Somebody Saves Everything
As I sit here in my suburban living room watching Clarkson’s Farm on our 85” TV while the dishwasher churns away and I contemplate tomorrow’s workout in our home gym, I’m pulled back in time just over forty years ago (holy shit that makes me sound older than a dinosaur!) to the creaky old farmhouse and the start of another crop year. It was a warm May day and, as usual, I wanted nothing more than to play with my ‘Star Wars guys’ and stay away from the pollen and mosquitoes.
Dad had other plans. He’d been spending every day from the first thaw out in the fields, his red IH tractor blatting and chugging back and forth, back and forth. I was almost nine and being not farm-inclined at the time didn’t really understand what he was on about.
What Dad was doing was in fact bleeding edge, innovative farming. The land at Helios is a mixture of sand knobs and dense muck in the low spots.
For decades, whenever the weather turned fitful Dad would pace and swear and watch the thin layer of nutrient-rich topsoil wash out of the fields and across the roads or into the ditches that crisscross the farm. If you look at the picture above, you can even see where some of the washes happened over the years.
Anyway, in the early ‘80s the local ASC office partnered with Dad to have him install a series of water and sediment control basins (WASCOBs). Dad called them terraces. For months, he’d have his morning cup of boiled coffee (umm. ew.) and tell us he was going out to work on the terraces. Then for the next several hours we’d hear the chugging of the tractor intermixed with the grinding clash of gears. Dad was essentially building dams. Combine those with an intricate series of drain tiles running from the new basins into the ditches, and voila, top soil retained.
For that work, which had never been done in Indiana before, Dad won the Indiana Prairie Farmer Magazine’s Farmer of the Year, 1982. There was a ceremony at Purdue University (funny story about that another time), and he landed the cover of the July issue.
We had a dozen copies of this magazine stashed around for the longest time, and Dad built (of course) a “frame” for one copy. I say “frame” in air-quotes because he had a spare sheet of quarter-inch paneling that he cut a hole in and duct-taped a piece of hazy plexiglass over the opening. For forty years that magazine hung over the ancient roll-top desk. Over 14,000 times the sun came up and worked a shaft of light across that wall, and the magazine had faded. Badly.
Continuing with the revitalization of everything at the farm with the move to Helios, I had the bright idea to get the magazine behind a UV-protected frame to keep it from deteriorating any more. So I brought it home and peeled the duct tape holding everything together. Unfortunately the fading was so bad that after multiple attempts at scanning and restoring it, none of the colors would come back.
To the Google!
I tracked down the publisher that has the rights to the old Prairie Farmer issues and sent them an email. I found some incredibly helpful people who went to talk to some other people in one of their subsidiaries, and lo and behold, they were actually able to come up with a PDF of the original cover!
Somebody saves everything. Wow. What kind of storage and warehouse do they have that has a 40 year old copy of a regional farm magazine?!?!
I’ve had the file for a few weeks now but with other commitments I finally had time to pull the cover and the article scan into photoshop and put together a side-by-side.
We picked up some frames and I made two copies, one for here and one for up at Helios. Looking forward to getting it back in its rightful spot next weekend.
