The Ditch Hay That Filled Mom’s Barn

Our dad, Ray Kranz, ran cows on that place for forty-one years. He was not a big operator. He never wanted to be.

He had a hundred cows at his peak, and the hay meadow, and enough corn to keep the bank happy.

When he got sick, he sold most of the herd. He kept fourteen good cows for Mom, because he said a farm wife without cows would not know what to do with her mornings, and he was right about that.

When Dad died, Brent took over the ground. He already farmed eight hundred acres of his own, plus some rented land, and he folded Mom’s place right in with it. It was the natural thing. Nobody argued.

My husband, Josh, works nights at the ethanol plant forty miles east of us.

I drive a school bus nine months of the year and work days at the vet clinic in town. We have two boys, Wyatt, who was 14, and Cole, who was 11.

That night after the boys went to bed, I told Josh what Brent had said. He was getting ready for his shift, filling his thermos at the sink. He stopped with the lid in his hand.

“Ninety dollars a bale for hay off her own meadow,” he said slowly, like he was checking the numbers. “And he farms it for nothing.”

“He says the drought cut his hay to a third. He says his note’s due at the bank in October. He says it’s family price.”

Josh screwed the lid on. Josh is a fair man. He does not like to pile on anybody, least of all my brother, who taught him to drive a grain truck the first summer we were dating.

“His hay probably did come in at a third,” he said. “Everybody’s did. And the bank part’s probably true too. That doesn’t make it right to charge her.”

“No,” I said. “But it means he’s not just being greedy. He’s scared.”

“Scared people do greedy things,” Josh said. He kissed the top of my head and went out to his car.

I called Brent’s wife, Kim, the next morning. Kim and I have always gotten along.

She told me what she could without being disloyal, which was that the note was real, the hay was short, and Brent had not slept a full night since May.

“He thinks your mom should sell out,” Kim said. “He thinks if he gives her the hay, she’ll keep going another five years and hurt herself out there. He thinks charging her is the kind thing. I’m not saying I agree with him, Shelby. I’m saying that’s what he thinks.”

I thanked her. I believed her. And I still thought it was wrong.

People have asked me since why we didn’t just make Brent pay rent, or take the ground back and rent it to somebody else who would.

That is the sensible answer. Anybody at the co-op would have told you that.

The answer is that it was Mom’s ground and Mom’s son, and she would not take him off it.

I asked her once, that week, sitting on her porch swing. I said, “Mom, you could rent that ground to the Meyer boys for real money and buy all the hay you want.”

She looked at me like I had suggested she sell one of her grandchildren.

“That’s his father’s ground he’s working,” she said. “Your dad put Brent on a tractor when he was seven years old. I am not going to be the one who takes it away from him over a bill for hay. I’ll sell the cows first.”