Now I needed hay.
Our place is only fifteen acres, and most of it is house, yard, and pole barn. I’d known from the beginning that I’d need somebody else’s field.
I knew exactly whose.
Retta Kopp is seventy-six. She’s a widow who lives in a little white farmhouse up Spring Creek, about three miles north of us. Her husband, Walt, died six years ago. Since then, her thirty-five acres of smooth brome hayfield had sat uncut. Nobody had baled it in six summers. It had gone tall and shaggy, and the county weed inspector had sent her two letters about the thistles along the fence line.
I knew Retta from the clinic. She brought in her old border collie, Banjo, for his arthritis shots every month.
I drove up there on a Sunday afternoon and sat in her kitchen with a cup of weak coffee.
“I’ve got a baler,” I said. “An old one. And two boys. I’d like to put up your brome this summer. For a share.”
Retta squinted at me over her glasses. She has a sharp, wrinkled face and doesn’t suffer fools.
“What kind of share?”
I’d thought about it. The standard deal around here for hay on shares is that the landowner gets a third and the person doing the work gets two-thirds. But I wanted it in dollars, not bales, because Retta didn’t have horses or cattle anymore. What would she do with a third of the hay?
“I sell the bales,” I said. “You get twenty-five percent of whatever I take in. I pay for everything: fuel, twine, repairs, all of it. And I’ll mow the thistles along your fence line so the county stops sending you letters.”
Retta drummed her fingers on the table.
“Walt always said a deal you can’t write down isn’t a deal,” she said.
“Then let’s write it down.”
So we did. That week, I paid a lawyer in Marysville, Mrs. Ochsner, $175 to draw up a simple one-page hay lease. It said I had the right to cut and bale hay on Retta’s thirty-five acres for one year. Retta would get twenty-five percent of gross sales, paid monthly. I’d carry liability insurance, keep the field in good condition, and control the thistles.
I called my insurance agent, Gene Hollis at the Farm Bureau office, about adding liability coverage for haying on someone else’s land.
“You’re running a hay operation now, Jana?” Gene said, sounding amused.
“A small one.”
“With your boys?”
“Tucker’s sixteen. Reed’s thirteen. Reed’s only going to stack on the wagon and in the barn. He won’t be driving anything with a power takeoff.”
Gene was quiet. “Good. Keep it that way. I’ve seen too many kids hurt around balers. You keep those shields on and that PTO shaft covered, and nobody reaches into that pickup while it’s running. Ever.”
“I know, Gene. My uncle died on a tractor.”
“I know he did,” Gene said softly. “That’s why I’m saying it.”
He added a farm liability endorsement to our homeowner’s policy for $186 a year. I wrote it in the HAYLINER ledger.
Then I needed a tractor. Our old lawn tractor wasn’t going to pull a baler.
Cordell solved that too.
“I’ve got a John Deere 4020 sitting in my shed doing nothing,” he said. “Runs fine. Just needs somebody to drive it. You can use it this summer if you pay for the fuel and change the oil when you’re done.”
“Cordell, I can’t…”
“You can,” he said. “Arvid let me use his hay rake for eleven years after I quit farming and never charged me a dime. I figure I owe the Lindemans a summer.”
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