Francis had already asked what Mari planned to do about sourcing next fall. Two operations Mari had never met before November had put their names on her delivery list for the coming month. The ledger showed a net position, before the last three deliveries were priced out, of a little over $1,800 in the black on a bid of $60.
Mari poured the coffee. She sat down at the kitchen table. She opened the ledger to a new page and began the calculation for the second year because the second year was where the real work was going to start. And because she had a purchasing manager at the county's largest cannery who had already watched her long enough to make three separate moves without knowing that she had been keeping count.
Somewhere past the shop, a coyote called once from the ridge. She wrote through the sound. She wrote until the coffee went cold in the cup and the kitchen had grown dark enough around her that the only light in the room was the small yellow circle of the lamp on the table and the red glow of the wood stove door. She wrote until the second-year plan had a shape she could see.
Then she closed the notebook, put the rubber band back around it, and slid it into the inside pocket of the barn coat, hanging on the peg by the door, where it would be ready the next morning when the truck started and the day began again.
The check from Francis Oberlin cleared the Viroqua State Bank on the 7th of December, 1971. Mari did not celebrate. She drove into town on the 8th, deposited it, and asked the teller for a printed statement showing the balance. She folded the statement into thirds and put it inside the ledger next to the entry for the Holdridge lot.
Then she drove home and began the second-year plan in earnest.
The second-year plan was not about carrots. Carrots had been the proof of concept. What Mari understood sitting at the kitchen table on the 9th of December with the wood stove going and the wind pushing sleet against the north window was that Vernon County produced in an average year somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 tons of rejected root vegetables that the canneries either plowed under or sold to renderers for pennies on the ton. The rejection was not a bug in the system.
It was a feature of it. Commercial peelers required uniformity. Uniformity was a narrow band. Anything outside that band became someone else's problem.
Or if a person had done the arithmetic, Mari had done someone else's opportunity. She wrote to two cannery operations that week. One was in Crawford County, 30 miles south.
The other was in Monroe County, 20 mi. West. She did not write to the Vernon County cannery. She did not need to.
She wrote instead to purchasing managers she had never met at operations she had only driven past. And she said in each letter the same thing. She was in the market for cosmetically rejected root vegetables, specifically carrots, beets, turnips, and rutabagas taken in whole load lots at the point of rejection, paid in cash on delivery at a price she named. She was writing to establish a standing arrangement so that when a load was pulled from their processing line, for cosmetic reasons, they could call her before they called the renderer.
She included her telephone number. She included Francis Oberlin's telephone number as a reference. She signed each letter M. A. Thorson and addressed the envelopes to whoever currently held the purchasing job.
Both letters were answered inside two weeks. The Crawford County manager, a man named Everett Langren, whose father had known Raymond in the 1940s, called first. He said he did not know they had a market for the reject loads beyond the renderer, and he was pleased to hear otherwise. He said his line pulled roughly two loads a month during the fall run and he would call her the next time it happened.
The Monroe County manager wrote back with a formal letter agreeing to the arrangement and asking whether she would consider taking their beet culls as well. She wrote back the same afternoon and said yes. By the end of January, she had a network. It was small.
It was quiet. It did not appear in any farm publication, did not travel on any rural route Grapevine and did not require any capital beyond gasoline money and the checkbook she carried in the F-100's glove box. Between the Holdridge stockpile in her cellar and the standing arrangements with Crawford and Monroe, she had winter feed lined up for 18 months of horse operations she did not yet own.
The horses came in the spring of 1972. She sold 20 head of Hereford cattle in April at a sale barn in Sparta and used the proceeds minus the trailer fee to buy three mares at a dispersal sale in Crawford County the following weekend. The dispersal was for an estate. The owner had died in February and his widow was closing out the operation.
Mari watched the mares move through a small paddock behind the barn for the better part of an hour before she made a single bid. Two were bay Quarter Horse crosses in their prime, six and seven years old, with clean legs, and the kind of walk that told her they would settle into work without protest. The third was an older sorrel, 13 past her breeding years, but sound calm and by the look of her willing. Mari bought all three for $600 combined.
She hauled them home in her neighbor's stock trailer that evening. The bay named Juno was in foal. Mari had known that when she bought her. The widow had not mentioned it either because she did not know or because she had assumed the buyer would notice which Mari had.
That was two horses for the price of one. It was the sort of arithmetic Raymond would have approved of done quietly in the head in the moment. Through the spring and summer, Mari sold the remaining Herefords in small batches at three separate sale barns to avoid depressing the local price. She kept 10 cows in their calves for beef and for the land management they provided on the steeper slopes where the horses would not thrive.
She reconfigured the rest of the pasture for the horse operation, running new fence along the north 40 in a pattern that separated the mares from the geldings, gave her a smaller foaling paddock adjacent to the main barn, and left a two-acre round pen area where she could work young stock without dragging equipment across the fields every session. Juno foaled in late April. The foal was a dark bay filly with a small white star and legs that came up under her at the right angles the first time she stood.
Mari named her Ardith after her mother's aunt, a woman who had run a dairy operation outside Sparta in the 1920s without a husband and had done well enough at it to leave the farm to a niece rather than to the county. The name did not make it into any registry papers because the filly was not registered. Mari kept the papers on Juno in the ledger with everything else and did not concern herself with formal breeding documents. What she was building was not a papered operation.
It was a working horse operation for people who wanted animals that could be ridden and worked without a fight. The market for that, as she was beginning to understand, was substantially larger and substantially more forgiving than the papered market. Francis came down from Cedar Bluff in June to look at what Mari was doing. She stood at the fence line for 20 minutes watching Ardith move through the small paddock with her mother.
And then she walked the full length of the north pasture with Mari without saying much of anything. At the end of the walk, she stopped by the F-100 and looked at Mari with the expression of a woman who had come to a conclusion she was not going to soften. "You are going to have a waiting list inside four years. You do not need to advertise.