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Norman County survivor's improbable crop comes in

After months of grooming the soil, working his crops and praying for rain, it was time for harvest, and the long, cool nights driving tractors and combines under the stars.

A cornfield captures Perley farmer Bryan Hest on the move to a sugar-beet field in northwestern Minnesota, where thousands of acres were under water a few months ago.

With his neighbor, Paul Houglum, guiding the lifter and Hest at the wheel of a truck, the two men set out last week to lift rows of sugar beets from Houglum's field near the banks of the Wild Rice River.

Nearly four months earlier, the prospect of a harvest hardly seemed possible.

This field -- and thousands of nearby acres of wheat, beans, corn and other crops -- was under water for days after a torrential June rain soaked several northwestern Minnesota counties, pushing the Wild Rice over its banks and across the countryside.

Half of the tillable acres in Norman and Clay counties were flooded. Losses were staggering -- an estimated $50 million. In the days that followed, Hest and his neighbors talked wearily of the frustrating run of miserable growing seasons, their diminishing equity and the prospect of getting out.

But the months since have brought mild weather, little disease and a better-than-average crop, giving farmers affected by the flooding -- with help from federal government subsidies -- some optimism in a year once feared lost.

Across Minnesota, farmers are harvesting crops with high yields, but that good news is offset by continuing low commodity prices.

"In general, it's been a good year cropwise," said Michael Hunst, statistician with the Minnesota Agricultural Statistics Service.

Even in the Red River Valley, which has been plagued by disease, heavy rains and flooding in recent years, agriculture experts consider the 2000 growing season to be one of the best in a long time. Yields for some crops, such as wheat, are better than average and, in some places, the best since 1992, said Duane Berglund, Extension Service agronomist at North Dakota State University (NDSU) in Fargo.

Which makes Hest and his neighbors wonder "what if?"

"If we could wipe that 18 hours or 12 hours off the summer, things would have to be considered very good," the 39-year-old farmer said last week as beet harvest began. "Everything comes back to that stinkin' flood. ... Yeah, if a guy could just go back and change the clock a little bit ... a guy could have made some money this year."

Hopes to break even

Even in parts of Norman and Clay counties, some farmers are enjoying respectable yields.

"Some of the beets, grain and beans are all looking very good in the part of the county that did not get flooded," said Randy Tufton, director of the Farm Service Agency in Norman County. "I'm sure, overall, our averages for the county will be over our five-year county average. That's not saying a lot, but at least it's in the right direction."

Said Ken Pazdernik, the Norman County Extension Service agent: "It's nothing to write home about, but at least there's something they are taking off" the land.

All of which makes what happened June 19 along a meandering, 20-mile strip of the Wild Rice River -- where the digging of drainage ditches and accelerated runoff from higher ground has caused more and more flooding -- that much harder for farmers to accept.

One-quarter of Hest's 2,400-acre operation was destroyed; another 300 acres were badly damaged. His beets, beans, corn, wheat and sunflowers all were affected.

What it means to his pocketbook won't be clear until harvest is done and Congress decides whether to send disaster aid.

At best, Hest said, he might break even, but only because of federal subsidies and other programs already in place to help farmers weather the downturn in crop prices in recent years. In the past two years, government statistics show, Hest received about $41,000 in crop-loss disaster assistance alone.

"And I hate that," he said. "We're as heavily dependent on Uncle Sam right now as any time since I've farmed. And that takes a lot of the joy out of farming."

Exploring options

Since 1997, roughly 10 percent of the 300-plus farmers in Norman County have gone out of business. Several more have filed for bankruptcy this summer, and others are on the brink, Pazdernik said.

More will follow, he said, without government help to offset low market prices.

"It's keeping these guys alive," he said. "Otherwise, we would have had mass sell-outs. Even with the crop we're taking in, it's still not a very big margin to live off of."

With hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt tied up in combines, tractors, trucks, land and seed, farmers here needed a good year, Pazdernik said.

"We can handle it one [poor] year out of five," Hest said. "But four years out of five? That's too much."

Although Hest said he isn't in danger of being forced out soon, he feels the financial pressures.

He grew up in the farmhouse his grandfather built and where his family now lives. As a boy he rode tractors with his father on a 540-acre farm within 2 miles of that house, about a mile southeast of Perley.

For as long as he can remember, he said, he wanted to farm.

"There's nothing else I really wanted to do," he said. "I remember riding on a combine with my dad and sitting out and breathing in the dust. I could just sit in that thing for hours and hours."

After graduating from college, he rented some land from his father and later took over his father's operation while gradually acquiring or renting more land from farmers who retired or quit.

Today, he owns about one-fifth of the 2,400 acres he farms.

"It's a good way of life, a good way to raise a family," Theresa Hest said.

Yet they're tired of fighting the market and the weather. With three young children at home -- John, 8; Emily, 5, and Joseph, 3 -- they talked seriously this summer about getting out and moving on.

Bryan Hest has a degree in agricultural economics from NDSU, and his wife is employed full time as a lecturer in communications at several local colleges. She's also pursuing a doctorate degree in communications.

"A few years ago, we never talked about what we'd do if we were not farming," Theresa Hest said last week as the family sat at the kitchen table after a brief hailstorm interrupted the harvest.

"Now we talk about where we'd like to live. We like Wisconsin. The thing is, this is the first year, I think, where the discussion has been serious about what life would be like outside farming. ...

"We're lucky. We're both educated. We both know if we have to leave, we can. ... I just hate to see Bryan work the hours he worked and have no reward for it."

Not as much fun

With the string of tough growing seasons, marked by flooding, crop disease and low prices, the harvests aren't as enjoyable as they used to be, the Hests say.

There's camaraderie -- Hest and Houglum, who is a distant cousin, have worked together lifting beets since 1987 -- and a solitude -- quiet hours watching the stars, the sunrises or the deer while bringing in the crop.

"We see some amazing things," Bryan Hest said.

Still, it's not what it was.

"It used to be exciting to see the bushels," Theresa Hest said. "But when the flooding started, it was just not as much fun anymore."

Over the summer, Hest and several neighbors organized area farmers to lobby the local watershed board to find ways to reduce flooding and runoff problems along the Wild Rice.

"They need to slow this water down, to dike it up, retain it," Pazdernik said. "Until we do that, we will not be safe."

Adding to the woes for many farmers this season has been a lower price for sugar beets, a crop that has been an economic mainstay for many of the region's farmers.

"It's just adding insult to injury," said Jim Stordahl, a Clay County Extension educator based in Moorhead.

For now, though, the burden of the harvest, with all its responsibilities, overshadows other concerns.

Often working with two or three hours of sleep, Hest and Houglum labored around the clock and around the weather last week. In a span of 48 hours, conditions were too hot, too wet and then too cold to harvest.

By week's end, they'd pushed on, hoping to complete the sugar-beet work this weekend.

"You don't have much choice but to let go of it," Hest said of what happened in June. "Our year is coming in right now. Our management is being rewarded right now."