It had been a few days since the Mumblers had gathered in the back room at Bert’s Diner.
A couple of us had been sick – winter flu and colds – a couple were in Florida, escaping the Midwest winter.
We were having one of those warm March days where we hover between seasons, between snow and tornadoes. The forecast was calling for a return to winter, which did nothing to lift spirits.
“Has winter always been this depressing?” Will asked. “Or is it just all the crap swirling around us this year?”
“It’s the crap,” Sam Robertson said. “Winter is winter. Comes after Fall, before Spring and always has.”
We had just about talked out the war in Iran, the Epstein files, the destruction of the White House to make way for a trailer-park version of Versailles and the blatant corruption of the Trump family and everyone around it.
“Well, we are about to get a shock here in our county from all this,” Dean Etheridge said. “Talking about Spring plantings.
“What about it?” I asked.
Dean, a retired farmer and ag extension agent who is still plugged into the ag business, hung his head a bit and said “there may not be any.”
“What?” I asked. “There has to be Spring planting.”
“Well,” Dean said. “There will be some, but a lot of acreage is going to go Alfalfa or nothing.
“A farmer lives and dies by two things – weather and energy,” Dean said. “Weather you live with, you try to survive because you can’t control it. But energy, that’s another thing. The hellscape every farmer, even the big corporate guys, face now is a man-made cluster-f*** that has the potential to change the farming landscape for decades.
“A farmer uses heavy equipment that runs on diesel. We’re hearing all about gas prices at the pump but that’s a small part of this, really. When oil doesn’t come out of the Middle East the biggest impact in terms of consequences is on diesel. And it’s not just farmers. Most of what you see in the grocery store, in the hardware store, even the big boxes, arrives by truck, which means diesel.”
Dean paused for a minute, like he expected questions but we all just looked at him.
“Farmers don’t just need diesel, they need fertilizer which also has fossil fuel components and also is shipped by truck. When you add all this up whatever slim margins a farmer had is gone. If a farmer is going to plant this Spring, he’s going to make a gamble with no better odds than an on-line casino. Will prices for fuel come down? Will prices for grain, livestock go up? Who knows?
“Here’s another thing. I’ve been following rural real estate. More and more small farms are going on the market. Farmers are giving it up. They simply are out of money and energy. The land will probably be absorbed by the corporate farmers, who may be able to wait all this out. But one thing for sure, once a small farm disappears, it’s gone for good and there are ripple effects from that. Corporate money goes back to corporate. Small farm money circulates through the community.”
“So,” Herb Stratton asked. “What do we do about that?”
“Nothing,” Dean said. “We can’t go anything about it. Mid-term elections, if we even have them or if they are honest, are not until Fall. We can’t touch Trump until 2028. We don’t have a Congress at this point. We have a dictator who can blow up the world without anyone stopping him. Sorry to be pessimistic but that’s the reality. I don’t know what the entire economy will look like come Fall, but I do know that by then we won’t recognize the farming community we’ve been a part of most of our lives.”
“Did you ever think we’d live to see anything like this?” Reuben Barnes asked no one in particular.
Silence, a few head shakes answered him. We shuffled out into a sunny day and warm temperatures knowing that in just a few hours winter and rain and snow would fall over the empty fields, maybe for a long, long time.