Manure and the Common Man

He gets up at 4am. Puts his feet on the floor and the floor is cold.  It’s April and he is in Iowa.  You know what it can be like in Iowa at 4am in April?  Dark and cold as… damn cold and let’s leave it at that.  For the last month though the weather has been good enough to get the soil ready. It’s not frozen and it’s dry enough, ready to be worked. Nobody made him get up; he doesn’t have a job created by somebody else.  He doesn’t have a boss – except for his family and except for – well let’s leave that for later.  He goes down the narrow staircase to the first floor of his house and into the kitchen.  It’s colder down there, kept just warm enough so the water doesn’t freeze in the pipes. Still has the long johns he slept in on and leaves them on as he pulls on his overalls and his Hawkeyes sweatshirt with the hood.  Pulls the hood up on his head, flips it down again, then puts his DeKalb cap on and adjusts the hood over it. Maybe someday he will get the order of that right. Socks, he looks down at them in the dark room, same socks he had on when he went to sleep last night.  Too cold to take them off.  Boots come next, good ones but old, not too old but getting some age on them.  Gloves next, two pair, one for warmth and one to keep the others from getting torn up.  Goes out on the porch, stops, no wind today.  On mornings like this with a lot of wind, it doesn’t take long for his face to feel as if it is going to fall off.  He takes a deep breath – that’s the only break he is going to take today.  Ok that’s over- let’s get after it.  At a proper pace it will take 10 hours to get it done with a half hour break for some lunch.  The cab is heated though so it won’t be bad, just boring. But he knows what all of this will look like in July, beautiful.  He fires his baby up, the John Deere barks to life, lights come on and he begins.  How many acres today?  Too many - but not enough.  Corn, sure it’s a risk, it’s a commodity and so he hedges his hope. But for this morning no hedge will do or for that matter get the work done, nope there is no hedge for not working.  So he drives off into the dark, no breakfast – that will come on a break, three hours later. He has a radio in the cab.  After his breakfast, about 8:30 Iowa time, he is listening to the radio and hears about Goldman Sachs getting sued by the government.  So they supposedly helped sell something to somebody that was synthetic and backed by/derived from/or somehow related to some mortgages. Mortgages taken out by people who couldn’t pay the mortgages. Mortgages supposedly picked by an outfit that believed the mortgages were probably bad and would likely end up in default.  Then that outfit supposedly bet that they would default.  Supposedly they did default and that outfit made a billion dollars while the folks that got helped out lost a billion dollars.  His initial instinct was to think of a four letter word, but no, he just visualizes some manure and continues driving his tractor. He thinks people have to eat. That outfit isn’t going to feed them, Goldman isn’t and the government isn’t.

I am.

Make that a large pile of fresh manure¹, yep, well at least the Hawkeyes won in Omaha this year, best college wrestling team on the face of our planet.  He wonders how his son is doing taking care of the hogs - there is no hedge for not doing that either.

1.     1. Manure: an end product which eventually may have indirect benefits not intended by its originator.