Nick Reding Read Online Free PDF

and from whom; when to harvest; how long to hold the crop—is arrived
     at from a process of superimposition of dated economic information onto subtle, veinous changes of seasonal matter. What to
     do tomorrow depends on this week’s weather relative to last year’s yield, or on how today’s futures markets at the Chicago
     Board of Trade relate to anticipated trends in Australian or Canadian wool production. In this way, the Leins are less like
     farmers and more like mystics clinging to belief in a hazy vision born not just of weather and organic chemistry, but of a
     hundred other unseen and uncontrollable forces. To look at them, leaning against the counter in the tiny kitchen, is to understand
     the connection between farming, itself an act of blind faith, and religion. If you can believe in a year’s worth of corn or
     beans, it seems, you can believe in anything.
    Nathan’s father, James, is sixty-nine years old. His hair is short and black, and his glasses are broken. Standing somewhat
     off-kilter from a bad back, in a red and blue work shirt, jeans, and sneakers, he looks fifty. His mother, Donna, who is seventy,
     has shoulder-length brown hair that is going gray. Dressed in jeans and a light gray wool sweater, she, too, looks younger
     than her years, though the arthritis from which she suffers is readily apparent in her hands, which are bent and knobbed at
     the joints like a bird of prey’s claws. And though neither parent is short (James stands six feet, Donna five seven), it’s
     unclear whence Nathan got his tremendous size. Ducking as he entered the kitchen, with its low ceiling and peeling linoleum
     floor, Nathan immediately fills the room, even as his parents seemed to shrink. The weight of his presence makes it odder
     still that the Leins barely take notice of their son, who now stands next to the refrigerator. It’s as though Nathan has just
     briefly come in from the barn for a glass of water; no one says a word. Then, with a nod, Nathan goes outside to see about
     the sheep. With a storm coming and the tractor awaiting his father’s return, there’s no time for talk.
    Farming is still, as it has always been, the lifeblood of Fayette County—and by extension, of Iowa. Nathan goes to his parents’
     place at least three times a week. During spring planting, from late April till mid-May, he’s there every night, as he is
     during the hay cutting and baling season of late summer, the corn harvest in the fall, and when the ewes lamb-out in the winter.
     Thanks in part to this, the Lein operation is a successful one. The fecundity of the land helps, too. With soil that boasts
     a corn sustainability rating (CSR) of 75 to 85 out of 100, the land in Fayette County has remained exceptionally rich for
     the 150 years that people have farmed it. Annual rainfall here averages three feet, and farmers here, unlike those in many
     places in the United States, needn’t bother with irrigation, thereby saving themselves untold thousands of dollars each growing
     season. Though they have a 50 percent rotation of soybeans, the Leins make their bottom line most years off row crops alone,
     raising hay just to keep the sheep fed. Selling wool, lambs, and the occasional ram or ewe is predominantly a labor of love—or
     what Nathan’s ascetic parents consider an indulgence, and one for which the Leins have won prizes as far away as Maryland
     and Colorado. All together, it’s a formula that James and Donna Lein have applied with good success for almost forty years.
    Unfortunately for many farming families around Oelwein, the Lein place is an anomaly. Since the early 1980s, three out of
     four farms in Fayette County have gone out of business, in a trend reflected everywhere in the rural United States. In their
     stead, many family farms have become add-ons to the ever-increasing holdings of private corporations like Cargill and Archer
     Daniels Midland (ADM). That, or free-falling land and corn prices have