He laughed again.
This time it had an edge.
“Emily, that's not an experiment.”
“No.”
“That’s a mistake with acreage.”
She rested the seed sack on the tailgate.
“Then it’s my mistake.”
Ed lowered his voice.
“Your dad wouldn’t have done this.”
That stopped her.
The other men stopped laughing.
For a moment, the only sound came from a truck engine idling near the fuel pumps.
Emily looked down at the seed in her hand.
Small.
Black.
Almost nothing.
It was strange how something so tiny could carry so much weight.
Her father had spent forty years building the Walker farm.
Forty years of early mornings.
Forty years of frozen hands.
Forty years of repairing equipment instead of replacing it.
Forty years of telling Emily that land was not something you owned.
It was something you borrowed.
But after he died, the bank did not care about memories.
The fertilizer supplier did not care about memories.
The equipment dealer did not care about memories.
Bills did not care about memories.
The land that her father had protected was suddenly covered in numbers.
Loan payments.
Fuel costs.
Seed expenses.
Machinery repairs.
Crop prices.
Every spring, farmers across Iowa placed their hopes into the ground.
But in 1982, hope was becoming expensive.
Corn prices had dropped.
Input costs had climbed.
Small farms were feeling pressure from every direction.
Emily had spent nights at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad, calculating what another ordinary season would look like.
The answer scared her.
If she planted the same crops her father always planted, she knew exactly where she would end up.
Barely surviving.
Maybe worse.
So she started looking.
Not dreaming.
Looking.
She read agricultural magazines after midnight.
She called extension offices.
She studied market reports.
She wrote letters.
Most people looked at the farm and saw tradition.
Emily looked at it and saw a problem that needed solving.
Then she found the contract.