Column by John Mattingly
Agriculture – June 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
AFTER HE GRADUATED from college, I offered to give my son a circle in the San Luis Valley. Farmers in the Valley refer more to how many circles they’re farming than how many acres. A circle is a 120-140 acres irrigated by a center pivot system, usually in the middle of a quarter section (160 acres). I’d owned and farmed 11 circles, but had started a gradual road to retirement by selling seven of the circles over the previous three years. The circle I offered my son was one of the four remaining circles I intended to sell in the coming two years. The gift circle was about 130 acres under a late model Zimmatic pivot.
My son had grown up on the various farms I’d either owned or managed through the years. A willing part of the labor force, he started on a tractor when he was about seven, needing wooden blocks strapped to his shoes to reach the clutch and brakes. He had shown real promise as a farmer. My son had a sense of what to do and when to do it with field operations. He’d developed decent tinkering skills and was good at handling machines. Until he was about twelve, he was the first one on a tractor in the morning and the last one off at night. When he discovered girls and basketball he was the first one off the tractor at night, but always there when really needed. He went to high school in Pueblo at East High, and college in Boulder at CU, but still came back to help out on the farm during holidays and summers. I often planned harvest and planting operations to coincide with his time at home.
I wasn’t sure what my son was going to do after college, but I wanted to offer him a chance to become a farmer, or a chance at startup capital if, instead of farming the circle, he decided to sell it.
But he declined the gift.
My approaching retirement might have had something to do with it. My son was looking at me as I approached 60, and though I had escaped serious injuries, there had been a slow accumulation of stresses: stents in my coronary arteries, a few mangled toes from an auger accident that needed surgery to mend, a knee that would soon get a full replacement, face burns from skin cancer removals, hands that were beginning to look like tree roots.
He didn’t mention all that, though.
After some figuring, he told me he turned down the gift because one circle wasn’t enough ground to justify the equipment he would have to buy. He needed five or six circles to reach economy of scale, which meant going into debt to buy or lease more ground — and then taking on more debt to buy the equipment and fund the variable costs of seed, fertilizer, fuel, repairs, insurance, etc. which would be needed for a modest alfalfa-wheat-canola rotation.
HE DIDN’T PRESENT this information in a way suggesting that he didn’t appreciate my offer, or that he wanted more from me. He simply pointed out that the farming business was capitalized in such a top-heavy way that it made it almost impossible for a young man to get started — even a young man with his first circle.
“You have to own or control all the means of production,” he said. “Most businesses spread that out among stockholders. But for me to get into farming, I have be all the stockholders in my company, and to do that, I start with a yoke of debt that never gets off my neck.”
“And,” he daggered on, “for that lopsided capital investment, I have no market share. Say I grow 30,000 bushels of wheat on a couple of circles, deliver it into a U.S. wheat crop of 12 billion bushels. My market share in wheat is so small it doesn’t even register as a number on my calculator. Most companies, if they have to own all the means of production, expect at least a 30% market share.”
Finally, someone had explained to me in hard terms why the farming business was so lousy.
I’d started farming in 1969, and leveraged the progressive appreciation of the ground and water rights over the decades to eventually own all the means of production in “my company.” But I’d happened to buy in at a time that preceded an historically high period of land appreciation, not matched by the current cycle of ups and downs. I was lucky: The sale of crops and, at the end, sale of my machinery, paid off my operating debts, and I then needed to sell most of the ground I’d acquired in forty years of farming to provide for my retirement. I’d been flat broke twice, and come back from it. There are many farmers who, in the August of their life, have far less than I ended up with, and I readily admit that sheer good fortune played as big a role in the moderate success of my endgame as good management.
I RECENTLY HAD DINNER with my son in Denver where he’s selling financial products — things I’m certain didn’t exist when I was his age. But he’s good at it. After a little more than a year on the job he had enough in the bank to buy, on his own, a condo in a lively part of downtown Denver that’s worth about twice the price of a circle of farmland in the San Luis Valley. He sported the new suit he’d just had tailored, a subject lost on me, as I’ve had but one suit in my entire life and had worn it three times, maybe.
My son’s five-year plan is to own a string of night clubs. As he talked about his goals and doings, I caught a glimpse of the great irony: my parents expected me to be a lawyer and I became a farmer instead. I recalled an evening I had dinner with them, and the look on their faces as they listened to me talk about sugar beets, bean cutters, and pipe ditchers. It must have resembled the look on my face as I listened to my son talk about derivatives, arbitrages, and euromarkets.
After we’d had a few martinis, I asked my son if he thought about the farm much. His head nodded, his lips pursed, and he said, “Sure.”
That was all he needed to say, as a lot of emotion passed between us: Standing together when a hailstorm passed a mile south of two circles of ripe wheat. A smile over a thermos of coffee on the fender of our pickup truck, the sunrise dew glistening on windrows of alfalfa. Hefting a gear box out to a pivot tower in a field of bright yellow canola that loomed high over our heads. The smell of bacon at 3 a.m. after working all night to get a field planted ahead of a storm. And those small moments when we just sat back in our easy chairs to breathe a macho sigh of relief that we’d made it through another harvest.
After a long silence, I said, “You could’ve just sold the circle, or traded it for your first night club.”
“Yeah, but you know,” he said, “I wouldn’t have felt right about it.”
Though I instantly appreciated the metaphysical incongruity of trading a San Luis Valley circle for a night club, his smile made me remember how satisfying it was to buy my first farm on my own. The unexpected life is best, if not necessarily, lived on one’s own terms.
John Mattingly is a recovering farmer who now cultivates prose.
