The Lord's Bounty

The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 4

The Lord's Bounty

Daniel Mundt pulled himself out of the big recliner when he heard Earl barking at a car in his father's driveway. He must have dozed off in front of the Sunday afternoon basketball game. He stepped to the picture window in time to see a young woman wave and pull away. His father's red-faced look followed the car. The vigilant black shepherd stopped barking.

A plume of white gravel dust trailing the southbound auto paralleled one of ground feed spinning off the corner of the barn. The March wind beat against the glass. Daniel rubbed his closely cropped gray head and ran a finger beneath his clerical collar. He'd hoped to get a walk in between Sunday services 30 miles apart. The old man was amazing, 75 and strong as a Rhineland horse. Irene, his mother, was pretty good, too, resting after fixing them a Sunday lunch. She didn't set the big dining room table these Sundays the way she had when all the kids were here. That was fine with Daniel. He was always turning down food wherever he went. Lutherans do like to eat.

He turned toward the coffee pot, walking by the big table where fertilizer order forms lay. Would pastors ever drink chamomile tea instead of coffee like the church wellness doc wanted? Right now the score was two Sunday services down and two more to go.

Harold pushed into the big kitchen from the mudroom. His face was flushed with more than the wind. "I get tired of these tree huggers coming around here, and suggesting we don't know how to farm! They know crap about an enterprise like this! What it takes to keep it running, to keep it making money, to keep all the equipment and buildings up. Pay the notes off, pay the taxes. Hell, Cedar Rapids people poison more runoff water with lawn chemicals that I do acre for acre! Where does she get off?" Harold paused for breath.

"What did she want, Dad" Daniel asked. (Too bad she’d interrupted the traditional Sunday afternoon brandy and cigar with a brash bumper sticker.)

"Didn't say, lost in paradise, if you ask me," Harold said. "I got better things to do than give directions to latter day hippies." Harold brightened suddenly, "'Bout corn plantin' time, eh, Danny boy? Not long now!" Corn growing as competitive sport drove Harold Mundt. March madness meant taking delivery of the right seed and fertilizer, planning and working everything perfectly to squeeze out every bushel per acre he could. He usually looked to buy out a neighbor this time of year, too.

"If these yay-hoos in Washington don't get a farm bill passed this week, I'm going to be chewing on Tom Harkin by Friday," Harold carped. "That Daschle wants to be president. Trent Lott would have had this done weeks ago if Jeffords hadn't deserted the party. I couldn't believe it! At least we've got this ethanol market coming."

Daniel poured two cups of coffee and set them at one corner of the big dining room table. His mother's crocheted table runner laid bright white against the walnut. He marveled again at the beauty such patient needlework brought to so many tables of her generation.

Harold Mundt sat down, then poured the rest of his brandy into the coffee cup. He bounced the edges of the stack of fertilizer order forms on the walnut.

"Say, Dad,” said Daniel first, “I was talking to Dr. Pandumali over at the U last week. She says you can save a ton of money on your nitrogen this year. Get this, some USDA guys up in Minnesota have figured out that the traditional N level calculations are off by quite a bit, and especially if you're spreading manure from your feedlot lagoons. Fact is you've been putting on far more than you need."

Harold's cup clattered onto his saucer. "Look, boy, nitrogen powers Iowa corn, and that's a fact. How do you think we can keep ahead of the Brazilians and Argentines without heavy nitrogen? Don't start on me with this green weenie line. My son, the liberal!"

"Now wait a minute, Dad. Liberal nitrogen is a big problem in the Upper Midwest. We've got soil that's brittle and running off. We've got well water not safe to drink, especially for little kids and nursing moms. We've got rivers so polluted we just lost a major environmental suit. You swam in the Cedar River as a boy, but your great grandson can’t.

"Think about it this way for once," Daniel continued. "Conservatives conserve. God calls us be stewards on the land, to pass down a heritage we've conserved and protected. Being a good steward and a good farmer is the conservative, Christian thing to do. I don't think God wants farmers in the upper Midwest to mine their topsoil, to export it and extra nitrogen to the Gulf of Mexico."

"I thought I'd heard one sermon from you today already, Danny," Harold answered. "I don't see the harm in a little extra N. People can buy bottled water; it's in all the stores. Doesn't cost much, either. Get this rural water running."

"Dad, hold on, do you know there's a huge dead zone, that's d-e-a-d, dead, at the mouth of the Mississippi River. You wouldn't just ignore a dead, nonproductive section on one of your farms. Do you know the main cause of this dead zone?"

"Tell me, Mr. Scientist," Harold's sarcasm bit at his youngest child. The prairie wind pounded the big picture window.

"Nitrogen, upper Mississippi basin nitrogen running off our farms is killing an area in the gulf the almost the size of the state of Maryland. Dad, it's true, and it's not right." Daniel said.

"What about the cities? Minneapolis, Chicago, Des Moines, St. Louis, the Quad Cities, what about them; what about all that on the lawns?" Harold asked. His face was red again.

"The research says, and it's verified by other studies, that the lawn nitrogen runoff, is huge relative to the size of the lawns themselves. Yet the studies confirm that lawn runoff still adds up in all the cities and towns to a very small total amount of nitrogen compared to what we put on all the corn acreage in Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa."

"So what am I supposed to do then? Fred Hermann at the co-op is expecting my big order. I thought this would be the year with the new ethanol demand starting to appear, that we could finally cash in. We're talking money in the bank to send your kids to college, and your sibling's kids, too, and the inheritance for the bunch of you. When they said get big or get out, I got big. What now? I'm supposed to just let all the Lord's bounty go?" Harold asked.

"Look, Dad, maybe there’s a win-win here. The Lord wants the bounty to be here for many, many generations. How about calling the NRCS guys, ask for help recalculating the N for this year? Maybe you can cut your costs on purchased nitrogen, and by spreading at just the right time, still keep a good gross margin," offered his son.

Harold said nothing.

"What say, old man, try something new?" Daniel kidded him.

"Yeah, yeah, let me think about it. Get outta here, will you. Don't you have more sermons somewhere today?" Harold growled.

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Next week... "Nothing Like Family," Chapter 5

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 4 was written by John Gabbert with Barry Drazkowski.

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The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.