Sun. Sept. 26

Started beans Friday. Ran till eleven last night by the light of that big harvest moon, and could have run longer, but the dew came down and the beans got tough. My wife Karen brought supper out to the field last night. Beef sandwiches and coffee on the tailgate. She sat in the combine cab with me for two rounds like she used to before she went to work in town. She didn't say much and neither did I. It was the best two rounds of the year.

Our son Jeff came home from college Saturday morning and drove the grain cart all day. He's good at it. He has been good at it since he was twelve. I watched him out the back window of the cab, running alongside to catch the unload, not spilling a bean, and I thought about how he told us at Labor Day. It doesn't change anything that he's good at it. He can be good at something and not want it. I know that. I just had to watch it all day.

Yields are better than I figured. Price is not. Fell asleep in church this morning during the second hymn. Karen let me.

Wed. Sept. 22

Pastor came out this afternoon. Drove right up the lane in his good car and walked out to the finishing barn in his good shoes. I knew Karen called him. She knew I'd know.

He stood in the alley with me while I checked waterers, and he said the Lord is in the hog barn too. I said then He knows what hogs are bringing. He laughed. He's all right, Pastor.

We sat on the tailgate a long time. He asked was I sleeping. I said some. I told him some nights I lie there doing arithmetic, and it comes out the same every time no matter how I carry the numbers. I told him I was here in the eighties and I saw what that did to men around here, and I'm not going to be one of those stories. He said he believed me. Then he said he'd like me to call anyway, and he left a card for the farm stress line the extension runs. It's on the refrigerator. I haven't called. I haven't thrown it out either.

On TV tonight they showed North Carolina, hog barns with water up to the eaves. I shut it off. Those are men like me.

Thurs. Sept. 16

Went to the bank. Rich and I went to school together, all twelve years. He was decent about it. He'll carry the operating note through harvest and into next year. But he put his pen down and said they'll need to see a plan by spring. A plan. I've had a plan for thirty years. The plan was raise good hogs and pay what I owe. Nobody told me the plan could be right and still not work.

Drove home past Gene's place. There are survey stakes out in his south field now with orange flags on them, where the two big buildings are going to go. I pulled over and looked at them a while. I don't know what I was waiting for.

Mon. Sept. 13

Sold a load today. Still under what they cost me to raise. Bank on Thursday. Nothing else to report.

Mon. Sept. 6 -- Labor Day

Jeff was home for the long weekend. Karen made the pork roast, which in this house is not a statement, it's just Monday.

After dinner he said he had something to tell us. He's a senior at Iowa State this year. He has a job offer from a company in Minneapolis for after graduation. Good money. Insurance. Two weeks' vacation. He said it fast like he'd practiced it in the car, and I suppose he had.

Karen looked at me. I said that's good, son. That is good. He said, "Dad, I'm sorry." I told him don't be sorry. A boy shouldn't be sorry for doing better than his father.

He went out to the barn after, by himself, and I let him. When he came back he smelled like hogs and his eyes were red and he said the new gilts look good. They do.

My great-grandfather came onto this ground in 1889. I don't know who is supposed to know that after me. Our daughter Amy is sixteen and would rather be anywhere but a hog barn, and I don't blame her. Karen says I have to quit thinking of it like a relay race. I said what else would you call it. She said, a farm, Dennis. It's a farm.

Tues. Aug. 31

Up at 2:30 with a sow in the farrowing house who was having a hard time of it. She's an old girl, on her fifth litter, and she got it done with a little help. Eleven pigs. I sat on an upside-down bucket under the heat lamps after and watched them find their places, and for about twenty minutes nothing about the markets mattered at all.

That's the part nobody counts. You can't put it in a plan for the bank.

This week I have to decide whether to cull forty sows this fall and cut the herd back. Fewer sows, less feed, less to lose if prices go down again. Also less to gain if they come back. Every hog man in Iowa is doing the same arithmetic right now. If we all cut back, prices come back. If we all wait for somebody else to cut back, they don't. My dad says never sell at the bottom. The banker will say cut. The old girl in crate six doesn't know she's being discussed.

Amy came out at six to help with chores before school without being asked. I didn't say anything about it, because she'd quit if I did.

Fri. Aug. 27

Karen has been working at the county office in town since March. She took it for the health insurance. What we were paying on our own policy was more than the payment on the combine, and it went up every year, and it didn't cover near enough. Now we're on hers. That's the whole reason. She will tell you she likes the work, and she does. But that's the reason.

She leaves at a quarter to eight in her town clothes. She used to keep the farrowing records and help me process pigs. Now I do it alone, or Amy does it, grumbling. Karen comes home at five-thirty tired in a different way than farm tired, and she changes clothes and comes out to the barn anyway, and I tell her go in the house, and she doesn't.

My dad doesn't understand a wife going to town so the farm can have insurance. He doesn't say so. He doesn't have to. I'm not sure I understand it either. But I understand the bill.

Proud is a funny word. I was proud to not need anybody. Now I'm proud of her. It's supposed to feel better than it does.

Wed. Aug. 18

Gene is selling out. He told me himself this morning at the elevator before the coffee crowd heard it second-hand, which I appreciated.

Gene farms three miles east. His dad and my dad traded work for forty years. Gene and Donna are selling their sows and their hog buildings and the south eighty to one of the big outfits that's been putting up confinement sites all over this part of the state. They'll build two big finishing barns. Thousands of head. Hired men on a schedule. Hogs that belong to a company.

Some of the fellows at the elevator had plenty to say about it after he left. Traitor was one word. I didn't say anything. Gene is 58 and his knees are shot, and his kids are in Des Moines and Omaha, and last December he was paying to feed hogs he couldn't sell for what the feed cost. The outfit offered him cash. I would like to know which of those fellows would have said no.

I'm not saying I'd do it. I'm saying I didn't call him a traitor.

Mon. Aug. 2

My son Jeff set up this page for me before he goes back to Ames. He says writing things down helps. His mother agrees with him. I am outnumbered.

So. My name is Dennis Kruse. I'm 49. My wife Karen and I raise hogs farrow-to-finish, about 160 sows, and we farm corn and beans on the ground my great-grandfather came onto near Carroll, Iowa. We have two kids, Jeff at Iowa State and Amy at home.

Last December hog prices fell off a cliff. At the bottom, live hogs were bringing around ten dollars a hundredweight. I sold a load of market hogs that month for less than the feed I'd put into them. My dad is 76 and he said he never saw it that bad in his life, and he farmed through things. It has come back some since then. Not enough. Every hog that goes out of here is still a question, and the debt from last winter sits on the kitchen table like another person at supper.

I don't know who is going to read this. Farmers don't have time, and town people don't care about hogs until the bacon goes up. But Jeff says somebody will.

Chores are at five-thirty. That doesn't change.