Farmer on the Dole

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Stretching east to the horizon, a thousand acres, was all soybeans; across the road to the west, another thousand acres, all corn. Zeb kicked the irrigation valve moodily and watched the meter register the change in flow. Damn weather! Why didn’t it rain? He sniffed the air deeply and shook his head, frowning. Eighty-five percent relative humidity. No, closer to eighty-seven. And not a cloud in the sky.

From across the road his neighbor called, “Afternoon Zeb.”

Zeb nodded curtly. He was soy and Wally was corn, and they didn’t have much to talk about, but you had to show some manners. He pulled his bandanna out of his hip pocket and wiped his brow. “Had to rise up the flow,” he offered for politeness’ sake.

“Me, too. Only good thing, COZ’s up. So we’s getting good carbon metabolizm.”

Zeb grunted and bent down to pick up a clod of earth, crumbling it in his fingers to test for humus, breaking off a piece, and tasting it. “Cobalt’s a tad low again,” he said meditatively, but Wally wasn’t interested in soil chemistry.

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