The Note the Bank Called After the Drought

What the drought did

We got 1.4 inches of rain between the first of June and the end of August. Our average is closer to 14. The corn on our upland ground, the rented acres out past the county road, rolled its leaves tight by the Fourth of July. By August it was dead on its feet, and the combine made 31 bushels to the acre where we hoped for 175.

Soybeans came in at 12.

My son Shane farms with me. He is thirty-one, a big man, quiet in a room and not quiet about numbers. He rents 400 acres of upland on top of the 142 acres of river bottom I own along Sugar Creek, and the whole operation runs on a note he signs every spring. Seed, fertilizer, fuel, cash rent. Last spring it came to $333,000, with my bottom ground pledged behind it as security.

The bottom made 96 bushels of corn. Bottom ground holds water down deep where the creek feeds it, and it will carry a crop through a summer that kills everything on the hills. It is the only reason we were not wiped out. It is also the best dirt in the county. The last 80 acres of comparable bottom to sell near us went for $9,400 an acre two years ago.

Our crop insurance paid $118,400, and every dollar went against the note, the way it is supposed to. We had bought the cheap level of coverage, 65 percent, because the premium on anything higher ate the margin in a normal year, and the bottom’s 96 bushels counted against the guarantee. It was a small check for a year like that one. It left a balance of $214,600.

For ten springs running a note like that had been rolled forward without anybody in a vest raising an eyebrow. A drought year is why a bank carries a farm.

There was one more thing, and it was in the fine print I had signed ten springs running without reading page three. The loan agreement says that no pledged acre can be sold, leased, or encumbered without the bank’s written consent. My bottom ground was behind that note, every foot of it. Whatever happened to it from here, the bank would have to say yes.

I sat at my kitchen table that night and I said all of it to my wife.

Beth listened to the whole thing with her hands around a mug. She has been married to me thirty-three years and she can hear me thinking.

“What do you want to do?” she said.

“I’m going to call the regional office.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know yet.”

The call

I called the Prairie Trust regional office the next morning. I got a receptionist and then a voicemail for a woman named Susan Pratt, the regional president. I left my name and my number and one calm sentence about the note.

By Wednesday I had a letter in the mail. It was a form letter. It thanked me for my business and informed me that decisions on individual credit relationships “rest with the local lending officer.”

You may be thinking I should have gone to another bank. I tried. I called two on Tuesday afternoon.

A new lender needs an appraisal on 142 acres, which takes three to five weeks, and every appraiser in the state was busy. They need a credit review of a farm that had just made 31 bushels of corn, and a loan committee that meets once a month. The Farm Service Agency would help a farm in a bad year, but their paperwork runs six weeks on a good day.

Nobody could close in thirty days. Mabry had not given us thirty days to be generous. He had picked a number too short for anybody to beat.

That left one way out, and I tried it Wednesday morning. Tom Kessler farms across the county road from us and has wanted a piece of the bottom since his boy came home to farm. I called him from the truck. He said thirty acres of the south end, at $9,000 an acre, and he said he could have the money by the middle of the month. Thirty acres at that price is $270,000. It would clear the note with $55,000 to spare, and I would still own 112 acres of the best ground in the county.

I wrote it up on a sheet of paper, Kessler’s price and Kessler’s name, and I walked it into the bank and laid it in front of Brent Mabry. Page three said I needed his consent.

“I’ll put it to the committee,” he said, and he did not so much as pick up the paper.

Shane came into the kitchen Wednesday night with his cap in his fist. He had read the form letter twice and his jaw had that set to it.

“I’m going down there,” he said. “I’m going to say it to his face.”

“And then what?”

“Then he knows I know.”

“He writes in his file that Shane Becker came in angry and threatened the bank,” I said. “And you’ve handed him a reason. They keep files, Shane. That’s all they do.”

“Dad.”

“You’ve got a girl with a spelling test in the morning.”

He stood there. My son is no fool. He knew what I was saying, and he knew what I did not say, which was that I was afraid for him.

“Go home,” I said. “Feed your cattle. Help Shelby with her words.”

He went. It cost him something. I watched his taillights go down the lane and I thought, that is a good man who just did a hard thing, and I will not forget it.