Out here, when the crop is poor or the price is worse, somebody at the elevator always says, "Well, next year." People have been saying it on these prairies since the homestead days. They call this "next year country," and they don't entirely mean it as a compliment.

We have said "next year" six years running now. This page is about those six years, and mostly about the part nobody likes to talk about, which is what years like that do to a man and a woman and a marriage. I'm Mary. I've written most of it. Russell wrote one part himself, and it took him most of a winter, and I didn't change a word.

If you are a farm family and you found this page at eleven o'clock at night because you couldn't sleep, then this page is for you. Get a cup of coffee. You're among friends.

Our Story

Russell is 52 and I'm 48. We farm spring wheat and barley a few miles from Devils Lake, on land Russell's grandfather homesteaded in 1902. Grandpa Carpenter broke the sod with horses and lived in a claim shack the first winter. The shack is gone, but the cottonwoods he planted are still standing in the shelterbelt, and every spring Russell says hello to them, though he'd be embarrassed I put that here.

Our son Jarrod is 22. He grew up riding in the combine and always meant to come home and farm with his dad. He's working in Fargo now, and he's told us he's going to wait a while. We told him that's the right thing. It is the right thing. It still hurt to say it.

The water. Devils Lake has no outlet. When it rains more than it evaporates, the lake just keeps coming up, and since 1993 it has rained and rained. The lake has come up more than twenty feet since then. It has taken farms and homes and whole sections of road, and they've had to keep raising the dikes around town. On our place it has taken the low ground on the north side, quarter by quarter. Russell's dad had a hay meadow down there. Now there are pelicans on it. We still pay taxes on some of that ground. That's the kind of thing you have to laugh about or you'll do the other thing.

The scab. The same wet weather brought scab, which the Extension people call fusarium head blight. If it's warm and wet when the wheat is heading out, the fungus gets into the heads, and instead of plump kernels you get light, chalky, shriveled ones that blow out the back of the combine. What does make it into the truck can carry vomitoxin, and the elevator docks you for that, and the maltsters won't take barley that has it at all. We had scab in '93, and then we had it again and again. There were years we combined a crop that looked fine from the road and hauled it to town for next to nothing.

The prices. And then on top of all of it, the prices fell to about the lowest anybody around here can remember. I'm not going to put numbers on this page because they change every day and they're all bad. You know what they are. If you don't farm, just know that there have been loads we sold for less than it cost to grow them.

This spring was so wet we couldn't get into some of our fields at all. What we did plant came off this August, a fair crop, better than we feared, and we're grateful for it.

In the fall of '96 I went to work at the county courthouse in town, mostly for the health insurance. I'm in the treasurer's office. I like it, and I like the women I work with. But I'll be honest: I didn't marry a farmer and move out here to drive into town every morning at seven-thirty, and there are days I resent it, and then I feel guilty for resenting it, because it is keeping us going.

We're still here. That's the short version. Here's the longer one.

Russell's Part

I'll only add that the winter Russell wrote about was the worst of my life, and I didn't know what it was either. I thought he was angry with me. I thought he'd stopped loving me. We've both learned a lot since then, and that's why this page is here.

What to Watch For

I'm not a doctor or a counselor. This is what June and our doctor and the Extension office's farm stress meeting taught us, and what I wish I'd known two winters ago. Watch for it in your husband, your wife, your dad, your neighbor, or yourself:

• Pulling away. Quits going to coffee, to church, to the ball games. Stays in the house or out in the shop alone.
• Sleeping all the time, or hardly sleeping at all.
• A short fuse with the kids, the wife, the dog, the machinery.
• Letting things go that he'd never have let go: chores, repairs, the yard, mail piling up unopened.
• Drinking more than he used to.
• More close calls and accidents in the field or the yard. A tired, worried man is a careless one around a PTO shaft.
• Saying it's all his fault, or that the family would be better off without him. Take that seriously. Every time.

Women carry it too, and sometimes it looks different on us: tired all the time, crying in the car on the way to work, headaches, snapping at everybody and then apologizing. Farm wives are very good at taking care of everybody but themselves. I know. I'm one.

It isn't weakness. Depression is an illness, like diabetes or a bad back, and it can be treated. Hard times don't make a person weak for feeling them. The strongest men I know are the ones who finally said, out loud, "I'm not doing so good."

Talk to someone. Your doctor, your pastor or priest, a counselor, the farm crisis hotline, your county Extension agent, a neighbor. Start anywhere. If you're worried about somebody else, ask him straight out how he's doing, and then be quiet and let him answer.

What's Helping

The farm crisis hotline. I called it first, from the kitchen phone at two in the morning, the winter Russell was in bed. The woman who answered had farmed with her husband for thirty years. She didn't hurry me. She told me what to say to get Russell to the doctor, and it worked. If you don't know the number, your county Extension office will have it, and so will most pastors.

The state's farm mediation service. When things got tight with our lender last winter, the mediation service set up a meeting with us and the bank, with somebody in the room whose job was to help everybody find a way through instead of a way out. We came out with a plan we can live with. Don't wait until the letters get nasty to call them.

The Extension office. Our county agent has been a friend through all of it. They held a farm stress meeting in the church basement last winter that a lot of people came to "for the pie," and then stayed for. They've also been good on the practical side: which varieties have held up better against scab, when to spray, how to get our records together for the bank.

Last fall's emergency payments. The emergency farm money Congress passed last fall came through when we needed it, and it let us make a payment we weren't sure we could make. It didn't fix anything, but it bought us a winter. There's talk of more this fall. We'll see.

Our pastor. Pastor Larry Donner drove out on a Tuesday afternoon and sat at our kitchen table for two hours and drank coffee and didn't preach at anybody. He told Russell that Lutherans are very good at bringing hotdish to people's houses and very bad at saying "I'm struggling," and that he was working on it himself. Russell laughed for the first time in weeks.

Coffee. Russell goes back to coffee at the cafe in town most mornings now. The first morning he went back, Richard McLaren and James Trueblood were sitting where they always sit, and James said, "Where've you been?" and Russell told him the truth. Turned out James had had his own bad winter in '95. Turned out half the table had. They'd all been keeping it to themselves. Now they don't, quite so much.

Each other. We go for a drive on Sunday afternoons, just to look at everybody's crops, which is a farmer's idea of a date. We talk more than we used to. We pray. We're Lutherans, so mostly silently.

Other farm families. Since this page went up, we've heard from people all over the northern plains, and I've put some of those letters on their own page: Letters from Other Farm Families. Deb Paull, a farm wife in Iowa, has a page called Hanging On about her family and the hog price crash. It's worth your time.

If you'd like to write to us, we'd be glad to hear from you. I answer every letter, though some weeks it takes me a while. If you don't want your letter on the letters page, just say so.

[email protected]

Neighbors who've stopped by since March 1999:

Last updated Sunday, September 19, 1999, after the last of the barley was in the bin.
© 1999 Russell and Mary Carpenter