In the spring of 1987, nearly every farmer in Pottawattamie County, Iowa, planted corn the same way. This was not treated as a decision. It was gravity. Corn was what...
In August of 2017, a check for $187,450 was written to a man who had not bought a bag of commercial hog feed in fourteen years. The check was not...
On a frozen Tuesday morning in February, Jazelle Harmon signed a contract with a smirk she did not bother to hide. One thousand dollars. That was the number she assigned...
She is thirty-one years old now. She runs a diversified farming operation on 614 acres in Sequoyah County, Oklahoma: market vegetables, pastured poultry, a certified organic grain plot, and a...
Part 1 “That dilapidated pile of rotting wood you call a barn has to be demolished within thirty days, Mr. Miller.” Karen Brewster said it like she was reading a...
PART 1 My name is Marissa G. Carter, and for three years I thought I knew the shape of my life. It was the shape of Ethan’s keys landing in...
Part 1 When I think back to that summer, what scares me most is not how much money I lost. It is how calm I sounded while my family was...
Part 1 The day the homeowners association fined me ten thousand dollars for “unauthorized agricultural activity,” I was standing ankle-deep in mud trying to pull a stubborn calf out of...
Part 1 I found out about Texas from a photo I was never supposed to see. Not from a family group chat. Not from my mother calling with that fake-bright...
Part 1 Some stories begin with a phone call. Mine began with the smell of burned toast, wet sneakers by the back door, and my ten-year-old daughter standing in the...