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It was already dry in southern Illinois early this
summer when I went down for my class reunion. As a group of us from the
Mount Vernon Township High School class of 1967 gathered for lunch before
the festivities, somebody said that they’d heard that David’s
mother had recently died. She had been a favorite of us all, so we shared
memories of the mom we’d nicknamed, for her housedress,
“Muu-muu.” I remembered her rye bread, fresh out of the oven;
Steve remembered her conga bars and the crazy times we’d had at her
house. I regretted that I hadn’t gotten down to Missouri to see her
in the nursing home as I’d intended to do. At the party, when I saw
David I told him that I was sorry to hear that his mom had passed away.
“No, she’s fine,” he said. “I went by to visit her
this morning and told her I’d be seeing you all. She said the hole
you guys put in her ceiling with a broomstick is still there. I said,
‘Mom, you haven’t lived in that house in 10 years.’
”
It hasn’t rained since then in Jefferson
County. It’s been dry here in central Illinois, where the drought is
rated as moderate. But southern Illinois south of Effingham is in a severe
drought, just a step above Kentucky, where it is categorized as extreme.
“Our county’s burnt up,” says Sharon Frick, executive
director of the Jefferson County Farm Service Agency. The drought hasn’t made much news, partly
because northern Illinois, where most of the corn and people are, has had
excessive rain, even flooding. “Nobody considers us part of the
farming community anyway,” says Frick. “Down here, our
double-crop beans aren’t even above the wheat stubble.” Even in
southern Illinois, where most take bad news in stride, some are beginning
to think that this event is of historic proportions. “It’s the
worst I can remember, especially with it going into September like
this,” says an 80-year-old who’s been farming in that area
nearly all his life. “Our farmers are crying,” says Dennis
Epplin, extension crop-systems educator in Jefferson County. He says that
most of the corn got in early, so it will make a crop, though yields may be
down by 40 percent on account of the drought. But soybeans are in trouble,
and several farmers have called Epplin for advice on baling the plants like hay for
livestock.
At my family’s farm, near Bluford, where we
raise Angus cattle, the Easter frost had already stunted the hay crop, and
little rain meant no second cutting this year. Because the pastures are
brown, we’re already feeding what little hay we had for winter.
“There is absolutely no forage left,” says Tom Smith, manager
of Farraway Farm. In the absence of grass he’s feeding the herd corn
gluten, a byproduct of ethanol made in Decatur. The farmer who cash-rents
our crop ground planted his beans the first week of May, then got no rain
till the first week of July and only two-tenths of an inch since then.
He’s turned in his beans to insurance as a total loss, so this week
we’ll put cows in the bean fields to graze what’s there.
We’re planning to bale stalks after the corn is out, another
emergency measure. Ours is among the 100 farms in the county this year that
have gotten permission to graze or bale grass that’s in the
conservation reserve program; a normal year might see 10 applications to
use CRP acreage in exchange for a small decrease in the payment. Farmers and livestock producers learn that there are
ways to get by, but I wonder what it means. I’m tempted to blame it
on George W. Bush, like everything else, but that seems too simplistic.
It’s arrogant to give humans too much responsibility for the weather,
but you can’t help but wonder how much of this is a result of global
warming and the greenhouse effect, which is said to worsen both floods and
drought. I hope that at least the dry summer will cause some people to
question the wisdom of the ethanol plant proposed for Jefferson County and
the plan to take 1.5 million gallons of water a day from Rend Lake to feed
it. Grief, loss, even the prospect of loss, remind us of
what’s important. A friend says that he and his wife stopped
quarreling the moment they found out that she had cancer. Drought will make
us more thankful for the rain when it comes. And when those southern
Illinois hills turn green again, they’ll be more beautiful than ever.
I’ve been meaning for a long time to get better acquainted with the
stars that are always bright over the farm, so I’ve spent more time
these cloudless nights taking in the country sky, reflecting on learning to
appreciate what you have while you have it. That reminds me — I need
to get down to Missouri to see Muu-muu before too long.
Contact Fletcher Farrar at ffarrar@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2007.
