"You can fix part of it. You cannot fix all of it. What you can fix is what you have signed and what you owe. What you cannot fix is what the market is going to do.
My father taught me the difference between those two things. I am telling you what he told me, which is that a paid for farm is the only thing a bank cannot take from you. You have a paid for farm underneath everything you have borrowed against. If you can protect the home place, you can rebuild.
If you lose the home place, you are starting over at 52 with no equipment and no credit." Dale sat with that for a while. When he stood up to leave, he did not shake her hand. He did not thank her in the ordinary way. He said only at the back door with the same flat honesty he had brought in with him.
"I was one of the ones who laughed at the co-op that morning about the carrots. I want you to know I am not proud of that. I did not come here today because of that. I came here because Everett told me to, but I want you to know." Mari nodded once.
She let him leave. She sat at the kitchen table for a long time after his truck had gone down the drive. She did not write anything in the ledger about the visit. Some things did not need to be entered.
Some things were part of the private cost of doing business in a small county over a long span of years.
The drought came in the summer of 1983. It came late in June and it stayed through August. The ground cracking in the pasture in patterns Mari had never seen before. The creek down to a trickle.
By the middle of July, the hay crop cut in half across three counties. By the first week of August, hay prices at auction had doubled, and by September, they had tripled. Mari's feed costs did not change. She had root vegetables in the cellar.
She had root vegetables in the elevator storage in Viroqua. And in supplemental space she had rented that spring in Sparta. She had root vegetables coming in from Crawford and Monroe and since 1979 from Richland County as well where a third cannery had joined her network the year Everett Langren had recommended her to a colleague. Her horses came through the summer in condition.
Her horses came through the fall in condition. When winter arrived in November on the tail of a hard early freeze, her horses were in better shape than the horses at any operation within 50 miles of her farm that was running on hay alone. Her waiting list did not shorten during the drought in the crisis that followed it. It lengthened.
She reached 70 months at the peak in the fall of 1984 before she began telling callers she was not accepting new names. She was breeding six mares a year. She could not accommodate more without expanding the barn in the pasture, which she was not yet prepared to do. By the end of 1984, the ledger showed a savings balance of $78,000.
The farm carried no debt. She had quietly over the previous three years watched 11 farms in a 12-mile radius of her place go through some version of financial reckoning. Four had lost ground to the bank. Two had sold equipment at auction for numbers that did not cover the loans against it.
One had sold out entirely and moved to Green Bay to work for a paper mill. The Kentner operation had been among the four that lost ground. Dale had walked out of the March 1983 conversation at Mari's kitchen table and gone home and refinanced what he could and sold what he could and had still lost the 200 acres of East Fields to the bank in a foreclosure that closed in November of 1984. He had held the home place.
He had sold most of the equipment. He was farming 300 acres now with a smaller line of credit and a lender who had learned something about interest rate risk from the previous four years.
The Vernon County cannery closed in December of 1984. It was not Mari's doing. The parent company in Milwaukee had made a decision in a boardroom she would never see the inside of cutting three underperforming regional canneries in a corporate restructuring that took effect on the first of the year. The closure meant the loss of 42 jobs in Viroqua and the surrounding area.
It meant the loss of a market for pea and bean growers across three townships. It also meant that Merl Blackwood at 58 was suddenly out of a job. Mari heard about the closure the same day everyone else did on a Thursday in a two column story in the Vernon County Broadcaster. She read the story at the kitchen table with her morning coffee.
She did not react. She turned the page. She read the market listings. She read the obituaries as she did every week now that she was of an age when she recognized more of the names than she did not.
Merl came looking for her at the co-op on a Friday morning three weeks later in the second week of January 1985. Mari was at the counter picking up a case of hoof oil and a length of leather lacing for a bridle repair. Merl came in through the front door and stood for a moment in the vestibule while his eyes adjusted to the dim inside light. When they did, he saw her at the counter and walked over.
He was not wearing the wool sport coat. He was wearing an old canvas barn coat that had clearly not been his working coat. He was thinner than he had been. His hair had gone entirely gray in the two years since Mari had last seen him at any distance.
He stood at her shoulder and waited for her to finish paying. His voice was low, almost formal. "Mrs. Thorson, could I have a word with you?" She nodded.
She let Ronnie behind the register hand her the change. She turned to face him. He wanted to know whether she was in the market for a purchasing consultant. He had 34 years in the produce processing industry.
He knew every cannery, every renderer, every grower cooperative from the Wisconsin River to the Mississippi. He could help her formalize her sourcing network. He could help her negotiate contracts. He could help her expand into other regions.
Mari looked at him. She was aware of the men around the coffee pot at the back of the store, three of whom had been there the morning in October of 1971 when Merl had told the story about the widow buying the crooked carrots. She was aware that they were watching. She was aware that Merl was aware they were watching and she understood with a clarity that felt to her almost impersonal that Merl had chosen this location for this conversation on purpose because he wanted a room in which she would be reluctant to say what she was actually thinking.