People’s lives, despite their choices, usually follow a general direction, a slightly wavy but for all intents straight line. What we ate for lunch yesterday is one of those minor and inconsequential choices that is often hard to remember the next day. A string of poor financial decisions over time that result in crisis shows us that one choice can influence the next. Some choices even lead to major adjustments in our lives, such as a disability resulting from a decision while driving, but our lives usually continue in the same basic direction. Nobody ever warned me that the choice I made at the age of 18 would transform my life and forever affect my descendants.

I was once a farmer and rancher, the latest of a long line that spanned 10 generations. Parts of my family tree branched with distant ancestors becoming merchants, sea captains, and even a U.S. senator, but not my branch. Long ago my branch became farmers and with the expression “practice makes perfect” we tilled the land, back and forth or in circles, the whole 300 years of that time. As farmers we moved west as America grew, often settling in territories pining to become states, because homesteading on free land with few taxes usually appealed to poor farmers. My grandfather cemented the general title “poor dirt farmer” when he endured farming in the epicenter of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Dad and I practiced dry land wheat farming on the plains of Eastern Colorado where the crops depend on an average of 15” of rainfall per year, which isn’t much. Raising wheat, millet, rye, sorghum, and barley, supplemented by pigs, sheep, or cattle was instinctual.

Like the young prince of a royal family, albeit a much humbler and poorer one, I was groomed from early childhood to one day assume the duties of my kingdom. At the age of four Dad took me to feed cattle in a pasture as he hoisted hay bales from the back of an old green 1960 pickup truck creeping along at 2mph while I stood on the driver seat with my tiny hands guiding the enormous steering wheel. During wheat harvests at the age of six I rode with my father as he drove a large red truck filled with wheat over country roads to the grain elevator in town for storage; the royal anthem was Johnny Cash on eight track tape. By age 11 I learned to drive an old orange Ford F-150 service truck’s stick shift, barely reaching the gas pedal and seeing above the dash only to temporarily disappear from view as I pushed in the clutch to shift gears and hop up on the seat again to steer. I became the commander of that large red wheat truck by age 14, mastering a 15 speed stick shift with a warning from Dad, “Don’t let that tach gauge needle go above 3500 or you will blow the motor!”. In many ways I reached manhood at age 14 when I was expected to work like my father and operate any mechanical device our farm offered.

My brother was three years younger and not far behind in learning the art of farming. As early as three years old, and in pop quizzes thereafter, we would be asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up”? My brother enthusiastically replied, “A farmer!” to the nods and approving smiles of everybody present. But our family was not unique. Families out of necessity fostered the next generation to continue with the family farm, teaching their children skills early, imposing a truncated childhood, and setting expectations of taking over the family farm some day when the father could not farm as well in keeping up with the grinding labor that makes you a worn man by age 50.

The 1970s were not kind as the Middle East gas embargo impacted American farmers worse than motorists because of increased prices narrowing what small profit margins farmers had. Crop prices during the following economic recession dwindled to the point that farmers rode their tractors down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. in protest. By the 1980s, the effects of hard times could be seen as town populations dwindled. In the early ‘80s my home town’s K-12 schools closed from lack of students and I began attending school in the next town 10mi away. Living at the government economic line for families in poverty, we struggled on with an optimism for what the future would bring.

That ray of sunshine came for me when I attended a new school. While it had only 120 kids in grades K-12, it seemed like a huge and modern place as I began high school. For the first time I was introduced to chemistry, football, English composition, vocational agriculture (Vo-Ag) and the FFA. The Vo-Ag program gave me three years of practical vocational training to be a successful farmer. I learned to weld, identify range plants, formulate balanced diets for farm animals, build electrical circuits for barns, and recognize and prevent erosion patterns in fields. In three years of classes I gained the equivalent of an associate’s degree in agriculture, solidifying my future as a farmer.

The leadership organization, FFA, or Future Farmers of America (a.k.a. Father Farms Alone) underscored my farming education. I excelled in crop judging contests, soil judging, range land judging, and agribusiness with its double-entry accounting. I traveled to district and state competitions, saw national conferences out of state, and became a district president who regularly traveled to meetings across a quarter of Colorado. Just when I was becoming truly useful, Dad was down one farmhand. He was proud of my accomplishments and FFA only gave me more skills be a farmer.

But along the way to becoming a farmer prince to succeed my father the king of all he surveyed, something subtle, almost imperceptible took place. I read too much. Fantasy and science fiction, which my parents never understood. After all, the only thing I ever knew my father read was Successful Farming magazine. I read a lot because I often could not be farming due to severe asthma, ironic for the son of a wheat farmer to be acutely sick from wheat dust. And I loved school, so much so that I obsessively held my 3.995/4.0 GPA. I exhausted the high school math classes and was the only student the teacher taught “AP Math” with her old college textbook. In the FFA, I excelled most of all in public speaking and debate, winning state competitions in public and extemporaneous speaking. One day at school, a person with the strange title of “software engineer” spoke about the new field of computers and programming. One day when my father asked how my day went and what I might want to be someday, I broke that taboo of all taboos and said, “I think I want to be a software engineer”. After a long, deafening pause, Dad said, “Well, I guess we need to learn more about it”. The monarchy was at risk. Was I on the verge of abdicating my thrown as future farmer?

The week before I graduated from high school my father and I sat in a lonely pickup truck surrounded by miles of farmland. In the distance, the sound of my brother driving the tractor as it plowed a field. New green fields of wheat nearby undulated under the wind’s breeze. Dad’s gravely cigarette voice said, “Son, you are the best farmer I’ve ever seen. But I don’t know if your heart is in it. You have a decision to make soon on what your life will be. Whatever you decide, I support it”. In the following silence I felt the weight of ghostly ancestors sitting on my shoulders, pulling me toward one answer or apprehensively awaiting another.

My last day of high school I stood in the office of my Vo-Ag teacher, looking through windows into the metal shop as students finished their projects, barely registering the sparks from a metal grinder or the flash of welding. My teacher and I had been discussing whether I go to college or apply for a state FFA officer role. “You are the best Vo-Ag student I have ever had and several state FFA advisors say you are the best district officer there is. You could easily be a state officer. But you need to decide what is right for you.” As state officer, I would travel the country. I could become a national officer and travel the world. My body ached with the choice. In the Vo-Ag office I saw as a second home, I made the choice.

Attending college in computer science, the first in my family to earn a degree, began a path that took me far away from farming, never to fully return to my farming community. The longer I stayed away, I became a stranger to the life I left behind. I understood and identified with farming, but the farming community no longer identified with me. Returning to my rural community seemed like a martian on Earth for the first time with no hope of speaking the same language.

My father in his youth attended community college on a football scholarship in hopes of leaving the farm to become an agricultural architect. He would have designed grain elevators to store grain, functional yet stylish structures large and small, and possibly been part of the innovative movement to incorporate small-scale agriculture into urban settings. But his hopes were dashed when I was born and his father developed emphysema, leaving Dad to take over the family farm and discard his dreams. Over the years, he likely understood and even guided my choice to leave farming. He never would say.

I was part of what would become known to historians, economists, and anthropologists as the 1980s Great Farm Crisis in which an entire generation left rural communities due to economic circumstances. I had no idea then. I only recognized at a subconscious level that change was needed. Farming was not rewarding our family any longer. When my father died in the late ‘90s the family farm was sold and farm equipment auctioned to pay the grim debt that every farm bears, leaving my brother with no opportunity to farm. Our role now was to find the transition, the bridge to family survival.

Do I regret my choice? The choices we make form the reality we live in. My choice gave me a son who has far more opportunities and will follow his passion without guilt for leaving tradition. My choice brought me the woman of my dreams. But I do catch myself periodically checking on the per bushel price for Kansas market hard red winter wheat (6.3875/bushel as of today). I am drawn in a trance to combines and tractors, quietly standing in a lot or running. The smell of farm diesel in the air amid the growl of a hot industrial engine is like a siren’s song. And the sound of a distant tractor working a field will draw my gaze no matter how far away it is.

~ Mason