THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 10, 1994 TAG: 9407080271
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
Lyle and Margaret Pugh have a farm off Centerville Turnpike and there hadn't been a decent rain to nurture their land for months. ``Pure agony,'' Lyle called it.
Then, at the end of June, they woke up one night to the sound of rain on the roof. ``We got up and sat on the porch and watched the rain and cried,'' Margaret said. ``We had waited so long,'' Lyle nodded and said, ``it was like at a wedding. You cry because you're happy.''
Whether the tears are happy or sad, it seems to me that anyone who works a farm has a lot to cry about. I can't think of any other occupation where you can put in so much skill, effort and investment and then have circumstances beyond your control torpedo your dreams.
Think about it. It doesn't rain and your crop wilts. Or it rains so much that you can't get in the fields. Or everything goes right and you harvest a nice crop and the market price is ridiculously low.
The Pughs have lived through all of the above and come up smiling - mostly. When I asked Lyle why in the world a man would want to be a farmer, he grinned and said, ``You gotta be nuts!''
Both he and Margaret come from farm families. When he was 10, he was driving a tractor for his neighbor and pulling down a dollar a day. ``Not bad for a 10-year-old boy,'' he said.
Now he farms land that he either owns or rents in Chesapeake and North Carolina. And there's grim humor in his voice when he tells about the year his land in Moyock was drought-stricken at the same time his Chesapeake land, 10 miles away, was too soggy to work. Go figure.
Since columnists are professional smart alecks, I suggested he should have hired an Indian rain dancer to even things out. That's when he told me about the chief he saw on an Indian reservation some years ago. ``The guy did a dance and it started raining three hours later,'' he said. ``I could have used him.''
The Pughs raise wheat, corn and soybeans, all crops apparently suffering market miseries. Like the day I talked with Lyle and Margaret. It was bad enough because Lyle was struggling to fix a planter that had conked out three days before. And while he was working farmer-hard, Margaret said, the market price of soybeans was spending the day dropping 30 cents a bushel.
The prices are controlled at the Chicago Board of Trade. ``We have not one iota of influence,'' Margaret said.
It seems like a farmer places a yearly bet. He takes out a production loan in the spring and bets with nature, the market, that he can pay it back in the fall and make some money besides. ``If you don't make enough to pay back the loan, you refinance,'' Lyle said. And, yes, Lyle agrees to the possibility that a farmer can wind up in deep financial quicksand.
So I led the Pughs through a discussion of the woes of farming. And then we got to the good stuff, like in a bountiful crop year, Lyle and Margaret say you can make a nice comfortable living.
But there's something more. Lyle spelled it out:
``You're your own boss. You set your own schedule. You can look at what you do, regardless of how it turns out and know that you did the best you could. There's a spiritual side, too. You can see a crop damaged by severe conditions and then the conditions change. What might be almost nothing becomes the possibility of a fruitful harvest. There's nothing like it in the world.
``You can put the seed in the ground, but you can't make soil or sunshine or rain. Yet, somehow, the crop comes up. It's nature. I provide the start and something greater than me takes care of the rest.''
On Sunday, when they curtail their work schedule, the Pughs say they like to ride around their land and enjoy the sights and smells. Margaret echoed Lyle's words as she said ``There's nothing like it.''
Then Lyle tells me I'm not going to believe what he's about to say, that if I put it in the paper, other people won't believe it. He smiles and recalls a neighbor who used to say you sometimes hear the corn growing.
``He said that if conditions were perfect and there was adequate rain and you had a keen ear and you knew what to listen for, you could hear it.
``It may not actually be happening, but it's nice to think about.'' by CNB