Column by John Mattingly
Agriculture – December 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
FROM A GRAY-GREEN SKY, a torrential rain overwhelmed the parking lot. Cars appeared to liquify into the asphalt as it became the bottom of a shimmering, black lake. The awning under which I stood began to droop from the weight of gathering water, so I stepped back under the wide soffit of the supermarket, wondering if this downpour was also falling on my crops out at the farm, or if, as usual, it was focused exclusively on the urban heat island.
During a clap of thunder, a woman stomped out of the store, a plastic bag in each hand. She wore tight teal shorts topped with a lemon tank. Her shoulder-length straight hair framed a face of pure indignation. Shaking her head in disgust, she stared for a moment at the parking lot, then looked right at me. “Why is it raining?”
The question stumped me. I’d never thought of rain from the standpoint of why, instead devoting my attention to questions of when and how much. If a crop needed dry days to ripen and cure, the chance of rain obviously increased, whereas if rain truly was needed, it typically blew by with a raincheck. When it did rain, there were, as with the Eskimos and snow, many kinds: from frog-stranglers to stubble soakers, goose- drowners to windrow misters, tank toppers to 12- inchers (as in inches between drops). Having given so much attention to the vagaries and particulars of rain, I’d never given much thought to the why of rain.
But I had time to think about it, standing under the supermarket soffit as the downpour continued. “Well,” I said, “it rains because of the hydrologic cycle — you know, water evaporates off the oceans, condenses over the land masses, precipitates, percolates, transpirates, and eventually migrates back to the ocean to evaporate again.”
The woman looked at me as if I’d just beamed down from MIT. “Thanks professor. I have a convertible. The roof is down.” She pointed to a small, red 280Z, water flowing over the door tops and back seat.
“Why?” she asked again, only it was more exclamation than question as she picked up one of her bags and flung it against the near wall.
She reminded me of an old farmer named Hyde who taught me a lot about growing sweet corn. He farmed 10 acres of truck garden crops as a sideline to his 150 acres of field corn, pinto beans, alfalfa, and barley. The first few times I met him, he struck me as patient and wise, a man of the soil, salt of the earth. Then I happened to be with him during a brief hail storm that hit just as his sweet corn was tasseling, effectively destroying pollination and thus killing the crop. To my surprise, Hyde tossed his already rumpled hat to the ground, stomped on it until it nearly came apart around the rim, and then fell to the ground, pounding the earth with his fists. This was not a mere flash of crankiness, it was a full blown incantation of grief offered in a stream of cuss words I’d never heard in such emphatic combination, though I do recall the word why rising intermittently from the blue smoke. A few minutes later he stood, dusted himself off, and returned to being the wise and patient Hyde of before the hailstorm.
This happened early in my career as a farmer, and for a time I thought such tantrums might be normal behavior for farmers. If the weather turned against you, frustration built up, you let Mother Nature have a piece of your mind. Another of my neighbors in those early years, named Reuben, had a slow drizzle fall on his windrowed pinto beans, causing the pods to pop open. After watching his entire bean crop jump to the ground out of combine’s reach, Reuben stormed back to his yard and started kicking buckets. I arrived shortly after he’d kicked one full of old nails. He too was cursing a streak, and the word why occasionally flavored his outburst.
TO TAKE ACTS of weather personally would seem to be pure folly, but in retrospect I think of Hyde and Reuben as icons of the pre-precision farmer — which most of us were before the dawn of computers and satellite systems. We looked up at the sky and hoped. If the sky frowned at us, we hoped harder, and if the sky lashed out at us, we could throw a tantrum. The tantrum was not so much an angry outburst as an expression of our weakness: an outcry to Mother Nature, our acknowledged superior.
Back in the early ’70s, some time after those fateful encounters with Hyde and Reuben, when I was still trying to figure out how, as an apprenticing farmer, I should respond to the weather, I wrote a paragraph one evening after a big rainstorm ruined a field of cut hay.
“I’m sitting here on the porch, looking at the sky, thinking about weather and graces. What I did yesterday and what I will do today depend on weather, as does my general fortune. I want a blessing from the sky and sometimes I get it, though not as I expect it. It comes as something I know by sight but do not see, something I recognize but never really know, so equivocal its graces are, or aren’t.”
Today’s precision farmers have neither the passion of Hyde and Reuben for tantrums, nor the patience for mystery that satisfied my early years as a farmer. Precision farmers seldom look at the sky when assembling their elaborate hedges and challenges to the superiority of Mother Nature. Instead, they turn their gaze on global positioning systems to differentially fertilize fields, and monitor harvest yields by tiny quadrants. They deploy pinpoint pesticide applications for optimal effectiveness and use herbicide resistant, genetically modified crops that relegate the cultivator to the fencerow. Their faith lies with complex chemical pharmacologies and computer links to weather forecasts to aid in the timing of operations from ground preparation through harvest. If all else fails, they have Federal Crop Insurance, which, in some cases, pays better than the harvested crop. It isn’t uncommon for a precision farmer to be secretly hoping for hail.
Rather than throw a tantrum after an adverse weather event, today’s modern industrial farmer looks for ways to increase the accuracy of incoming information, get more from government programs, streamline and accelerate harvest techniques, and make necessary adjustments in his crop insurance. The sea change from Reuben and Hyde in the ’60s to today’s industrial-precision farmer is a measure of the fading deference — in perception if not fact — to the superiority of Mother Nature.
AS FOR THE WOMAN in teal shorts, standing outside the supermarket while her convertible became a bath tub, her question could land either side of the spectrum from Hyde-Reuben to Precision-Modern. The why of rain could be something akin to the Zen of rain, begging the essence of a mysterious liquid that, were it not so plentiful, would be considered magic. Three times more abundant than all other substances on Earth, water is one of very few inorganic liquids, the only substance that occurs naturally as a solid, liquid and gas. It is the most universal solvent and enabler of organic transport, and blessed with the highest surface tension of all liquids (except mercury). And water expands with increasing temperature, has the greatest heat capacity of all liquids (1 cal/g/deg C), has the greatest latent heat of fusion and vaporization, has the greatest thermal conductivity (except mercury), is dense and compressible and yet generously transmits both light and sound. And water seeks its own shape while occupying 80% of our bodies yet shares none of its mobility with us in space. Perhaps most remarkably, water is less dense when frozen, allowing it to float — a good thing, or else all bodies of water would eventually become solid ice. The why of rain could be seen as questing the cosmologic origin of our water planet.
Or, the why of rain question from the lady in teal could be magnificently stupid. She apparently didn’t even glance at the sky before going into the store.
John Mattingly is a recovering farmer who can some days be found near Moffat.