The house where Nathan was born and raised is a white-clapboard three-bedroom that sits on a slight rise in the prairie at the end of a gravel road. It was built in 1910. The yaw in the place is visible, two or three degrees measured foundation to rooftop, northwest to southeast, as meaningful a testament as there is to the prevailing ferocity of the prairie wind. The views are stunning, as much for the austere grandeur as for the suffocating sense of desolation. From the driveway, mile after mile of newly planted corn and soybeans spread in every direction, interrupted now and again in the shifting line of sight by an evergreen shelterbelt or an anemic finger of timber. The maples and oaks, like the farmhouses, have taken their chances against the weather for as long as anyone can remember. Out here, it seems, stubbornness is just a part of the landscape.
As is frugality. Inside the farm house, Nathan’s mother and father stand in the kitchen, next to the sink. The rest of the room consists of a tiny four-burner stove, one bank of white wood cabinets, an Amish table with two chairs, and a small refrigerator. Stacked in piles throughout the room are dozens, if not hundreds, of agricultural bulletins, almanacs, magazines, and foldouts that the Leins pore over in an attempt to anticipate sheep and crop prices—Wallace’s Farmer, Today’s Farmer, Sheep magazine, the Corn Producer, the Iowa Farm Bureau Spokesman. There is no Internet and no computer, no fax machine or BlackBerry. The only nod to modern technology aside from the wall-mounted phone is a small TV on the counter, on which Nathan’s father watches (and talks back to) the two hosts of Market to Market every Friday night on PBS at eight P.M.
Every decision made by the Leins—how much seed to buy, and from whom; when to harvest; how long to hold the crop—is arrived at from a process of superimposition of dated economic information onto subtle, veinous changes of seasonal matter. What to do tomorrow depends on this week’s weather relative to last year’s yield, or on how today’s futures markets at the Chicago Board of Trade relate to anticipated trends in Australian or Canadian wool production. In this way, the Leins are less like farmers and more like mystics clinging to belief in a hazy vision born not just of weather and organic chemistry, but of a hundred other unseen and uncontrollable forces. To look at them, leaning against the counter in the tiny kitchen, is to understand the connection between farming, itself an act of blind faith, and religion. If you can believe in a year’s worth of corn or beans, it seems, you can believe in anything.
Nathan’s father, James, is sixty-nine years old. His hair is short and black, and his glasses are broken. Standing somewhat off-kilter from a bad back, in a red and blue work shirt, jeans, and sneakers, he looks fifty. His mother, Donna, who is seventy, has shoulder-length brown hair that is going gray. Dressed in jeans and a light gray wool sweater, she, too, looks younger than her years, though the arthritis from which she suffers is readily apparent in her hands, which are bent and knobbed at the joints like a bird of prey’s claws. And though neither parent is short (James stands six feet, Donna five seven), it’s unclear whence Nathan got his tremendous size. Ducking as he entered the kitchen, with its low ceiling and peeling linoleum floor, Nathan immediately fills the room, even as his parents seemed to shrink. The weight of his presence makes it odder still that the Leins barely take notice of their son, who now stands next to the refrigerator. It’s as though Nathan has just briefly come in from the barn for a glass of water; no one says a word. Then, with a nod, Nathan goes outside to see about the sheep. With a storm coming and the tractor awaiting his father’s return, there’s no time for talk.
Farming is still, as it has always been, the lifeblood of Fayette County—and by extension, of Iowa. Nathan goes to his parents’ place at least three times a week. During spring planting, from late April till mid-May, he’s there every night, as he is during the hay cutting and baling season of late summer, the corn harvest in the fall, and when the ewes lamb-out in the winter. Thanks in part to this, the Lein operation is a successful one. The fecundity of the land helps, too. With soil that boasts a corn sustainability rating (CSR) of 75 to 85 out of 100, the land in Fayette County has remained exceptionally rich for the 150 years that people have farmed it. Annual rainfall here averages three feet, and farmers here, unlike those in many places in the United States, needn’t bother with irrigation, thereby saving themselves untold thousands of dollars each growing season. Though they have a 50 percent rotation of soybeans, the Leins make their bottom line most years off row crops alone, raising hay just to keep the sheep fed. Selling wool, lambs, and the occasional ram or ewe is predominantly a labor of love—or what Nathan’s ascetic parents consider an indulgence, and one for which the Leins have won prizes as far away as Maryland and Colorado. All together, it’s a formula that James and Donna Lein have applied with good success for almost forty years.
Unfortunately for many farming families around Oelwein, the Lein place is an anomaly. Since the early 1980s, three out of four farms in Fayette County have gone out of business, in a trend reflected everywhere in the rural United States. In their stead, many family farms have become add-ons to the ever-increasing holdings of private corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). That, or free-falling land and corn prices have forced smaller places like the Leins’ into bankruptcy, making them easy targets for the few families who control the bulk of land in rural counties like Fayette. With their land sold and no jobs, large numbers of people have left the farm belt in the last two and half decades. Oelwein is typicaclass="underline" between 1960 and 1990, the population fell from eight thousand to just over six thousand, a decline of nearly 25 percent. Along with this came a decline in education and employment. Of those who remain in rural America, only one in ten men over the age of twenty-five have at least two years of college education. Unemployment averages one and a half times that of the urban United States. That is to say that the lifeblood of Fayette County, as in most farming areas, now sustains far fewer lives than it did just twenty years ago.
Out of respect for his parents, Nathan does not use the word poverty when describing the circumstances of their lives, though any qualitative analysis would hardly fail to label his parents as poor. Only one side of the Leins’ century-old farm house has siding, despite the ruthless weather systems that pound northern Iowa. As a child, Nathan wore clothes from Goodwill. Christmas was for praying, not for gift giving, less for reasons of religious stricture, Nathan says, than for the financial constraints endemic to a seat-of-your-pants farming existence. Donna, whose parents were new German immigrants from over by Waverly, Iowa, has lived here since the 1960s. In 1968, Donna’s first husband was killed in a car accident. She married James, the first-generation auto-mechanic son of a Norwegian day laborer, in 1972, after having kept the farm going by herself for four years. Back then, with crop prices good, the average size of a farm in Fayette County was still 250 acres—that’s all it took to make a living. Since then, the 480-acre Lein place has become an artifact of a different time. Many neighbors farm ten times that much land, and planting is done with quarter-million-dollar machinery, guided by GPS. Meanwhile, says Nathan, the equipment his father uses has been largely relegated to museums.