The Immortal Land
In my last post I mentioned how I always felt like the farm was just… there. Static and unchanging. Trees grow imperceptibly slowly, even from season to season. The crops come and go but still a field is a field. Dad made a lot of changes while I was growing up, but I was too young to really appreciate the amount of work he put into draining some areas of the farm, making sure other areas had enough water, that kind of thing.
But the last few months, now that the solar project is moving forward, the changes—at least on paper—have been coming fast and furious. This whole process has made me realize that even though things may change on the land, the land itself is immortal. My dad died of cancer after several surgeries over the course of a summer and fall. But at 84 years old, literally the day before his first surgery, he was out in the field digging a hole.
A hole that I had to fill in a year later after he was gone. Pretty sure I heard him laughing at me the whole time I was out there sweating with the shovel.
Anyway, Dad was bound to the land so closely that deep down I always felt they were one and the same. The earth was so embedded in the creases of his hands and under his nails that it was just part of him. After he was gone things rolled forward on the pure momentum of Dad’s will. Mom had to step in and pay the taxes, keep the bills going, things like that, but all the CRP programs were those that Dad initiated fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years ago.
The transition to Helios has really brought to the front of my mind though that the land itself will continue long beyond Dad. Long beyond Mom. Long beyond myself and Kelly and even Molly. So we started thinking long term. We’ve been working with a lawyer to put the entire property into an LLC so that it will exist as its own entity. Alongside that is a series of documents that will cover my succession planning and even planning for Molly’s adulthood and management of Helios. It’s reassuring to know that Dad managed the farm for nearly seventy years, and I’m carrying on that tradition and planning for the management of the next seventy and then some.
