Views from the Cab

By David Tollefson, Columnist

Harvest for most farmers is over for the year 2022. Tillage is going on, especially on harvested corn ground. Lots of cornstalks in the area have been baled for feed or bedding – many of them going out of the county by truck.  

From The Land Magazine of October 14, 2022, comes a story from Iowa of the Schwaller family (Karen Schwaller writes a column called “Table Talk”). Read on to see the drama that can come from “the last field of corn.”

How great it is to pull into the last field of the harvest season – especially a harvest season that went without a hitch.

Or maybe, without an UN-hitch.

It had been a drought year – one that followed two consecutive monsoon seasons and harvest sessions of mud, fighting to keep machinery from getting mired down and waiting for rains to stop before the mud was deemed “dry enough.”

“Go get the tow rope,” were the words of the day during those two years, and when we closed the door on those harvest seasons, we turned the key in the lock and vowed to pretend that if they ever returned, we would pretend we weren’t home.

Iowa weather is fickle, if nothing else.  Nonetheless, the corn and soybeans grew, matured and called us to reap the grain.  And it went flawlessly…

Until we got to the last corn field.

My husband pulled in with the combine and began opening up the field while we waited. After some time, we heard a strange utterance coming from the two-way radio. “What in the…….?? There’s water standing over here,” my husband said in disbelief.

His message sent shivers down my neck, and the radios fell silent as we all waited for the words “Go get the tow rope,” as we had heard so many times before.

Those words didn’t come; but after some investigation into the cause of the standing water, my husband saw it had come from the nearby waterway, which had overflowed.

In a drought year.

It simply wasn’t adding up – especially for someone like me, who used to get the answers to fifth grade math story problems from the back of the book.

Further investigation by one of the guys on our harvest team (who knows almost as much about wild animals as God does) found that muskrats had skillfully created a dam in the waterway. When the one rainfall we got that year that amounted to anything, it resulted in a regulation, four-alarm flood situation in that corner of the field.

If our last name is attached to bad potential, you just know it’s going to happen.

We all stood around in the dark that evening with lights shining on the dam, in utter amazement that small animals can bring these large machines and work goals to a stop.

It’s the same shivery feeling you get when you think a tornado can take down your house, but so can a team of microscopic termites.

Long story short, the muskrat construction team was trapped and hauled away (at least for that year), the waterway was opened back up by mechanical hands, the water started flowing again and after things dried out in that corner of the field, we resumed operations.

Only someone of our heritage would have to wait for dryness during a drought year.

Fast forward to that winter when I am hanging out with our grandchildren at their house. We traipsed to the basement to play farm (which our very young grandson loves to do). As with generations of Schwaller children, he farms the carpet down there in high fashion. He instructed me that he would be grandpa (driving the combine), and I should be grandma, because I had the tractor and grain cart.

I thought I could handle such a commission of names and duties.

When we got over to one corner of the “field,” I saw a few of his small stuffed animals underneath a wire basket which was turned upside down. I asked him what that was. He said, ”Oh, I’m just trapping muskrats.”

Apparently now to a four-year-old, that’s just part of the corn harvesting process.

Maybe muskrats have some useful purpose, but their name still has the word “rat” in it, so in my book, they’re dead to me. Except when they bring such delight to little boys, who think it’s pretty big stuff to catch them in their flooded-out corn fields made of carpet fibers.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Not too far from my farm is a little stream that originates near Glacial Lakes State Park. This past spring that little stream (which is normally maybe a yard or two wide) became a flooded area maybe three-quarters of a mile way back to highway 29. Apparently, beavers had blocked up the small culvert under the gravel township road that meets highway 29 nearby, resulting in shallow water across that gravel road for 20-30 feet.  

Just last week, the beavers had been at it again. There was not nearly enough flooding to go across the road this time, but township officials had to again respond to the problem.  

There are not many trappers willing to take on beavers any more. There is a township bounty on them, but few takers.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Please contact David Tollefson with thoughts or comments on this or future columns at: adtollef@hcinet.net