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But then the clouds broke, and the temperature crept toward 70.
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Bill Heider fills the planter with seed corn. Erik Daily photo |
Spring.
He has purchased nitrogen — one of the three key nutrients needed to grow corn — that was injected
the previous week in the form of chilled liquid
anhydrous ammonia. He has spread what cow manure he had, which saved some money in a year when
fertilizer prices doubled and fuel is at an all-time high. He has cleared brush and plowed some fields.
And here’s Bill Heider, in the late evening sun, drugstore reading glasses on his nose, fumbling in the weeds for a pair of bolts he dropped. A typical first day of planting.
He spent the morning loading his planter with bins of pink corn seeds specifically engineered to produce high yields in sandy soil like this field, which he rents about a mile from his home farm along Hwy. 16 in the town of Hamilton. He has squirted the seed with powdered graphite to lubricate the planter. He has dialed in the settings for fertilizer and pesticide, checked to make sure the seeds are coming out.
Once things are working, planting is monotonous. Circle each field three times to create an 18-row buffer to turn around the combine. Then it’s just back and forth. All told, Heider will need about 10 good days.
But the weather has to cooperate.
And the equipment.
Heider has less than 25 acres planted. Even the dry fields have mud bogs where he can’t plant yet. He got stuck once already, and for the second time today has stopped to fix a balky chain. Just as he got it back on its sprockets, he jostled the planter — and the bolts that hold the chain guard in place slid off their perch.
“Monkey business,” he says. “Monkey business.”
Bill Heider is a man of unimposing height in work boots and denim pants stained orange with the soil where he makes his living. He’s trim but solid, with friendly eyes shaded by a John Deere cap. He has a dry wit and keeps his conversations short.
“Try again,” he says cheerfully when someone gets it wrong.
His cell phone chirps frequently in his pocket — with calls from his employees at the excavation business he runs in town. He ends most calls with “thank you.”
At 55, Bill Heider has been farming his whole life. Just like his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father.
He sold his dairy herd last year and bought the excavating business. A 54-cow dairy isn’t as profitable as it once was, and with residential development crowding his farm, expansion is tricky business. He misses working at home, but bulldozers don’t have to be milked at 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. 365 days a year.
This year, he’ll plant 300 acres — 120 on the home farm halfway between Onalaska and West Salem, the rest rented here and there. The majority of those acres will be corn, the remainder soybeans and alfalfa. All are fetching record prices this year, which is good, because fertilizer and diesel fuel costs set records as well.
Once the corn is in the ground, there’s little to do but wait. Come back in two weeks to make sure it has sprouted. Pay a licensed applicator to spray the fields with weed killer. Hope it rains enough — but not too much — and corn borers, varmints and stalk rot spare the crop.
This corn is designed to grow a little more than an inch a day to reach 10 feet by mid-August. It will spend the rest of the summer and fall drying in the field until it falls to the combine in November.
If all goes right, each acre will yield about 145 bushels.
While La Crosse is a manufacturing town, about 600 families like Heider’s earn their living off the land in La Crosse County. That’s less than it once was, but agriculture still accounts for 6 percent to 9 percent of the gross domestic product for La Crosse and Houston counties. In 2002, the year of the last agricultural census, the average farm — about 200 acres — made about $48,000, which was 6 percent less than five years before.
These are the economics of cash cropping: Stick $40,000 into the dirt and pray. Come November, if nature and luck go your way, you’ve got something you can sell. If the market holds at $5 a bushel, you might get $140,000 out of it. Corn subsidies might add a few thousand to the bottom line.
Lop off $20,000 for land rent, another $12,000 for property taxes on the home farm, $3,000 to $4,000 for fuel. Take out any equipment loan payments or repairs. New set of tractor tires this year? That will be $1,800.
Use $40,000 to buy your fertilizer and seed and fuel for next year. If you’re lucky, your wife will have a job that comes with health insurance. If not, take a chunk out for that.
What’s left is yours, after taxes.
Bill is the fourth generation Heider to work this land. Back in 1880, his great-grandfather Henry F. Heider bought 400 acres between Nathan Hill and the La Crosse River in the area known as Waterloo. He was part of the second wave of white immigrant settlers from Germany and Scandinavia to farm the valley. Henry started with cattle and sheep, and about a decade later helped found the West Salem Cooperative Creamery. In 1914, he split the farm, giving the east half to son George, the west to William, Bill’s grandfather. Bill’s cousins still work the neighboring farm.
It was a prosperous operation. Bill’s father brags he always kept a hired man, as his father had before him.
The dairy barn, built in 1964 after an electrical fire destroyed the first one, sits empty now behind the red brick farmhouse. The herd is gone, but Bill kept some young cattle to sell. A couple dozen steers shelter in a covered pen while heifers lounge in the muddy run that leads through the good tillable land — about 80 acres up near the road — down a gulley into lowland pastures where a no-name creek snakes through on its way to the La Crosse River at the southern edge of the farm.
There’s nothing flat around here.
Killdeer skitter across freshly plowed fields. Wild turkey and deer prowl the woods. Mother Nature’s tax collectors, they’ll eat much of the outer rows of corn.
Further south are river bottoms, to the west a knob of timber that Heider logs to heat his home.
In 1945, Henry Heider bought the land east of his cousin’s. Mostly it’s marginal woodland and swamp along the river, though it provides a few good fields.
Bill wants to develop 17 acres of that land along the highway, a plan he hopes will secure his retirement but has drawn a cold shoulder from some who would prefer to keep the town rural.
For nearly 130 years, the land has been farmed by Heiders — Henrys and Williams all of them. About every 30 years, a father moved into town and his son took over. Bill took it over in 1974, but he may be the last to farm it.
Bill’s son, Fred, 24, worked on the farm for a while, but as Bill says, there weren’t enough cookies for two families. His daughters all are teachers. Teaching, like farming, runs in the family. Bill’s mother was a teacher, as were two aunts.
Fred — actually he’s a Henry F., just like his grandfather, but goes by his middle name — works for another excavating company. He likes the farming lifestyle but doesn’t miss the monotony of milking cows, and he doesn’t want his own son to miss out on things he did, like high school sports.
When he heads out to plant, Bill checks his fuel gauge. He’s got plenty for the morning.
“My dad would chew me out,” he says.
He reconsiders.
“Maybe I should fill it up, in case my dad shows up.”
Henry Heider is 96. He helped with the planting until a stroke six years ago. But he still has wife Irma drive him out to check on things.
Even after Bill started running the dairy, Henry did the planting. In the early 1980s, Henry had a heart attack while visiting his daughter in Cincinnati, and Bill had to figure it out. He learned it the same way he’s learned everything about the business — trial and error. Try again.
When all the equipment is working right, Heider’s 85-horsepower John Deere purrs along the contoured slope at 5 mph, dragging the creaking, groaning, whirring and clacking corn planter. The stubble of last year’s corn cracks and pops under the tires.
Three laps, then back and forth.
A clockwork of wheels, cogs, gears and chains, the corn planter is calibrated to take six hoppers full of specifically bred corn seed and place each kernel exactly 6 inches from the next, in six even rows spaced 30 inches apart. The goal is 30,000 plants per acre — just enough space for each to get its share of light and fertilizer.
Metal starfish called trash rippers mesh in front of each row to clear weeds and brush and the detritus of the previous harvest. Serrated discs cut the soil, each seed is dropped into a ½-inch deep trench, and another pair of discs pushes the soil gently over the top of them. It’s all about seed-to-soil contact.
Heider bought the planter used for $7,000 and made about $3,000 in modifications so he could use it for no-till planting. It’s 50 percent more efficient than the four-row planter it replaced, but Heider is unhappy with it. He constantly fusses with the chains and gears that regulate the viscous brown fertilizer that’s dripped onto the newly planted seeds.
On the first try, he put down only about three gallons an acre — less than half his goal. After switching some gears, it spewed nearly 30 gallons on the first acre.
Try again.
He’ll be under the planter again tomorrow, greasing the bearings. He’ll replace the pink corn seed with kernels dyed green — marked as Roundup Ready, genetically inoculated against the potent herbicide that kills everything else in the field.
He’ll pull the planter past the swing set, sandbox and lawns where his neighbor’s dairy used to be, down across the creek to the fields he rents high up on the hill.
Things will go smoother tomorrow. The sun will be out and it will be 80 degrees.
He’ll circle each field three times, then back and forth.
Dinner will be sloppy Joes and snickerdoodles on paper plates. Fred will come over, and the men will ignore the “Lose the shoes” sign on the back door. Afterward, they’ll put the dual wheels on one of the big old tractors. Bill will call his wife, Dorrene, to thank her for lunch. Fred will hook the tractor up to a rented soy planter, and they’ll be able to hit two fields at once.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
The sky will darken in the afternoon. A sheet of rain will move over Nathan Hill until the big drops splatter on the dusty tractor windshield, and he will turn for home.
Try again.
Chris Hubbuch can be reached at chris.hubbuch@lacrossetribune.com or (608) 791-8217.
