TWTBACD Ch.4 - The Land That Remembered Being Prairie

Chapter 4

The Land That Remembered Being Prairie

Hardin County, Iowa, USA — 1887–2019

agriculture begins

Ch.4 opening: Five generations on Iowa soil, and what the soil remembered

The land that Dale Hayes farmed had been prairie.

Before Ezekiel Hayes broke it in 1887, before the steel plow turned over the native root system that had been accumulating and rebuilding and deepening for twelve thousand years since the glaciers retreated, the land that would become the Hayes farm had been something the English language has difficulty expressing in a single word: it was alive in the specific way of an ecosystem that had reached a kind of maturity, a deep continuity of interconnected life in which everything from the tallgrass roots five feet down to the meadowlarks overhead was part of a system that sustained itself.

Ezekiel broke it because that was what you did in 1887, because the Homestead Act said the land was available, because the railroad made the market reachable, because the soil under the prairie was darker and richer than anything he had ever seen in Ohio and he understood, with the agrarian intuition of a man who had grown up watching his father grow things, that this soil was extraordinary.

He was right. The corn yields on the newly broken prairie land of Iowa in the 1890s were startling. The land gave generously. It continued to give for thirty years, then twenty, then with increasing supplements — chemical fertilisers, first, then pesticides, then herbicides, then the genetic modification of the seeds themselves — it continued to give, but the giving required more and more assistance, because the soil, broken from its native community of organisms, was no longer maintaining itself. It was being fed in order to produce rather than producing in order to be.

Dale Hayes was born in 1956, the year his grandfather bought the first combine harvester. He was the fourth generation. His father Vernon had farmed through the farm crisis of the 1980s, which had broken many of the Hayes' neighbours and not, barely, the Hayes themselves — Vernon had carried debt that Dale, inheriting the farm in 1995, had spent a decade paying down.

The Hayes farm in 2019 was two thousand acres of corn and soybeans, sustainably managed by the standards of 2019, which were not the standards of 2040 but which were, within the American agricultural context, conscientious. Dale used reduced-tillage practices on a quarter of the acreage. He managed his pesticide applications with a precision agriculture system he'd adopted in 2012. He had a good relationship with the county extension office.

He also had a farm that was losing topsoil at a rate that the extension office's soil maps, if Dale had requested them and understood their implications, would have described as 'concerning.' The topsoil that Ezekiel Hayes had broken into cultivation in 1887 was, in the areas of highest erosion, four inches shallower than it had been. In a foot of topsoil, four inches is thirty percent. In a foot of topsoil that took five hundred years to form, four inches is what you lose when you farm it hard for a hundred years without returning what you take.

The water table beneath the farm had dropped three feet since the 1970s. Dale knew this. He knew it the way he knew most things about the farm: in his body, in the accumulated sensory knowledge of a man who had been walking this land since before he could read. The pump ran longer now to get the same water. The creek behind the barn ran lower in summer. The rain was less reliable — more when it came, longer gaps between.

Susan Kowalski became Susan Hayes in 1997. She was from Ames, a city person in the sense that mattered — a person whose relationship to the land was not inherited but acquired, not unconscious but deliberate. She brought to the farm a quality that Dale had in less conscious form: the desire to understand what was actually happening, rather than simply managing it.

She had kept bees since 2008, which was partly honey and partly the thing that beekeeping always is for careful people: a window into ecosystem health. The bees told her things about the land that the soil maps didn't say. She listened.

By 2019 the Hayes farm had Claire, who was eleven, and Travis, who was one — too young for anything except absorbing the farm through sensory immersion, which was exactly the right age for it, which was how every generation of Hayes had begun.

The land remembered what it had been. Under the corn, under the tile drainage, under the compaction from decades of machinery, the prairie seeds remained. They were still there. They were waiting.

Ch.4 close: Four generations of farming what was once — and might be again — prairie