Word: erv
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like so many successful American farmers, Erv is actually cash poor. "The city people think we get real rich," he says, "but I've worked many a year and not earned a nickel." He gave up dairy farming years ago because that requires extra hands, and hands cost goodly sums of hard cash. "When you're a farmer," his son Dick points out, "you never have any money in your pocket until you retire and sell out, because it's all invested. We get paid every few months, while a hired man would have to be paid...
...market. Says Dick Walters: "If one thing fails, you have an opportunity to balance out your loss." Walters' crop mix is typical. He usually grows corn on a particular field for two years, then switches to soybeans for a year. Gone is the ritual slopping of hogs; Erv's animals are fed carefully calibrated mixtures of corn and protein automatically through ducts that connect his silos with the feeding troughs. Absent too are some of the more familiar animals, such as horses and chickens. They are no longer profitable. As son Dan pithily sums...
...this makes contemporary farming something more than a bucolic communion of man, plow and earth. Says Erv: "A farmer these days has to be a good buyer and seller-that's the important thing. But he must also be an electrician, soil analyst and veterinarian. If he isn't, he's sunk." Each winter Erv and his sons attend courses in nearby towns given by the Extension Service and firms that try to keep farmers abreast of advancing farm technology. Lately Walters has added the omnipresent computer to his list of farm aids. For $80 a year...
Still, the love and feel of the land, not to mention its daily demands, are eternal verities. "Book learning might teach you the basics," Erv says, "but you've got to have the experience. You need to have little things in the back of your mind-what to do about a sick animal, what to do if the weather changes-and these things aren't there unless you grow up with them." And, he might add, work with them ceaselessly. During planting time Erv rolls out of bed at 4:30 a.m., dons heavy green coveralls against...
When planting is over around early June, Erv will take a badly needed fishing trip up to Michigan. The rest of the summer will be spent cleaning barns and attending stock sales; winter will be devoted to classes and machinery repair. There will be regular Saturday night dances ("Lucille and I would rather dance than eat," Erv grins), but mostly Erv's year will be a day-to-day battle just to stay even. Then it will be spring again, and time for planting. It is an exhausting and relentless cycle, but that is the way men like Erv...