“The drought hasn’t even started yet.”
The Young Farm Woman wiped her hand against her jeans.
“It started months ago.”
He scoffed.
“We’ve had rain.”
“Not enough.”
“Plenty for June.”
“It didn’t go into the ground.”
That irritated him.
“I’ve farmed this land longer than you’ve been alive.”
She looked toward his bare rows.
“I know.”
Something in those two words made one of the other farmers glance away.
The Older Farmer stepped closer.
“You think a little green carpet makes you smarter than everyone?”
“No.”
“Then what exactly are you trying to prove?”
The Young Farm Woman climbed back through the fence.
“Nothing.”
She picked up the corn basket.
“That’s your problem.”
His jaw tightened.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You think everything different is somebody trying to challenge you.”
She began walking.
The Older Farmer followed two steps.
“Your field burns up, don’t come asking me for feed.”
The Young Farm Woman stopped.
She looked back.
“Touch your own dirt before worrying about mine.”
Then she walked away.
The men beside the pickup said nothing until she disappeared between the rows.
The Older Farmer looked down at the clover still tangled near her footprints.
He kicked it aside.
Then stared across his own field.
The ground seemed hotter than it had a minute earlier.
The Young Farm Woman did not plant clover because she wanted attention.
In fact, attention was the part she hated most.
She planted it because of a notebook.
The notebook had belonged to her father.
It was not elegant.
No leather cover.
No carefully organized farm journal.
It was an old spiral-bound school notebook stained with grease, soil, rain, and something that might have been coffee.
She found it three years after he died.
Her father had kept hundreds of records.
Planting dates.
Yield maps.
Fertilizer receipts.
Equipment maintenance logs.
Loan documents.
Weather notes.
But the spiral notebook was different.
It contained questions.
That was unusual.
Her father had been a man who preferred answers.
He could tell you when to plant corn by the smell of spring soil.
He knew which bearing was failing from the pitch of a combine.
He could look at a thunderstorm in the west and estimate whether it would cross the county line.
He was wrong often enough to remain human.
He rarely admitted uncertainty on paper.
Yet the notebook was full of it.
What happens if soil stays shaded all summer?
How much July rain actually enters hard ground?
Can clover survive beneath corn without stealing too much moisture?
Terminate early?
Leave strips?
Does residue matter more than living root?
The Young Farm Woman had read those pages at the kitchen table until midnight.
Twenty-two years earlier, her father had planted a small clover trial in one corner of the farm.
She remembered the field.
Barely.
She had been a child.
She remembered pink flowers.
She remembered adults complaining.
She remembered her father telling her not to walk through the test rows because he was measuring something.
Then the trial disappeared.
The family never spoke about it again.
The notebook explained why.
Her father had planted clover beneath corn after reading soil-conservation reports and visiting an experimental farm.
The season turned dry.
The test area retained surface moisture longer.
Its soil stayed cooler.
Rain infiltrated differently.
But the clover also competed too aggressively in parts of the field because he allowed it to remain fully active too long.
Yield results were mixed.
Some rows performed well.
Others did not.
His final note read:
Promising, but management wrong. Try again with earlier suppression and lower density.
There was no second trial.
Debt increased.
Her mother became ill.
Her father expanded acreage trying to compensate for lower margins.