“Right here I have a pH of seven.” Harry turned over some dirt with her boot tip. “I’d like to get it to six point five.”
“Let me give you Centerpoint,” said Neil. “It’s one of my best products. Given that you want to experiment with a small portion—what, four by four feet?”
“Right,” Harry answered.
“Spread it by hand, or if you have one of those walking spreaders, the type people use for small lawn areas, that will do it. Mark your corners and I promise you next harvest you’ll see a difference.”
“All right.”
“You’re fortunate to have good soil. Well, good soil for Virginia. Davis loam. Some alluvial deposits.”
“Most of the lower fields are like that, but Dad really kept at them and when I was little we could use muck from the Bay.” She meant the Chesapeake Bay. “Can’t do that now, but that really helped here. We could also use crushed oyster shells.”
“Calcium,” Neil said, nodding. “Well, that’s the best, but since those things are off-limits now, these commercial applications do provide the same things: calcium, selenium, potassium, magnesium, and on and on the list goes. Soil tests are so accurate today they can pinpoint the exact application you need for your specific crop. Much more cost-effective.”
“Until you hit red clay.” She scuffed some dirt with the toe of her boot.
“Harry, we can even enrich that these days. Clay has important uses. The reason so many early Virginian homes are brick is thanks to that red clay. It’s the devil to dig up. But I mean it, fertilizer today helps even that.”
They turned to walk back to Harry’s house, about a half mile away, glowing in gorgeous afternoon light.
“Neil, how’d you wind up selling fertilizer and other ag products? You didn’t go to ag school.”
“My college major was business and I liked it okay, but an old girlfriend, premed, goaded me into organic chemistry. She said it was the washout course for premed and that included vet premed, too. First, I had to take regular chemistry. Liked it. Then I took organic and found I loved it. But what could I do with it? I didn’t want to be a medical student.”
“I think you are the only person I have ever heard say that they loved organic chemistry.” She smiled.
“Actually, a lot of people do, but you have to have a feeling for it, because it’s not always logical like, say, mathematics is. Magic happens in those equations.” He grinned. “Anyway, I graduated from Amherst with a business degree and starting working at a Monsanto satellite company outside of Minneapolis—great city, by the way. That’s when I realized that, much as I did like the business end of the company, I truly liked the hands-on, using the products. Monsanto gets attacked all the time for their genetic engineering of seeds, etc., but I learned a lot, and, Harry, how are we going to feed billions? Twenty-five million babies are born annually in India and seventeen million are born each year in China. They want Western foods, technology, all our goodies.”
“What’s the number of births annually in the U.S., if you know it?”
“Four point three million.”
“Ah.” The implications were becoming dreadfully clear. “All those people in developing countries … if they can’t get enough to eat, seems to me there will be tremendous instability.”
“There already is,” he said with conviction. “Anyway, I started thinking about what to do to make money based on what I was learning, and I decided to go out on my own selling fertilizer. There are good companies that I can call on, get the best products, and, of course, buy in bulk from Mosaic, PotashCorp. I work with the best. Even companies like Bayer, which made their fortunes in other areas in the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth, now have ag arms. Food is the future, not doctors.”
“I believe that.”
“Harry, in the next forty years, farmers will need to produce more than they have in the past ten thousand, and the biggest grain producer in the world is still the United States and it will always be. Huge corn producer, too.”
“That I know. No other nation in the world has the soils, the variety of climate, that we do. But that huge midwestern belt is gold, pure gold. And we are bound by two huge oceans and have the Gulf right in the middle of the country. Fishing alone is worth billions.”
“Like everything else, it’s politicized. Do I think we need to carefully manage our resources? I do. It’s a tightrope walk, so either some of the environmentalists give a little ground or ultimately millions will starve to death and then a billion or so. There will be nine billion people by 2050 and I think you and I might still be alive then.”
“Who knows?” Harry shrugged. “But I can see you do your homework.”
“I wouldn’t be in business if I didn’t.”
“He kind of smells like fertilizer, don’t you think?” Tucker said.
“It’s a medley of smells.” Mrs. Murphy flared her nostrils.
They reached the back porch.
“Come on in for a Co’Cola or maybe something stiffer,” offered Harry.
“Too early for that.” He smiled. “But I could use something cold.”
“I have some iced tea. Always have it, even in winter.”
“Sounds good.”
The animals walked into the kitchen, where Pewter took up her post next to her bowl, just in case.
As Neil sipped his beverage, Harry unfolded the soil map with the plan of her farm.
Neil studied it again. “You’re very fortunate.”
“I am. Given your business and your outlook for the future, I mean that population growth, how do you feel about housing development?”
“In the next ten years Richmond and its surrounding area is supposed to grow by four hundred thousand people. That means good farmland goes under.”
“Does. Well, it’s happening here.”
“Yes, it is, but if developers will plan entire communities with common gardens, wild spaces, stuff like that, or even build more row houses that share an exterior wall, maybe we can limit the damage. People have to live somewhere and not everyone is meant for a high-rise, especially in Virginia. People don’t move to Albemarle County to live in a skyscraper. It’s much easier to make money as a developer than by farming. We need to find that balance, but profit is what drives all business. There’s going to be more development everywhere.”
“Wouldn’t it make sense for, say, Wesley to buy and build on those acres where the soil is poor?”
Neil leaned back. “Sure. But he also has to consider access to I-64, Route 29, good roads in general. Water. Can wells be dug in places where there is no city water? The whole permitting process is complicated, and like every other county in America, there are people on the board of commissioners dead set against any form of growth or development.”
“Right,” said Harry. “So why do you and Wesley want Buddy’s hundred acres so much?”
“Harry, look where it is! Close to Crozet, a hop to Route 250, maybe a twenty-minute commute to Charlottesville or thirty to Waynesboro, forty minutes to Staunton. Perfect location and the soils seem to be decent, which I don’t like to see built upon, but Buddy’s got corn smut. Those spores have to be in the soil.”
“If he sprays for corn borer, it will somewhat cut down on the smut, not a lot.”
“There is no seed treatment for corn smut,” Neil said, warming to the subject. “You can remove the galls in a home garden, but not for one hundred acres. So he has to burn or plow under the diseased stalks. Burn, then plow, that’s the surest way.”