The combine will march steady and straight through the fields like royalty on parade, with the driver seated on a throne ten feet off the ground. The trusty grain cart ($30,000) rolls along at its side. When the cart is full, it is unloaded into one of two semi-trailers, $40,000 each. The trucks rush from field to storage bins to soybean oil and corn ethanol plants in nearby towns. Hargens looks out on his corn and wishes out loud for one more trailer. “We could use three, but then again, this harvest is going to be so big that no one is going to have enough storage anyway.”
The scale of the beast fits the land. Farming did not make tractors here. Tractors made farming. “How would farmers operate if they didn’t have massive machinery?” I ask. “Horses,” Hargens laughs. “And big families. Maybe a quarter of a section is all they could farm. We operate 30 quarters.” Son-in-law Dave offers another, simpler perspective. “This would all be pasture.”
After the Civil War, artist Olof Krans painted the citizens of Bishop Hill, Illinois, engaged in the annual ritual of corn planting. Twenty-four women dressed in bonnets and long black dresses, standing side by side in a straight line, each with a sack of corn seed and a planting stick. On the edges of the line, two men stretch a tight string along the ground to guide the planters. It is human-scale, community-scale, farming. It is easy to imagine the same citizens harvesting their corn by hand, plucking the dried yellow cobs from the stalk, husking as they go. It is not just a romantic image of farming in another time. It is an image of farming in another place, a thousand miles east of Dale Hargens. In central South Dakota it is not community that will make the harvest, it is a small family who will work from dawn to dusk, seated on the throne of King Combine.
I ask Hargens what he will do with his profits if the harvest comes in as big as he expects. “I’ve been thinking about buying a planter. I’ve got a neighbor up the road who has a 90-foot-wide, 36-row planter. I don’t want anything that big. But a 24-row planter would be great.” $100,000.
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