A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [78]
When we started looking at brochures from confinement systems manufacturers in the week after Daddy signed over the farm, it rapidly became clear that four thousand finished hogs per year was somehow a more optimal number, ambitious but manageable, the sort of number that gained the respect of your neighbors. Four thousand was a number that Marv Carson liked, for one thing, two hundred to two hundred and twenty productive sows, three turns, and it was a number that the Harvestore dealer kept speculating about. It was also the number that bounced off the walls at the café in town, the number that other farmers fantasized about and “knew” was the best economy of scale, not too large for a family operation but enough to keep you busy, solvent, and interested. Pretty soon, four thousand hogs became our plan, and Marv Carson gave us a $300,000 line of credit.
The plan was to convert what remained of the old dairy barn to enlarge the farrowing and nursery rooms, add a gestation building, a grower building, and a finisher, to build a big Slurrystore for waste, and put up two small Harvestores for the corn that would serve the hogs for feed. These would run along Cabot Street Road from our house west, partly because the dairy barn was already there, but also because Cabot Street Road was a busier road, and better maintained than 686.
I think Ty, for all his experience with the basics of farm contrivance, where convenience and practicality, and even happenstance, precede any notions of appearance, still envisioned the barn transformed and these other buildings laid out in a parklike setting, perhaps even magically elevated so they could be viewed from a distance and admired, the way we admired farms down near Tama or Cedar Rapids, that crowned hillsides and looked off to the south. At breakfast or dinner, Ty would pick some brochures off the stack that lay next to the telephone in the kitchen and thumb through them, or he would scan the drawing the Harvestore man had given him, with the shapes of our house and barn crisply ruled in, the width of the road and the new driveways marked, the wide circle of the Slurrystore as neat as could be, drawn with a compass, the narrower circles of the Harvestores nestled against the gestation building. After perusing these, he would give a little disbelieving shake of his head, a low “Hmmp” of satisfaction, and sometimes say under his breath, “Isn’t that something?”
As my father got more difficult, it got to be, for Ty, that the new buildings were what would save us, the marvelous new silos, the new hogs, the new order, epitomized by the Slurrystore, where all the waste from the hogs would be saved until it could be returned to the ground—no runoff, no smell, no waste, a closed loop. Ty was sure my father’s enthusiasm for the future would blossom when he saw the buildings go up, even though he had no patience for the brochures Ty tried to show him. You couldn’t resist baby pigs, how lively and pink they are, eager, climbing all over the sow, scrambling for the forward teats, playing with one another, squealing, watching watching watching through the bars of the farrowing crates, their little black eyes shining with curiosity. If my father could sit tight until our place seethed with this life and movement, he would, Ty was sure, be reborn into a contented retirement, busy, as the farmers at the café said, solvent, and interested.
That field had been planted in corn before we’d thought of any new plans, so on the day when Marv Carson came out with the permits (which he’d been able to hurry through because the president of the bank was the brother-in-law of the county building inspector, and which he brought out to us even though it was a Saturday), Ty got out the plow and plowed under twenty acres of waist-high corn stalks. Daddy was working with Pete that day, cleaning and oiling the combine, which they always tried to do during the midsummer lull. The