Chapter 13

The first year, the yields were mediocre. The second year, they were worse. They switched to soybeans, then back to corn. Each successive rotation stripped more of what little fertility the clay section had ever held, and the repeated tillage disrupted the organic structure in the southern section that had taken decades to develop. By the time that owner sold, the farm was already in serious decline.The owners who came after inherited a problem they didn't fully understand and addressed it the only way they knew how: by planting more of the same things and hoping the results would be different.Earl looked out from the porch after he finished talking, at the tree line beyond his yard, and said that the land itself hadn't changed much. The soil in the south was still there; it had been compacted and depleted, but not destroyed. It just needed to be worked with instead of against.Bryson drove home from Earl's house with his hand steady on the wheel and something settling in his mind that felt less like relief and more like the particular clarity that comes when a question you've been carrying finally gets its answer.The answer didn't make the next decision easier. Understanding what the land was told Bryson clearly that roughly two of his planted acres were sitting on ground that would not produce a viable sweet potato crop under any reasonable management approach he could afford. The clay-heavy section that had flooded was not a recoverable situation given his timeline and his budget. He could spend money he didn't have trying to amend that soil and improve the drainage, and he would likely end up with a mediocre yield from a section that had already shown him what it intended to do in a rainstorm.Or he could accept what the soil had told him: remove what was planted there and concentrate everything on the southern section where the plants were already telling him they belonged.He sat with that decision for two days before he made it. Not because he was unclear about what the right answer was, but because he understood exactly what it was going to look like from the outside.

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