For three years, she had been stealing from my well: 200 gallons a night. Every night. I had assumed the new irrigation reading was a leak.
Her name was Berkeley Markham Stratton, HOA board president of Windmill Crossing Estates, Iowa. Forty-five, polished, blonde, three-time featured grower at the Pella Tulip Time Festival.
Mine is Edmund Brinkmeer. I am a retired Des Moines Water Works engineer.
The night I figured out where the leak was going, I drove to the irrigation meter with a bucket of fluorescein blue tracer dye and a 50-pound bag of solar salt. By Saturday, her famous tulip show—16,000 bulbs, four years of cultivation, the headline event of Tulip Time—was a Caribbean blue field with leaves the color of wet straw. By Sunday, she was in handcuffs.
What would you do if a stranger drained your well for her own ribbon?
My grandfather, Hendrik Brinkmeer, bought the 47 acres on the south edge of Pella, Iowa in the spring of 1923. He had immigrated from Drenthe Province in the Netherlands in 1909 with his older brother and $17 in his pocket. He had worked sixteen years for the Pella Hardware Company before he saved enough to buy a farm. The 47 acres had been a corn and soybean operation for a Dutch family named Kuipers, who had moved back to Holland during the postwar years. Hendrik paid $1,800 in cash. The deed was handwritten on linen rag paper.
The original artesian well, drilled by Hendrik himself in the summer of 1925 with help from his brother and a steam-powered rotary rig, taps a sand and gravel aquifer at 112 feet beneath the surface. The well has not gone dry in any year of the 101 it has been pumping. The well casing is the same 6-inch galvanized steel pipe Hendrik set in 1925. The pump has been replaced three times; the casing has not.
I was born in the original two-story farmhouse Hendrik built in 1925. My father, Cornelius Brinkmeer, ran the farm from my grandfather's retirement in 1958 until his own death from cancer in 2004. I had grown up on the farm. I had left for Iowa State University in 1979 with the intention of becoming a civil engineer specializing in agricultural drainage. I had ended up, after a master's degree at Iowa State and 28 years at the Des Moines Water Works, as a senior wastewater treatment engineer responsible for the operation and protection of the city's source water aquifers.
I had retired from the Water Works at the end of 2015 and come home to the farm full-time in January of 2016 after my mother, Hendrika, passed and the farmhouse stood empty for the first time in 93 years.
My wife Dorothea—Dot, everyone calls her—and I had been married since 1988. We had met at the Des Moines Public Library when she was the children's librarian on the second floor and I was a young engineer who came in on Saturdays to read groundwater hydrology textbooks. She had retired from the children's department in 2014 and moved back to Pella with me in 2016. She is sixty now. She runs the small farm bookkeeping and the seasonal flower CSA. She volunteers at the Pella Public Library on Tuesdays. She is the quiet, certain center of the operation. She is also the only woman I have ever loved.
We have one daughter, Frederica—Freddy since she was five—who is thirty-six and a partner at a Des Moines law firm called Beemster, Vossen & Stratton, where she specializes in Iowa water rights litigation. Freddy had not, as a child, expressed interest in the family farm. She had expressed interest in everything else: reading, swimming, debate, the trumpet, three different sports. She had gone to the University of Iowa for political science and then to Iowa Law for her JD. She had clerked at the Iowa Supreme Court and gone straight into water rights practice in 2014. She had never explained the choice; I had not asked. I had been quietly delighted. Freddy comes home every other weekend. She brings my granddaughter, Antje, age four, who has begun naming the chickens.
I converted the farm in stages between 2016 and 2020:
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Eight acres of specialty cut flowers—peonies, ranunculus, dahlias, snapdragons, lisianthus, sweet peas—sold to a small list of Des Moines florists and to two Pella vendors who supply Tulip Time.
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Six acres of Fraser fir and Douglas fir Christmas trees planted in a rotation that produces approximately 300 sellable trees per year by the third week of November.
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Three acres of heritage apple orchard, eleven varieties, all from the old USDA Beltsville collection, that produces apples for the local farmers market and the cider press at the Pella Historical Village.
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Four acres of native tallgrass prairie restoration along the back creek, registered with the Iowa Prairie Network and the Pheasants Forever local chapter.
The remaining 26 acres remain in corn and soybean rotation under a tenant agreement with a young Pella farmer named Theron Vermeer. His grandfather had farmed across the road from my grandfather in the 1930s.
The whole operation runs on the original 1925 well.
The irrigation system—the design I'm proudest of in my long career of pump rooms and pipe runs—consists of one main 4-inch PVC trunk line that loops the property under 12 inches of frost-depth burial, with six metered branch lines to the flower fields, the Christmas trees, the orchard, the prairie water tank, and two hose bibs at the workshop. Every branch line has a turbine flow meter calibrated to the nearest tenth of a gallon and a backflow preventer rated to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources spec. I built the system myself across the summers of 2017 and 2018 with Theron Vermeer's help on the trenching.
The system meters every gallon I pump. The system also meters every gallon that leaves the property unauthorized, though I had not until 2024 considered the possibility that any gallon might.
The fields each have a particular history; I had not chosen carelessly. The peony bed runs along the original 1923 farmyard hedgerow because my grandmother Hendrika had loved peonies and had asked Hendrik for a peony bed on their wedding day in 1924. She had grown up on a peony farm in Friesland and had not been able to leave them behind. The Christmas trees are on the back six acres because that ground had been corn-on-corn for seventy years and had not produced a profitable bushel since 1996. The orchard is on the slope above the creek because the slope is east-facing, and the apples there ripen one week earlier than they would in the lower bottoms. The prairie restoration is along the back creek because the back creek has a small population of Iowa Pleistocene snails (Discus macclintocki), a federally threatened land mollusk that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated as critical habitat in 2018 with my consent. I keep the restoration site under a Working Lands for Wildlife agreement with the NRCS. The agreement pays me $3,400 a year to maintain the corridor. I would do it for free; I take the check because the program needs to count.