, but his cargo would be marijuana instead of missionaries, and cocaine instead of clinical supplies.

In the interim, Purina was promoting poultry around Telfair County. Reaves went all in, urging Hortense to mortgage the farm for 36,000 laying hens. It was a bold move, but Reaves drowned in debt. He caught the wrong end of the market wave and got buried under $78,000 in chicken feed.

“So many farmers we knew were losing their farms in our area in the 1960s and I remember a couple of suicides,” Reaves notes. “It was terrible, desperate situation for a lot of families.”

In 1966-67, facing a potential farm loss, Reaves turned the chicken feed into moonshine—1,000 gallons per week. Packed in 200-gallon loads into the back of a long Buick with no reverse, Reaves delivered the firewater to eager customers in Waycross and Douglas. The bootleg cost him $1 per gallon and sold for $3 per gallon—approximately $2,000 weekly profit, contingent on the weather.

“It was risky business because the police would shoot you dead over illegal liquor. Sure enough, a competitor—another moonshining farmer, big acreage—turned me in. The revenuers showed up with bloodhounds and shot at me 40 or 50 times while I ran into the woods with the bullets snapping and swum a mile down a creek to escape.”

Soon after, Reaves turned himself in and was splashed on the pages of the Macon Telegraph, Atlanta Journal, and Telfair Enterprise: “Largest moonshine still in county history found near Jacksonville, Georgia. Four vats containing over 40,000 gallons of mash, 500 gallons of pure moonshine, 200 butane bottles, 12-foot condenser. One man arrested and sheriff says there will be more to follow.”

The grand jury deadlocked. Reaves refused the government’s offer to turn rat, but skinned to the bone, he lost everything that had wheels: pickup, tractor, International L-170 truck, and farm equipment. “Everyone knew what happened and I wanted no part of anyone at church or the store because I was ashamed. And I was paralyzed broke.”

Adios. It was time for Reaves to walk away from the fields of his childhood—forever. His slippery escape from the law and his refusal to turn informer foreshadowed the remainder of an incredible life.

“I hit the highway and I had tears in my eyes. In my head, I was leaving to go make money to pay off debt and farm the next spring. My spirit knew otherwise.”

Cropping days done, the poverty-stricken Georgia farm boy was about to tap El Dorado: “Imagine if you were in a casino with the slot handle pulled down and gold coins were flooding out, tumbling while you bagged,” Reaves asks. “When would you let go?”

Mercury or Marijuana

Almost 2,400 miles across the continent, the booming California economy of the early 1970s beckoned—particularly $7 per hour construction labor. Framing, concrete, electricity, and firefighter—even a short stint on a fishing boat in Alaska, Reaves bootstrapped for his bread, keeping an eye open for another dollar. Initially, he found significant side-stream income in antiques, locating an abundance of relics in Los Angeles County and far beyond—including the Midwest. The antique business was a plum to peel: Buy cheap, haul to California, sell to the nouveau riche.

One by one, Reaves paid off his Georgia farm debts, with enough cash flow left to buy his first airplane, a Cessna 182—the trusty Volkswagen of the sky.

In 1971, getting a tip on a motherlode of antiques in Joplin, Missouri, Reaves and a friend rented the biggest U-Haul on the market, latched on a trailer, and packed both to the gills with old furniture. Rolling across the Southwest, riding shotgun, Reaves thumbed the pages of a National Geographic magazine and came across a curious factoid: Mercury, he read, was 13 times more expensive in the U.S. than in Mexico.

Reaves blurted out his thoughts in the cab: “I’m gonna fly to Mexico in my airplane and buy some mercury and bring it back for a big profit.”

Reaves’ friend, the driver, responded with a life-altering question: “Mercury? That’s too heavy. Why don’t you fly marijuana?”

Need a Co-Pilot?

Life was sweet. Reaves had Marrie at his side, two baby girls, two houses, an airplane—and hopes of a farm. Yet, he was staring at an offer to fly the Cessna 182 to Mexico, fill the back seat with marijuana, fly back to California, and pocket $10,000. Lock, stock, and smoking barrel.

“And just like that, I made the flight and had a bag filled with $10,000 in cash. Intoxicating. So easy. There wasn’t even such thing as DEA watching the border.”

Faster than henhouse gossip, Reaves made a second flight to Mexico—another $10,000 in crisp bills. Why not buy a bigger plane, bigger loads, bigger money?

“I started thinking long-term and asked a lawyer friend what the penalty would be if a fella got caught: probation or four months raking leaves.”

Following the ball, Reaves bought larger wings (a Cessna 207 for $55,000) and began making marijuana hauls for $40,000 per flight. The pot was his path back home: “I drew a line at $300,000. As soon as I made $300,000, I’d quit and we’d go back to the farm.”

Best laid plans. Subtly, dollar by dollar, the farm return faded.

“I made the $300,000 so fast it made me dizzy. I wanted to go back so bad, and I could hear the farm talking to me, but the farm got fainter as the money talked louder.”

Pockets bulging, Reaves gifted his mother, Hortense, a California vacation. He picked her up at the airport in a Cadillac and drove her to Disneyland for a cash-flash afternoon.

Without skipping a beat, she threw a fastball to her son: “What are you doing, boy?”

Reaves answered truthfully: “I’m hauling pot, Momma.”

“How much are you making?”

“I’m making $40,000 any day I want to go to Mexico,” Reaves responded.

“Son, do you need a copilot?”

Banded and Ironed

One-hundred loads of pot later—flown in bigger and badder airplanes, Reaves’ reputation was stellar in the narcotics underworld. His farming background and dependability distinguished him from other mules. “Farming had a huge influence on my performance in the drug trade. I got the nickname of ‘can do’ because I could weld it, wire it, hotwire it, build it, change it, or drive it.”

In 1976, a rising Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa, the most infamous drug lords in history, were seeking a pilot for the Medellin Cartel. Escobar caught a tip about an American who kept his word: Roger Reaves. Less than a decade after walking out of cotton and tobacco rows in Georgia, Reaves was summoned to a coca plantation in Colombia.

“I went through a gate to a tiled farmhouse that was 200 or 300 years old,” Reaves describes. “There was a hitching rail and maybe 25 people gathered outside wearing fedoras, all cocaine men.”

Inside the house, Reaves was ushered into Ochoa’s office. “Ochoa was standing beside this big, big desk with 12 big phones lined up in a row, each a different color. He told me each phone was connected to a key U.S. city—Chicago, Houston, and so on. Ochoa was the brains of the operation he said the men outside had 100 tons of cocaine they wanted to move. Essentially, Ochoa would guarantee their drugs like an insurance company.”

Brass tacks, Ochoa asked Reaves a direct question: “What airplane do you have?”

“I have a DC-3, Beech 18, Aero Commander … whatever plane you need, I have,” Reaves answered. “I can get the job done.”

Ochoa signaled a female assistant who walked to a back room. She returned with a man in khaki pants and plaid shirt, pedestrian in appearance. “I shook hands with a man who looked like he could have fit with the crowd; looked just like the rest of us. The man was Pablo Escobar.”

The godfather of cocaine offered Reaves $5,000 per kilo.

Escobar declined to speak English, but Reaves navigated with broken Spanish, assuring Escobar he could glide past the U.S. border. Escobar’s response was plain, according to Reaves: “We’ve got all the work you can do.”

Without a hiccup, Reaves transported his first load of cocaine for Escobar, Ochoa, and the Medellin cartel in an 8-hour flight to the U.S.—300 kilos for $1.5 million in banded and ironed bills. (At peak, Escobar was reportedly generating $420 million per week in cocaine profit and spending $2,500 per month on rubber bands to organize the piles of cash. According to his chief accountant, Escobar lost $2.5 billion in stored cash per year due to rat consumption or water damage.)

“It was just that easy and when I finished, I asked Escobar, ‘When do you want me to come back?’”

“His answer was simple and polite, ‘We’re waiting on you, Senor.’”

Rip Van Winkle Awakes

Reaves made millions upon millions at a pace of his choosing. He hired Barry Seal (portrayed by Tom Cruise in the film American Made ) to transport 500-kilo loads generating $2.5 million in pay: $1 million for Seal and $1.5 million for Reaves. However, far beyond Escobar and the Medellin Cartel, Reaves charted one of the most buck-wild tales in American history. (See Reaves’ memoir, Smuggler , for the phenomenal story of his experience in narcotics transport.)

Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe—by airplane or yacht—he smuggled hashish and cocaine to every cranny and crevice on the globe for roughly a decade, risking life and liberty at every stop. Reaves doesn’t deny the motivation: “I did it for the money. Yes, there was genuine excitement and major thrills in flying over shark-infested waters, or getting chased, or beating the system, but bottom line, it was about money. I made around $60 million in 10 years.”

What did Reaves do with the money? He bought airplanes, boats, homes, toys—and seven farms.

One farm—702 acres adjacent to President Jimmy Carter’s operation in Plains, Ga.—paid invaluable dividends. Serving a life sentence for drug smuggling in Australia, Reaves wrote a letter to Carter.

“I explained that I was his neighbor and I asked him for help. I asked for a parole recommendation letter. He wrote to the top of Australia’s government and asked them to consider me for parole. I can’t prove it, but that farm connection probably helped get me out of prison for the last time.”

In 2019, after 18 years (33 years total for nonviolent crime, served on four continents) in Australian lockup, Reaves was free. “I cried three days in a row when I got out of prison. Rip Van Winkle finally woke up. It was time to live because I had Marrie, the most wonderful woman in the world, plus my daughters, waiting on me.”

Would he do it all again?

“No. No. No. I’d have kept us on the farm somehow. I’d have learned to cruise timber or grown Bermuda grass with my chicken houses. There was opportunity, even in farming at the time, but I didn’t see that as a young man.”

“Sure, all the money made me happy, but only in the moment—nothing lasted. It cost me 33 years away from my family. I’d trade every penny I made to get back those 33 years.”

Considering the short lifespans of smugglers and cartel associates, how did Reaves outlive his counterparts by decades as one of the last survivors of a tumultuous era?

“I stayed alive because I kept my word through it all, just like I learned on the farm. Everyone knew I wasn’t DEA or a rat. My daddy taught me to give someone a firm handshake—not too hard or too soft—and look them straight in the eyeball and do what you say you’ll do.”

Reaves no longer looks over his shoulder or listens for footsteps. He is at peace. “I’m so happy now—so grateful for my blessings and my time on the farm. I need nothing because I have my family. The simplicities of life, the fundamentals, are the only things that bring true happiness.”

“I don’t dwell on times gone by, but I also don’t deny the stories from my past. I wrote them down in my memoir, Smuggler , and people understand me a little more when they learn the details. All I ever truly wanted was to be a farmer,” he concludes. “I left the farm, but the wonderful thing is the farm never left me.”

Indeed. The most prolific narco-pilot of all time was a farmer. A life lived like no other: The unbreakable Roger Reaves.

For more from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm

Georgia Dairy Farmer Teaches NBA Superstars, Including Charles Barkley, How to Milk a Cow by Hand

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 19:46:37 GMT

NBA superstar Charles Barkley told one of his producers that he couldn’t remember the last time he had a glass of milk. The producers smiled and came up with the idea to not only have Barkley, but also his TNT show co-stars, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith, who are also NBA superstar legends, to learn how to hand milk a cow.

The basketball trio were introduced to a Madison, Ga., dairy cow, as Katelin Benkoski from Big Sandy Creek Dairy Farm was tagged by several friends on Facebook for the need for animal actors. More specifically, what they were looking for was a dairy cow in milk that could walk up a ramp and that could handle bright lights and cameras for the TNT show.

The Benkoski family knew just the cow they could use from the farm’s 80-cow herd that would perform well in that kind of spotlight. Rosie, a five-year-old Red and White Holstein cow, who weighs approximately 1,300 pounds, strutted down the ramp into the TNT studio.

“Oh, so she weighs a little less than Shaq,” teased Charles Barkley upon meeting Rosie, who has been shown at several fairs and is often used with milking demonstrations on the farm’s agritourism business.

“I got the call on Monday, and they asked if we could be in Atlanta on Thursday,” Katelin says.

The Benkoski family – John and Julie, along with their three daughters, Katelin, Alissa and Leah – lean into any opportunity that they can to educate people and have good positive feedback for dairy farmers. Although this opportunity was a big hit with the family, Julie was starstruck and John joked that no way the NBA stars grow to be as tall as they were without the help of milk’s nine essential vitamins.

The NBA trio was definitely surprised and visibly nervous to milk Rosie. Only Charles Barkley was willing to pull up a stool and hand milk a cow, but all three stars were interested in the process.

Katelin says Rosie was the true star and has felt like a diva back on the family’s farm since her TV appearance.

“She definitely thinks she is queen of the herd now,” she says.

Big Sandy Creek Dairy Farm

Big Sandy Creek Dairy Farm was established in 1947 when the girl’s grandparents came down from Connecticut to Georgia. The farm is located about an hour south of Atlanta. The family currently milks 80 Holstein cows and runs a well-established agritourism entity that provides school tours, summer camps and more.

Katelin shares that her mother is a schoolteacher and her father used to be a school bus driver for the local school and the family incorporated their love for education to engage more with their community to tell their dairy’s good story.

“My parents began noticing a disconnect in consumers and agricultural education with a lot of people not knowing where their food comes from,” she said.

The farm’s agritourism business has been going on for nearly two decades, although it paused after Hurricane Katrina, as people did not have the funds to do field trips. They opened their doors again seven years ago and have been part of the Adopt a Cow program for three years.

To watch the TNT segment featuring Big Sandy Creek Farm, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gt_l0b17JQ .

Your Mental Health Toolbox: How To Recognize The Warning Signs

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 22:28:17 GMT

Working in agriculture isn’t easy, and factors such as commodity prices, weather and family dynamics often weigh heavily on those involved.

It’s important the friends, family, and business professionals close to farmers are prepared to recognize warning signs and effectively communicate in a mental health crisis. PennState Extension shares several tips to help.

What To Look For
Some of the ways increased stress presents itself is through physical changes such as headaches or frequent illness, loss of the person’s sense of humor, change in routine, isolation or the feeling that they can’t do anything right.

In farmers specifically, this could look like a decline in the care of livestock and the farmstead’s appearance, no longer stopping by the coffee shop in the morning to chat with friends, or giving up something they were previously passionate about such as volunteering as a 4-H leader.

Prolonged symptoms take a toll on a person’s body and can have long-term effects like high blood pressure and diabetes.

Extension experts also say increased stress has the ability to make farmers more accident prone and could lead to an uptick in the number of accidents or injuries around the operation.

How To Approach The Conversation
If you notice these changes in a customer, friend or family member, the way you approach them about the topic matters. Simply asking them how they’re doing will probably elicit a response similar to “I’m fine.”

PennState Extension advises using active listening during this conversation to help the person feel comfortable sharing more about what’s going on and understand that you care.

For example, if they brush off your initial question of concern, encourage them to elaborate by saying, “I’ve noticed you seem down. Is there anything on your mind?”. Restate and paraphrase what they’ve shared with you periodically, so they know you’re interested and listening. This also gives them a chance to correct anything you’ve misunderstood and give more context if necessary. You could say, “It sounds like you’re thinking/feeling X. Is that right?”

Focus on listening, rather than what you’re going to say next and make sure to give them adequate time to speak before you jump in.

Extension experts also recommend talking to the person with empathy, rather than sympathy, even if you don’t have personal experience with what they’re going through.

Phrases To Help Convey Empathy:
• I know of several farms in similar situations.
• Every situation is a little different. Help me understand better.
• I don’t know what to say, but I’m so glad you told me.
• I can see this situation is hard for you. What changes would you like to see?
• I’m eager to help. What are some things I could do for you?

Try to avoid saying things like, “at least X didn’t happen” or “at least you still have X”.

Next Steps
Make sure you check back in with the person, whether you told them you would or not, and don’t promise things you can’t commit to.

If the situation becomes urgent, ask if you can call a family member or for help. Local, state and national resources are available.

Civil War Sacrifice: Forgotten Farm Boy Was First Soldier Buried At Arlington

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:53:05 GMT

Beneath sacred soil, a farm boy was first. Before 400,000 others, a farm boy was first. Preceding a host of other notables into the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery, a farm boy was first.

In 1864, William Christman, 19, and fresh from the crop rows of Pennsylvania, was the first soldier buried in what was essentially Robert E. Lee’s backyard and what would become the largest and most revered graveyard in American history.

William, a mute, statistical curiosity for almost 150 years, is no longer silent. His remarkable story of service mirrors the lives of near-countless young men drawn from the fields of agriculture onto the fields of war. Once a forgotten footnote, William tells a tale of duty, honor, family, and farm.

Pay In Blood

In 1761, Jacob Christman was impaled by a pitchfork to the heart. Jacob had immigrated from Germany 25 years earlier and bought 150 acres of farmland on the Berks-Lehigh county line in southeast Pennsylvania, only to fall foul of a freak calamity at 49 years old.

As cited in History of the Counties of Lehigh and Carbon (1884): “[Jacob] was out in the field on a wagon loaded with hay, he met with an accident by which he lost his life. The horse coming to a gutter refused to cross, when standing on the loaded wagon, he urged him with a hay-fork which he held in his hand. This caused the horse to take a sudden spring forward, and he was thrown from the wagon upon the fork, one of the prongs which pierced his heart, resulting in his almost certain death.”

Scratching out a living in the harsh conditions of a sparsely populated state, Jacob’s descendants continued working in Pennsylvania agriculture into the mid-1800s, when Jonas (Jacob’s grandson) and Mary Christman started a family with the birth of two boys: Barnabus, in 1842, and William, in 1844.

In 1859, with seven children in the brood, Jonas bought 89 acres of timberland—soon to be farmland—in Monroe County’s Tobyhanna Township. Despite the bright prospects, farming in the 1800s was a particularly fickle endeavor, rife with risk. Jonas was struck by severe rheumatism, sold the farm for $125, and then fell off a wagon—incapacitated by a hip injury. Poverty knocked.

On rented ground, Mary showed remarkable mettle, cultivating small acreage and tending livestock, while Barnabus and William worked as laborers on a chain of farm operations growing hay, oats, wheat, and rye atop the Pocono Mountain plateau.

As a window to the family’s threadbare struggles, a newspaper recorded a loan to the Christmans from a local landowner on Aug. 29, 1861: “1 yoke of Oxen, 1 wagon, 3 cows, 1 heifer, 4 shoats, 6 sheep, 1 plow, 1 barrow, 2 acres of rye, 1 musket, 1 cook-stove, 1 bed and bedding, and 1 grind stone.”

The loan date was Aug. 29, 1861, only four months after the start of the Civil War. Barely clinging to farm life, the Civil War would amplify the Christman family’s strain: They would pay in blood.

Invisible Enemy

Half (48%) of Union soldiers in the Civil War were came from an agriculture background. (Likewise, roughly 70% of Confederate soldiers were farmers.) Barnabus, 20, was first of the Christman brothers to take up arms, enlisting at $13 per month in the 4th Pennsylvania Reserve Regiment on June 8, 1861. Pennsylvania soldiers would suffer tremendous loss in the Civil War, with 33,183 deaths, almost a nationwide high, second only to fatalities from New York.

A year after enlistment, Barnabus was killed on June 30, at the Battle of Glendale in Henrico County, Va., struck down in a blitz of hand-to-hand combat across 200 acres of cropland alongside 240 of his Pennsylvania brethren. Barnabus was buried on-site in a mass grave (and later moved to Glendale National Cemetery, designated as an unknown).

Enter William. Rather than bayonets and bullets, William fought an invisible enemy.

‘Thad’ Deed, Land, Money

In 2011, Tobyhanna Township native Rick Bodenschatz began hunting ghosts: Who died in the Civil War in his immediate vicinity?

“I started finding untouched history,” Bodenschatz says. “In our township of 1,000 inhabitants, I found 28 Civil War deaths, and one of those was William Christman. I found out he was buried in Arlington, but I could only find two people in our entire county that had the tiniest bit of knowledge about him. I found his family, but they didn’t even know about him. It was like William had disappeared from history.”

Bodenschatz’s quest to salvage William’s tale turned into a superb book: First At Arlington: The William Christman Story.

By 1864, two years after the death of Barnabus, word of a new draft cycle filtered into Monroe County. Weighing his role as the new family provider, William could either wait for the draft, or volunteer and snag a $300 signing bonus, a plum sum considering undeveloped land could be obtained in Pennsylvania for $1 per acre.

A step ahead of conscription, William signed with the 67^th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers. According to his enlistment records, he was 5’7” in height, with grey eyes and a “florid” complexion. Presumably, William’s departure was heartbreaking for his mother, Mary, already dealing with the traumatic loss of Barnabus.

“Mary must have been a special lady,” Bodenschatz notes. “Her husband was ill and injured, but she did everything possible for the family, caring for the children and scraping money together. Without daily newspapers, she may not have known about the immense death totals the Civil War was producing, but she certainly knew her eldest son was dead and her next eldest was marching off to the same war.”

In April 1864, camped at Belle Plain, Va., on the Potomac River, William received a $60 portion of his bonus to be paid in installments, along with $13.41, his first month’s pay in advance. With foresight and concern, William sent the entire load home in a letter to his parents with simple instruction: Buy land.

“... father I want you to write me weter [whether] you have that note from Jacob Stoufer. I want you to take them papers all out put them in My trunk ant keep them their til I com back. father I want you to get thad deed for thad land ant get thad money from Timathy Miller ant pay it on thad land but mind yo thad you get a good deed”

Despite the gravity of his circumstances, William winked at his family with a poetic, but warm conclusion in the postscript of his letter:

So pleas excuse my pour riting

For I hapto write on my plait

So I cant write as good as I ate

Days later, he wrote home again, sending an additional $35 to buy farmland.

“We have to read between the lines, but it’s apparent that William was a man beyond his years,” Bodenschatz says. “When Barnabus dies, which must have been devastating for William, he recognizes the necessity to become the financial supporter of his family. His letters show he was directing his father to pay off land. This demonstrates tremendous maturity and leadership, especially considering William knew there was a good chance he wasn’t coming back from the war and that time was short.”

On April 22, yet to see battle, William contracted measles, and eight days later was transferred to a hospital in Washington, D.C. He would exit feet first.

Germ Theory

Warfare was never the same after Joseph Lister.

In 1867, two years after the close of the Civil War, Lister published groundbreaking research on germ theory, providing a roadmap to defeat disease and infection. Prior to Lister’s modern germ theory, at almost every major prolonged conflict of arms in history, disease was the No. 1 killer of soldiers, rather than battlefield action.

As George Washington wrote in 1777: Should the disorder (smallpox) infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy.

Or, as surgeon James Simpson penned in the 1860s: A man laid on the operating table in one of our surgical hospitals is exposed to more chance of death than was the English soldier on the field of Waterloo.

The U.S. Civil war was no different. Of 349,944 total Union deaths, roughly 221,000 men died of disease, while approximately 103,500 died in action or from battlefield wounds.

Lister’s medical discoveries came too late for William. On May 11, 1864, while in hospital, he died due to peritonitis, an infection in the abdomen obtained while recovering from measles. William’s worldly possessions mounted to one hat, one shirt, and one pair of pants.

However, with D.C. cemeteries at capacity, where to bury the next round of Union dead? Robert E. Lee’s house, of course.

Soul on Fire

Montgomery Miegs hated Robert E. Lee. Burning zeal.

Prior to the Civil War, Lee and his wife, Mary Custis Lee, lived on a picturesque 1,100-acre estate, Arlington, on high ground in Virginia, directly across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

Lee’s father was among George Washington’s most trusted officers in the Revolutionary War, and Lee’s wife was the daughter of Washington’s adopted grandson. The couple’s Arlington mansion, 140’-wide with eight 23-foot-tall columns on the portico, was filled with relics from Mt. Vernon: dishes, furniture, paintings—even the bed where Washington died.

Due to its strategic location and high ground, the Union seized Arlington one month after the Civil War’s start. The Lee family spent decades trying to regain the property. (Lee’s son, Custis, took his claims to the U.S. Supreme Court and won in 1882. Custis immediately sold the Arlington property back to the U.S. for $150,000.)

As the Civil War churned out corpses at the highest rate of any conflict in U.S. history, Congress charged Army Quartermaster General Montgomery Miegs with finding adequate burial ground. Miegs was highly familiar with Lee, having served under him in the Corps of Engineers on the Mississippi River. In a nutshell, Miegs detested Lee with deep animosity and bore a permanent grudge, partially due to Lee’s decision to fight with the Confederacy.

As noted by Miegs’ wife, Louisa: “His (Miegs) soul seems on fire with indignation at the treason of those wicked men who have laid the deep plot to overthrow our government,” she wrote. “He looks so dreadfully stern when he talks of the rebellion that I do not like to look at him.”

Miegs’ called for Lee’s death: "… should be put formally out of the way if possible by sentence of death [and] executed if caught.”

With Miegs’ hope of Lee’s execution stayed at least until war’s end, vengeance was still obtainable: Miegs chose to bury Union soldiers in massive numbers around Lee’s estate. And at the front of the burial queue? William Christman of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry, laid to rest in the northeast corner of Lee’s estate.

However, the periphery didn’t suit Miegs. He demanded burial placements up to the edges of the Lee mansion, encircling Mary Custis Lee’s rose garden. “It was my intention to have begun the interments nearer the mansion,” Miegs exclaimed. “But opposition from officers stationed at Arlington—some of whom did not like to have the dead buried near them—caused the interments to be begun elsewhere.”

By the close of the war, Miegs buried approximately 16,000 soldiers at Arlington, including a 20’-wide by 20’-deep, brick-lined pit beside Mary Custis’ garden filled with the bones of 2,100 unknown soldiers, topped with a monument and four cannons. Miegs made certain the Lees would never be able to disinter such a massive amount of the dead.

Miegs went further, burying his son (killed in battle), wife, father, and several in-laws on Lee’s property. And in 1875, per his wishes, Miegs was buried on Lee’s property. Simply, today there are more Miegs buried at Arlington than Lees.

Obscured by the Miegs-Lee tapestry of animosity, Christman’s body was placed roughly several hundred yards from the banks of Potomac, a half-mile from Lee’s mansion—the first soldier buried in what arguably became the most famous cemetery on the planet. Christman preceded Arlington’s current tally of 400,000 soldiers, including John F. Kennedy, John J. Pershing, Audie Murphy, and Robert Peary.

“Somebody had to be first,” Bodenschatz describes. “It wasn’t a boy from Iowa or Minnesota; it was William Christman. He got a pine box, and although there’s no record, it’s likely a chaplain was present for a proper graveside service of some kind, and a proper paperwork record, and eventually a proper headstone. His sacrifice basically saved the fortunes of his farming family.”

A True Hero

Back in Pennsylvania, William’s father, Jonas, bought 411 acres—thanks to his son’s service and diligence.

William was buried approximately 250 miles from home, and roughly 100 miles from Barnabus. “I doubt their parents were ever able to visit their sons’ graves,” Bodenschatz says.

Several questions linger for Bodenshatz. “If I could meet William, I’d like to ask him what his thoughts were of his family while he lay dying alone at the hospital in D.C. I’d also like to ask him about his memories of the farm community in Tobyhanna Township. History is always filled with names, but I want the personalities.”

“William was a remarkable young man,” Bodenschatz concludes. “Often, people don’t recognize genuine heroes because they are looking for the sizzle instead of the steak. Through my book and research, I hope I’ve ensured William will never be a statistic again. A forgotten soldier no longer forgotten.”

Sincerely. Respect to William Christman, son, brother, farmer, and soldier: 1844-1864.

(First At Arlington: The William Christman Story, is available at the Arlington National Cemetery bookstore or by emailing Rick-boden@msn.com.)

For more from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm