St. Joseph News-Press, Mo., Ken Newton column

April 22--These words I have heard hundreds of times in the last 38 years: "You want to ride along?" This stands as my father-in-law's all-purpose invitation.

It might mean a ride around the countryside or a trip into town to quiz the hardware store proprietor about a particular plumbing supply or fescue seed. Often, it means work.

Over the weekend, he suggested a ride while loading a couple of shovels in the back of his pickup and holding a small propane torch in his hand. I fetched my shoes. Seemed worth it to see how this would play out.

My father-in-law retired from farming many years ago, but you retire from farming roughly the way you retire from the Marine Corps. That is, you don't, not really.

He rents the land that he owns to a younger farmer, who works a vast patchwork of acres and uses massive equipment to do a volume business. My father-in-law marvels at the scale and the technology that allow farmers to finish in a day what once took him a week to complete.

And, with a big garden to tend and a tractor to drive and a big tool shed to employ, he uses a lifetime of experience to stay busy.

In this case, he decided Easter weekend would be just the right time to burn some dried grass on the levee that protects his land from an abutting creek.

As my father-in-law explained as the truck bounced along the levee road, the lines of authority for burning the grass seemed a bit muddled.

All deeds show him as the owner of the ground he planned to ignite. But a drainage district, to which he pays assessments, has assorted rights-of-way and rules thereof that a patch of scorched earth might run afoul of.

He asked before and got different answers. "Depends on how they feel," he told me. So this day, perhaps feeling it would be a shame to let spades and a torch go unused, my father-in-law has decided to burn.

This represents, in meager form, the tension that exists between the person who works at the ground level of maybe the world's most essential industry and just one of the layers of oversight to be found in affiliation with it.

An umbrella of protection helps, and the safety nets of crop insurance and natural disaster aid can't be minimized. Much of the land near my father-in-law's place exists free of flooding because of a large public-works project.

Farmers live in a world of risks, where ill-timed winds or lack of moisture can ruin not a day's work, but that of an entire year. The financial safeguards seem appropriate when it comes to the business of feeding the planet, yet farmers chafe at the fussbudgeting over how they conduct themselves.

My career has taken me to numerous places of manufacturing. I've seen the complicated machines that make everything from car batteries to chocolate treats. It's remarkable, all of it.

Still, I've never seen anything as amazing as the industry of seeds and sun, water and earth, that creates living things for the sustaining of human existence.

East and West Coast residents forever refer to the states in between as "flyover America." They should dine on the smugness. I never shrink from telling people I live in farm country.

Thus, in a humble nod to an independent heritage, I participated in a levee burning, dug a firebreak that worked as intended, tapped out the hotspots with a shovel and went back to the house smelling of smoke, passing row after laser-guided row of newly planted corn.

Getting permission might have ruined the afternoon.

Ken Newton's column runs on Tuesdays and Sundays. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @SJNPNewton.

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