Thursday, May 8, 2025
Time: 5:20 PM
Song: This Hard Land
Artist: Bruce Springsteen
Mode of Consumption: Listening to MP3s on shuffle on the way home from work.
Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/2CiuLIXhORqJOiwKjPnuYN?si=54696eed8a674a90
In a field to my right, a sprayer – a futuristic looking machine with tall wheels – breezes across a freshly tilled and planted field. The spray designed to kill weeds before they’ve had a chance to grow.
The next field down a pickup truck is parked.
In another, a man stands behind his tractor that is attached to a planter. Just standing. Maybe something is broken. Maybe he’s trying to calculate how far this load of seed will go. Maybe he just got caught in a thought and was following it to its destination somewhere along the horizon.
The countryside is bustling, planting season in full tilt in northern Illinois. In a few short weeks little stubs of green will appear in neat rows. Corn. Soy beans. Maybe a field of wheat here and there. A few hay fields are already growing strong. That’s about it for this area.
Most of the fields are managed by big operators – mostly former small family farmers who have year-by-year collected more and more acres and bigger and bigger equipment. There are a few family farms left. Guys and Gals with a couple hundred acres, but most of those are gone. In another half generation, they all will be.
Farming is corporate now. The land prices so high that the only ones that can take out loans to buy it are the ones that already have thousands of acres to borrow against. It’s one of the reasons that rural communities across the Midwest are getting smaller. Fifty years ago, every couple hundred acres belonged to a different family. Usually a family with three, four, or twelve kids.
Now it’s the big guy at the top, a few hired men and women to run equipment, and everyone else moves to the city.
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