Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farm

By Richard Rhodes

Pulitzer Prize winning author, Richard Rhodes’s year-long journey into the heart of American agriculture reveals a life trapped between two eras: the modern and the traditional, the future and the past.

Richly textured and deeply moving, Farm chronicles a year in the life of Tom and Sally Bauer of Crevecoeur County, Missouri, who cultivate nearly two square miles of the surface of the earth. They struggle to build up their farm, harvesting corn, birthing calves, planting wheat, coping with the vagaries of nature and government regulations. Required of them are ancient skills (an attunement to the weather, animals, crops, and land) as well as a mastery of modern technology, from high-tech machinery to genetics and sophisticated chemicals.

Written with honesty and insight, Farm is a revelatory exploration of farm life in the 20th century and the joys and challenges of the modern rural landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Oct 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476709598

Richard Rhodes

A Seattle, Washington-based sculptor, stonemason, entrepreneur, and scholar of stonework worldwide, Richard Rhodes apprenticed as a stonemason in Siena, Italy, after graduate studies at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. As the first non-Italian admitted into Siena’s medieval masonic guild (the operative branch of the Freemasons, heirs to the cathedral builders of Europe) in 726 years, he is known throughout the sculpture and stone community as the “last apprentice” since the guild collapsed in the mid-1990s. It was during his guild training that Rhodes first encountered the ancient rulesets called Sacred Geometries and the Sacred Rules of Bondwork, foundational knowledge from the 5,000-year tradition of stone expression. Though now branching into other media such as cast bronze, Rhodes credits his guild training as the major influence in his sculpture practice.

Book preview

ONE

Running a combine before dawn in the dead of winter in a strange field was damned spooky. Inside the big cab it was warm enough. The tilted picture window that started overhead and disappeared below the floor divided him off from the blowing snow that swirled in the headlights. But he didn’t know the references, didn’t know the trees silhouetted in the distance against the night sky that might serve as markers, didn’t know where the rows came out that wandered with the terraces, and watching the saw-toothed cutter bar tripping up soybeans was hypnotic. A man could lose his bearings in the dark in a strange field.

A wet November had caught a neighbor’s four hundred acres of soybeans unharvested. The neighbor had to wait until the ground froze in January to finish up. Tom Bauer had finished his own harvest by then and had some slack time, so he and two other neighbors pitched in to help, four combines in all.

Beans were a bigger challenge to pick anyway than corn. Cornstalks carried their heavy ears waist high, but the brown, rattling bean pods marched down their stiff stalks nearly to the ground. To leave a clean field you had to work the cutter bar close to the roots. You watched it like a hawk when you didn’t know the field.

They’d commence at four in the morning and run straight through until ten, when it thawed enough to make the ground slick. The combines would start skidding off the sides of the terraces in the greasy mud and bang down at the bottom. The men left their machines parked in the field then, drove their pickups home, did their own days’ work and went out again of an evening until ten or eleven at night. Then they’d catch four or five hours of sleep before going at it once more.

Tom’s wife, Sally, sometimes drove out during that marathon and rode with her husband, talking to him to help him keep his eyes open. Back at the house she’d shout at him over the two-way radio before she went to bed to see if he was still awake. The neighbor who owned the beans worked twenty-four hours nonstop, took a nap over lunch and worked seventeen hours more. Then he fell asleep at the wheel and ran his combine into a slope and tore up one side. Tom told him it wasn’t worth killing himself to get his beans in.

They picked beans in the darkness for four days before the work was done. No one said anything about getting paid.

That was the end of last season. Tom remembered it now because of the mud. It was the beginning of September, nearly time for another harvest. He’d been tired enough when he put away his big red Case International 1460 combine last January that he’d left it muddy instead of steam-cleaning and waxing it the way he usually did. He’d have run it last June to thresh wheat, but the same fall weather that kept the neighbor from getting to his beans kept the Bauers from planting any wheat at all. So when Tom wheeled the big 1460 from the cool darkness of its storage shed out into the summer heat, the mud was still there, caked and dried all over the sides where the tires had flung it up. It shamed him a little. He wondered if he was slowing down. It didn’t seem to him he worked as hard as he used to. He used to work eighteen or twenty hours a day. They weren’t knocking at the poorhouse door yet, though, and he’d get around to the mud. The combine needed servicing before he started in on the corn. He’d clean it then.

*  *  *

Tom Bauer was a Missouri farmer, six feet three, two hundred forty pounds, most of the weight muscle even at forty-six. With his massive head and long jaw, his powerful presence and easy walk, he could have doubled for Sheriff Matt Dillon on the old Gunsmoke television series. He was Western in the same way, big and physically confident, courteous, with a voice he could make deep and drawling, quick to grin. He looked less like a television star and more like just plain Tom when he took off his seed cap, which he only did indoors. Then his high white forehead shone above the dark weathering of his neck and face. He was losing his black hair. What was left he wore combed straight over from the part, with sideburns. People noticed his eyes. They were pale blue, limpid, so gentle and promising that women meeting him for the first time caught their breath. Tom Bauer’s eyes could narrow to shrewdness or chill to cold anger, but countryman that he was, grounded in the anchorage of the land, they usually sparkled with amusement at the world’s derelict commotion. He ain’t never going to grow up, Sally had complained once to his mother when she was alive. His mother knew a blessing when she saw one. Then he’ll never grow old, she’d said.

The Bauer farm in Crevecoeur County, Missouri, an hour east of Kansas City, had been two farms before; Tom still kept them separate in his head because they carried different mortgages. The old Dixon place, east of the home farm across a section line, was the newer purchase, 110 acres sloping up the hill from Little Cebo Creek and down toward the home farm east pasture. The bottomland along the creek had been a sour marsh when the Bauers bought the place. They’d paid to have the marsh tiled with pipe to drain it, then plowed and disked it until the soil sweetened. Now it was a fine, well-laid field. Tom had bulldozed the old house up by the road and filled in the old hand-dug well. House and well stubbornly refused to let go: bricks turned up every time Tom disked where the house had been, and the well formed a new sinkhole every spring, not so deep as to be dangerous but noticeable enough to remind him of the history that had come before. A mound nearby regularly turned up arrowheads, probably Osage—all of central Missouri had been Osage territory before the French and then the Americans crowded in—removing the history of the place even farther back into the past. The woods that shaded the creek Tom left unimproved. He’d planned to burn out the trees and brush to enlarge his tillable ground, but Brett, his sixteen-year-old son, had stopped him with a question. Do you have to have it all, Dad? the boy had asked. Tom had thought about the deer that sometimes crossed his fields and decided he didn’t and left the woods alone.

The home farm to the west was larger, 227 acres. The Bauers’ modern one-story brick farmhouse, insulated and snug, looked out over a grassy slope toward an oil-topped county road that came straight south two miles from U.S. Highway 24 and turned east just at their mailbox. South of the mailbox, down a graveled lane, Tom had installed the buildings and feeding floors of his hog operation. A southeast wind could blow a powerful stink back to the house from the sewage lagoon there. Tom would laugh then, a little embarrassed, and call the stink the smell of money. More reliably than any other harvest, hogs paid the bills.

Due south of the house was a barn lot and a pasture where the Bauers’ white-faced black cows and calves grazed. To the west, beyond the machine sheds and fuel tanks, beyond a corrugated steel grain bin nearly empty now of last year’s feed corn, beyond a roofless, abandoned concrete silo that enclosed a volunteer gathering of mosses and ferns, a field rolled gently down to another reach of Little Cebo Creek. There Tom had dammed an eroding runoff channel to make a deep pond beside a well-shaded grove of oak and hackberry trees. He’d hauled an old plywood mobile home into the grove and set up a picnic table for a camp where family, friends and relatives could hunt and fish and swim, out of sight of civilization but close enough to home to run the farm.

Everything was organized and trim—the grass mown, the buildings painted, the oiled and polished machinery stored out of the weather in barns and sheds, the fields and the fencerows free of weeds.

The soil on both farms was the richest in Missouri and among the richest on the North American continent, dark brown Knox and Marshall silt loams, Blackoar or Kennebec silt loam in the bottoms, soil in places as much as ninety feet deep. Winds off the glaciers receding at the end of the Ice Age, ten thousand years ago, had blown in the dust of their grinding—fine-grained, calcareous loess. The tall-grass prairie that had evolved then across the well-drained uplands had worked the loess to richness. Sally Bauer, whose sense of humor was peppery, liked to tell people that her husband had bought the farm without even bothering to look at the house. It was almost true. Give me the land and I’ll build you the house, Tom would quote the old Dutchman farmers, the German neighbors of his childhood, in defense.

The harvest about to begin would be Tom’s twenty-fifth since he started farming on his own. Before then, back to childhood seasons he could hardly remember anymore, he and his nine brothers and sisters had helped his father harvest rented farmland. Because William Bauer didn’t believe in borrowing, there’d been no land to inherit when he died, and Sally’s family was too poor for any kind of dowry. Tom and Sally had to borrow even the down payment to buy their first forty acres. They paid off that land in good time and used it in turn as down payment for a real farm.

Now, twenty years later, the Bauers owned 337 acres, more than half a square mile of the surface of the earth. They owned cattle and hogs and the equipment and buildings necessary to husband them, six tractors, four trucks, the big red combine, planters and disks and harrows, mowers and bailers and wagons, augers and feed mills and bins. They had three children, a young daughter and two sons approaching the age when they would have to decide if they wanted to follow their parents into farming. They farmed another 779 acres on shares with three landlords, the Bauers supplying the equipment and labor and sharing the harvest fifty-fifty in exchange for the use of half the land.

They had worked their way to security, and they considered themselves successful, but for all their investment of capital and labor their return amounted to less than twenty thousand dollars a year, and in the Reagan years just passing they’d seen their net worth reduced by half as rural land values plummeted. The fat’s been rendered out, Tom told a friend one day. "All those bad managers and plungers you used to hear about are gone." Gone and more going, probably as many as twenty-five percent more by the end of the century, and the question was, who was yet to be scourged, and what would it take to escape that winnowing, to survive?

TWO

Tom and Sally used the six o’clock farm report as an alarm clock. They listened to hog and cattle and grain prices and then planned the day’s business, sometimes with a little monkey business thrown in. Except during the harvest, when he needed her to run the combine while he unloaded the trucks, Tom did the farming and Sally kept the books. They looked over each problem or plan together, held it up to the light and turned it around, tried to spy out all the angles. They usually knew before they got out of bed how they meant to run their day.

My wife’s a nervous person, Tom said once, and she can talk a little rough sometimes, but a fellow couldn’t have a better partner. I don’t know what I’d do without her. Sally’s nerves, which showed in her smoking and in a tendency not to let go once she started talking, were battle scars. She and Tom had worked their way to prosperity together, but she’d grown up small-town poor, and their success always felt a little precarious. She hadn’t forgotten the standard Sunday dinner at her house when she was a child, chicken feet and noodles, the feet, peeled of their scaly yellow skin, left over from her mother’s work of dressing other people’s chickens. "We were poor," Sally emphasized when she told that story. Of the chicken feet she also said, "We liked them!"

She’d been a slight, tomboyish girl when she married Tom Bauer twenty-two years ago; she was heavier now, though not so heavy as many rural women over forty who’d borne three children. She wore her dark hair cut in bangs and curled. She was a good cook who was tired of cooking, her two strapping sons now nearly grown. She liked to shop garage sales and did family-treeing all over Missouri with her sister-in-law Grace, working harder at tracing the men’s family name than her own since Bauer was the name passing down.

Sally was considerably more cynical than Tom, who tended to give people the benefit of a doubt. Good old Tom, she’d say, rolling her eyes, when she heard her husband on the phone forgiving a delay in the arrival of a fertilizer truck or a mistake on an invoice, Good old Tom.

She had strong feelings. She stood up for her children ferociously. Unfairness, real or imagined, made her flush with anger. Tenderness brought tears to her eyes. She could challenge you and then stare you down, daring you to try to weasel out of it, but she could also say something funny as hell and hold her dark eyes wide until you caught her drift and laughed. She had a good laugh.

She was generous with help. She saw her girlfriend through breast-cancer surgery and regularly drove her to the doctor in Kansas City afterward for checkups. She worked gratis most days of the week, whenever Tom didn’t need her, helping one of her brothers keep his ceramics shop in order in her hometown north of the river. She enjoyed molding ceramics, glazing and firing them; she was good at it. Molded ceramic ducks, rabbits, mushrooms, pumpkins in season appeared on the peninsula of grass between the Bauer driveway and the county road, across from the mailbox. Vandals always stole her hand-painted menageries and Sally always replaced them. They think they’re getting something worth something, she’d laugh about the thefts. They’re just bolos. Pieces I didn’t make right.

She said ain’t, and don’t instead of doesn’t—so did Tom—in the old dialect way that had come to seem illiterate to city people, though it was good enough for the English nobility two hundred years ago. She was blunt and she was smart. She didn’t put on airs, but she didn’t miss much, either.

*  *  *

One morning at the beginning of September Tom left the house with storage problems on his mind. The farm dogs met him at the door and followed him out. Blaze, the big, sleepy female, who was buff-colored and part Saint Bernard, calculated he was heading for his pickup and flopped down in the shade of the big oak in the yard behind the house. Molly, the small, quick female, who was black and part Labrador, cocked an ear as the pickup started and dashed ahead. At the corner of the yard where the lane that led to the farrowing house ran off from the driveway she waited to see which way Tom would turn. If he turned north toward the county road she wouldn’t follow, knowing he was leaving the farm. If he turned south toward the farrowing house she would. He turned south to check on a sow and Molly raced along behind. Blaze was a twelve-year veteran, but Tom and Sally weren’t sure yet if they wanted to keep Molly. She was a sweet-spirited dog, just out of puppyhood, and she worked that much harder trying to prove herself.

The biggest problem of the harvest was going to be storage. The corn and soybean crops were supposed to break records. It was anyone’s guess where farmers were going to put it all. There were four billion bushels still on hand in storage from the year before. Counting commercial elevators, farm grain bins, river barges and whatever other facilities the government could turn up, the twenty-two-billion-bushel nationwide storage capacity was estimated to just match the coming harvest. But the harvest wasn’t grown nationwide. It was grown in the Midwestern Corn Belt, and until it could be moved out by train and barge it would overflow the region’s storage.

Tom had some ideas for temporary storage if the commercial elevators got full. He wanted to check first with the elevator that usually bought his grain, the Comstock Grain Company, ten miles east of him in Riverton. He figured a lot of guys would wait until the last minute to reserve storage. If he made arrangements early he might beat the crowd.

He parked his metallic-tan GMC pickup outside the farrowing house and looked in on the sow. She was the last holdout. The eleven other sows in the semiautomated building had already dropped their litters in the steel-barred crates where Tom had confined them. The baby pigs made a great scurrying when he came in, pigs everywhere in the darkened house, more than a hundred in all. The radio set up on a shelf on the east wall was playing country-Western music. Tom left it on twenty-four hours a day to soothe the sows. They did better with music, proven fact.

He switched on the lights and walked down the aisle. There was a strong smell of ammonia in the air. The holdout sow hadn’t farrowed yet. She lay on her side, looking miserable. The day was supposed to get hot, above ninety degrees, and she’d need to be watched. With the energy of a dozen pigs inside her body to dissipate as well as her own she could easily overheat even with all the farrowing house’s automatic fans kicked in. Tom milked out one of her teats—it was shaped exactly like an old-fashioned bottle nipple—without result. Sows farrow within twelve hours of letting down their milk. This one still wasn’t ready. She grunted at the man examining her. Let’s go, girl, he cheered her on.

Outside again, Tom studied the sky. Haze was already building to the possibility of afternoon thundershowers. They might cool things off. He drove out onto the county road, Molly hauling up behind to watch him go.

A hand-held microphone hung from a clip on the dashboard of the GMC. It connected to a two-way FM radio, a business-band system installed in the Bauers’ vehicles and at the house that allowed them to talk to each other from up to twenty miles away. Tom lifted the mike from the dash and held down the talk button.

Mobile to base. Sally, do you copy?

Sally didn’t answer right away. She was doing laundry and had to come up from the basement. Eventually she said, Go ahead, Tom.

I’m going to run over to Riverton to see about storage.

To Comstock’s?

Yeah.

Your dinner’s in the crockpot. It’ll be done at noon. You’ll be back by then, won’t you? She was going to her brother’s ceramics shop for the day.

Easy, Tom said.

Don’t forget Sammi gets home at three thirty. Their nine-year-old daughter rode the bus to school in Plymouth, the county seat, ten miles west. The fall semester had just begun.

Tom kept his radio talk to a minimum. Sally would know he’d heard. He hung up the mike.

He was already at the corner where the county road intersected U.S. Highway 24. The old two-lane federal highway ran east and west paralleling the Missouri River, out of sight beyond the bluffs to the north. The corner marked the eastern limit of Devon, Missouri, a few blocks of houses and old stores. Some of the headstones in the Devon cemetery Tom had just passed recorded the deaths of men and women born in the eighteenth century. U.S. 24 followed the route of the Santa Fe Trail from St. Louis to Independence, and the town was old.

Tom turned east onto 24 toward St. Louis, putting Devon behind him, and lit a cigarette. He drove through a divided landscape: green orchards to the north of the highway with red apples ripening, fields of maturing buff-colored corn and soybeans to the south. The division marked a division in soil types as well as in venture. The Knox silt loam that prevailed closer to the river had formed under deciduous hardwoods, the Marshall, farther south, under native grass. Tom had been born in Crevecoeur County only five miles west of Devon. He knew every farm along the highway and studied each one in turn as he passed.

Uphill and downhill he drove into the morning sun, past the AT&T microwave tower, past the yard where a farmer displayed used farm machinery he’d picked up at auctions and hoped to resell, past one orchard market and then another, past the inconspicuous entrance north of the road that led back to a major complex of apartments and outbuildings owned by the Transcendental Meditation people. Tom and his friends had heard that they were studying how to levitate themselves, so they called them carpet-fliers. Sally sometimes daydreamed of converting the fields south of the house on the home farm to a horse track, Devon Downs. She knew it was pure blue sky, but she was practical about it. She figured they could convert the vast living center the carpet-fliers had built, which appeared to be abandoned, to a weekend resort for wealthy bettors out of Kansas City. It had a big dome on top that would set the tone of the place and it looked out over the Missouri River, but with city amusements a long hour away by car it would certainly need a track to keep the gentry entertained, unless they wanted to pick apples.

Nearer Riverton the fields leveled out. Though the land was elevated well above the river, here began what Tom called the Lundbeck bottoms after the small town of Lundbeck up the road. The Lundbeck bottoms, covered at the moment with ripening beans and corn, never failed to distract him. He admired them without reservation. They occupied a place in his daydreams like the place Devon Downs occupied in Sally’s. That land’s so good it makes your mouth water, he said of them, his eyes shining. The only way you can get some is to inherit it or marry it. It was Marshall silt loam, like much of his own land. That was one important measure of its quality, but unlike his more rolling fields, which needed terraces that channeled runoff to reduce erosion, it was also open and nearly flat, sloping just enough for efficient drainage. It laid good, farmers said. Good soil, lays good where farm real estate is concerned is not one valuable quality but two. The lay of the land is more important now that one man with large-scale machinery farms a thousand acres or more. Tom’s father with four sons to help him farmed three hundred-some acres, his grandfather eighty. For maximum efficiency, Tom wanted an uninterrupted track across his fields and as few turnarounds as possible.

At Riverton Tom left the federal highway and drove north on the state road that led to the Riverton bridge across the Missouri River. A hundred yards this side of the bridge he turned east again onto a potholed road that cut down the face of the river bluff to bank level. Raising dust, he bounced along beside the railroad tracks that paralleled the river, crossed them and followed them to the elevators of the Comstock Grain Company, sixteen bare concrete cylinders eighty feet high set right on the bank of the river. The elevators were set at the edge of the mighty Missouri to access barges for transporting the grain Comstock bought at harvest and temporarily stored. From Riverton, hundreds of tons of corn and soybeans floated down the Missouri to St. Louis, down the Mississippi to New Orleans and from New Orleans, transferred to oceangoing cargo ships, around the world. Bauer soybeans might well end up, six months later, on Japanese dinner tables.

In the prefabricated steel office building beside the truck scales, Tom looked up Frank Tice, the elevator manager. Tice was younger than Tom. He had thick jowls and a barrel chest and wore his jeans belted tight below his belly. Tom found him in his corner office and poked his head in the door. I’m looking for storage, he announced with a grin.

Ain’t everybody, Tice countered. He gestured to a chair. Set yourself down.

Tom sat. What kind of deal you got?

Tice leaned back and toyed with a pencil. Everything’s real short this year.

Don’t I know it, Tom said. I’m going to start cleaning out old corncribs.

Yeah, a lot of guys are. It may come to that. Tice got serious. We’re offering storage first of all to our fertilizer customers.

Tom nodded. Seems fair enough. He wasn’t a Comstock fertilizer customer; he spread his own fertilizer each spring to save the expense of commercial application and to make sure the job was done right.

But customers like you who sell us grain get second call, Tice went on. If there’s any storage left.

You think there will be? Tom immediately asked.

It’s going to be a tough harvest this year. Farmers are going to have to do things they never did before. Federal soybean standards are going up. Corn standards too, probably. I’ve got railroad cars and barges contracted for to move it out as fast as we can when it starts coming in. But we’ll be taking maximum twenty-percent-moisture corn this year.

Tom raised an eyebrow. Oh? He didn’t approve of grain companies turning farmers away at harvesttime, whatever the excuse. Corn picked at more than fifteen-percent moisture had to be dried by blowing warm air through it to keep it from spoiling. That was an added inconvenience, and the grain companies usually compensated for it by docking—by knocking a few cents off the price they paid for the grain. With more corn expected to be harvested than elevators had space to store, Comstock’s was saying they’d have to limit that courtesy.

And we won’t be accepting any lower-grade grain, Tice went on.

Tom grinned. You never got that kind from me, Frank.

I know I didn’t.

You hear anything about a Russian sale? Tom asked, leaning forward and lowering his voice.

Tice sat up in his chair and tossed the pencil on his desk. What’d you hear?

Hear there’s cargo ships contracted for in the Gulf that don’t have no designated destination. You hear that?

Tice barely nodded. Something like that.

You think they’re going to buy some of this grain?

Tice wasn’t prepared to commit himself. Don’t know. They’re shrewd, though. Real shrewd.

They’ll wait until the price bottoms out.

That won’t be too long, Tice said.

Tom nodded and stood to go. When do you think you’ll know about storage? he asked the elevator manager.

We’ve sent out letters to all our fertilizer customers. Gave them until the seventh. That’s the end of this week.

Then you’ll go with your grain customers?

Yeah. Tice stood to acknowledge Tom’s leaving. Why don’t you give us a call Monday morning first thing? I expect we’ll have some space left.

Good enough, Tom said.

*  *  *

Tom ate his noontime dinner alone at the big family table in the kitchen of the farmhouse: crockpot sausage and sauerkraut, bread and butter, iced tea and apple brownies, Sally’s good home cooking. The sausage came from the Bauers’ own hogs, made up by German-descended butchers at a custom packing company in a nearby town. He would have liked Sally to stay home, for the company, but he knew she needed something to do besides the housework now that the kids were all in school. She’d be home soon enough, running the combine while he hauled grain to his on-farm storage bins or to Riverton.

He needed storage because he didn’t want to sell all his crop at once at harvesttime. Supply overwhelmed demand then and the price bottomed out. He might decide to hold off selling some of his corn and soybeans until after the first of the year. By then enough grain had usually been moved out to improve the sale price. In the meantime he needed a place to put it all. Seventy-two hundred bushels of his own corn would fill the steel grain bin west of the house. He fed his hogs from that bin, so that corn would stay on the farm until it walked off. The corn he farmed on shares with the Landers family would go into the big 7,800-bushel bin back behind the Landers family place, the Elms, off Highway 24 two miles west of Devon. The Landerses had agreed to rent one of the two smaller 6,500-bushel bins at the Elms to Tom’s other major landlord, Jack Ward, an airline pilot who was managing the family farm for his invalid mother. This year was Tom’s first harvest with the Wards. But the bins wouldn’t hold all the harvest. He’d have to store some of it elsewhere. Tom wouldn’t harvest soybeans until after the corn was in. They’d be another problem. How much additional storage he’d need would depend also on the yield, on how many bushels he produced per acre. A bushel was about nine gallons. With soybeans, 50 to 60 bushels per acre was a good yield for him. With corn, his fields yielded up toward 160.

All in all, Tom decided, he’d better get some backup storage ready. There were old wooden bins built into the barns north of the steel bins on the Landers place. They hadn’t been used in years and they’d have to be cleaned out. One of his brothers who had gotten out of farming had bin space in the barn on his spread five miles down the road.

Fixing up wooden bins didn’t make Tom happy. I wouldn’t have to do it if Ward wasn’t so tight, he’d told Sally. He knew we’d need more storage this year. I started on him in June. But I couldn’t get him to move. Now he wants to put in a bin but I can’t get a bin. They’re back-ordered. The work’s all gratis, me sweeping and cleaning up and moving the grain in and out. It won’t cost him anything.

You just don’t know each other well enough yet, Sally had soothed him. It’s your first year together.

Landerses pretty much let me do what I think best.

All Ward knows about Tom Bauer so far is what the bank told him, Sally said. He’ll learn he can trust you.

*  *  *

Tom went into Osage Station that afternoon to buy filters for the combine. The town of five thousand people, ten miles southwest of his home farm, was a busy commercial center with four farm implement dealers still holding on when most such towns were down to one or none. Plymouth was the same distance away to the west, a thousand people larger and the county seat. The Bauers banked in Plymouth, but Tom and a lot of folks thought the town was stuck up, more interested in its antebellum homes than in serving the needs of farmers with hog manure on their boots. Osage Station acted like it wanted your business.

Tom read a bill for a farm dispersal auction on the counter at the Case International dealer while he waited for the parts clerk to assemble his supplies. Two oil filters and one hydraulic filter cost $19.64. Air filters were on back order. He asked for one to be reserved. Across the road at Fleckmeier Implements he looked in on his big Oliver tractor. He was having it overhauled. Its diesel engine block was set crosswise on its frame, its valves and cylinders spread all over the mechanic’s workbench waiting for parts to be delivered from Kansas City.

Past an old empty factory Tom turned in next at the Keller Machine Works, a tall, corrugated-steel building closer to the center of town. He needed a new set of pulleys for one of his many power augers, Archimedes’ screws that moved feed and grain around. He always liked to look in at Keller’s. Every kind of farm equipment was repaired there. The air inside the old building was mellow with machine oil punched with pungent ozone from the welder arcs. Circuses traveling anywhere within a five-state area sent their broken Ferris

Reviews for Farm

[jrthebutler · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A man has to choose between his father's and his mother's account of events in rural Sweden.

[tina1969_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Daniel believes his mom and dad, Chris and Tilde are enjoying their retirement in Sweden. A phone call from his dad changes everything. His mother is ill and imagining things. His mother however claims to be totally sane and believes a great crime has been comitted. Who does Daniel believe.This book drew me in from the beginning. The majority of the book is the narrative of Tilde. A long narrative it is too, and very convincing. The story is very compelling and I was drawn into it and wanted to know the truth.Daniel goes to Sweden to find out for himself and that's when the reader gets the truth and the narrative told by Tilde falls into place. This I felt was a little rushed at the end of the book. The whole book is taken up by Tilde that there doesn't seem room for anything else.A compelling read but I felt let down at the end. I was expecting something more and perhaps a big twist which just didn't happen. Disappointing read which started out quite well.

[carpe_librum · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh my goodness! I've been hanging out to read The Farm by Tom Rob Smith ever since I heard the premise:Daniel's parents have retired to Sweden, and all seems well until he receives a call from his father."Your mother's not well. She's been imagining things - terrible, terrible things. She's had a psychotic breakdown, and has been committed to a mental hospital." But then his mother rings to say: "I'm sure your father has spoken to you. Everything that man has told you is a lie. I'm not mad. I don't need a doctor. I need the police. I'm about to board a flight to London. Meet me at Heathrow." (Source: GoodReads).Daniel then has to decide which of his parents to believe. I was instantly hooked by the premise, and instantly gripped by the plot as soon as I picked up the book.In fact, there was so much tension in The Farm, that I actually exclaimed, out loud, twice! The first was when Daniel's Mum says the simple words: "I told him everything" and I instantly yelled out "NO!"And the second was when it was clear Daniel had made his decision about which parent to believe (no spoilers though). Oh, and the ending too, so I guess that makes three out loud exclamations and luckily for me they all occurred at home.The Farm is a mystery and psychological thriller, which is surprising given the content is not driven by action so much as learning the truth about what took place. The plot is tight and the tension is palpable, and I thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend it. I was also pleased to learn the movie rights have been sold, hopefully it's not too long before we can watch The Farm on the big screen. Get it, read it now!

[rvhatha · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you're a fan of English mysteries *and* Nordic noir, you're in luck: you get both in one convenient package with this thriller, in which the main character, Daniel, becomes the vessel for an increasingly disturbing tale that his mother--a Swedish native who's recently moved back to her home country with her English husband--gradually reveals to him. Has she had a psychotic break? Or were terrible crimes being committed by a powerful group of men in the small Swedish town near her farm? Daniel, and the reader, vascillate between belief and disbelief as her story becomes progressively more outlandish.This was a quick and compelling read, especially toward the end. The structure of the early chapters is a bit aggravating after awhile: each short chapter opens up with Daniel reflecting on what his mother has just told him, then shifts back to her narrative. She's very insistent on telling her story chronologically and without interruption, and after awhile this technique becomes just as irritating to the reader as it does to Daniel. It also allows Tom Rob Smith to pull a real "deus ex machina" ending, which--while well handled and exciting--does still feel a bit like cheating. The characters here aren't particularly well-developed--and in part, this is because of the unreliability of the mother-as-narrator. But Daniel himself is a very flat character; we really don't learn much more about him over the course of the story. Also, Smith sets up a bit of a red herring at the start by having Daniel be very concerned about how his parents will react when they find out he's gay (he hasn't told them), but that turns out to be a non-issue, as do his concerns about whether his boyfriend, Mark, will chuck him out when he fails to carry his own weight financially. It sort of felt like an easy way to give Daniel's character more dimensions, but it doesn't really work.Still, this gets tipped over into the four-star category for me because of the really fascinating and complex way that the mystery's solution involves an understanding of Swedish folklore and fairy tales. I won't say more than that, but I *will* say that if you read it, don't dismiss the trolls.NOTE: I received this book as a free e-ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[hanneri_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book started off very promising but I was disappointed in the ending. It ended flat and I felt let down. While I enjoyed the book, it was not as much as I had expected - especially after the truimph of Child 44. Overall still an enjoyable read.

[velopunk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I wanted to believe Daniel's mother, and thought that Daniel's trip to Sweden might vindicate his mother.

[ladymine-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Eine spannende Familiengeschichte. Mehr braucht man dazu nicht sagen.

[micahmom2002 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A son gets a call from his father saying that his mother is very sick and has mental health issues and has been committed to an asylum . That she cannot be believed or trusted. He soon receives a call from his mother who was released from the asylum as "healthy"saying that his father has gotten himself into trouble with the wrong crowd and is dangerous. He must figure out who is telling the truth and how to help them.

[electrascaife · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Daniel believes that his parents are happily enjoying retired life in Sweden until the day he gets a call from his father telling him his mother has had a mental breakdown, been admitted to a mental hospital, and escaped. And then his mother calls him, telling him that everything his father has told him is a lie and to meet her at the airport. And so begins his mother’s struggle to convince him of a town-wide cover-up of the murder of a teen girl and a conspiracy against her for trying to uncover the truth.

A really well-done plot with great pacing and some clever twists. Tilda’s story is at all times equal parts convincing and suspicious, and it keeps you guessing right up to the end.

[gmoore8911 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Daniel receives a phone call from his father stating that his mother is not well and has been committed to an asylum. However, as he is about to board a flight to Sweden, his mother calls and says that everything his father has told him was a lie. Now Daniel must choose whether to listen to his mother's story with an open mind or believe that his mother is truly ill.

This book had me intrigued from the beginning. Daniel finds that his parents have been keeping things from him and now he is struggling with admitting his truths to them as well. It was a well written story that had me wanting to keep reading to find out what happened back in Sweden. There were stories within stories that had me flipping back to previous pages to see read with new eyes and find some clues that I might have missed before.

If you're looking for a page turner, a thriller with unexpected endings, this is it.

[daftboy1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of Daniel who lives in London and his Swedish Mum Tilde.
Tilde returns from Sweden where she and Chris her Husband and Daniels Dad had bought a farm.
She is really upset and tells Daniel that Chris is trying to trick her and convince her she is going mad.
She then explains everything to Daniel that happened and also a bit about her childhood.
A young girl called Mia has recently went missing, Tilde is convinced she has been murdered.

This book keeps you guessing is Tilde losing it or is Chris right to have his Wife committed to a hospital.
Daniel then goes over to Sweden once his Mum is safe in a London hospital to do his own investigation.

Good suspense and keeps you guessing.

[cassie.peters1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This one sure did not end the way I expected it to.

[scot2-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A friend lent this book to me as I had very much wanted to read it. It was very slow and I did skim through quite a lot. The last third of the book picked up a little. I liked the conclusion but it was a struggle for me to get there.

[soniaandree_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel is much better written than "Child 44" from the same author. For one thing, the writing is smoother and also, the suspens is much more controlled, as the narrator (main, one, the heroine's son) and reader, only find out about the full underlying story at the end. The plot contains a story within a story and contains 2 different points of views, depending on who is narrating. The characterization is very good. We like the characters not so much for the plot but for their respective flaws and faults. In the end, a lot of misunderstanding derive from these faults and we follow the main narrator (the heroine's son) in his investigation with focal distance, away from any direct involvement. From this, the resulting truth is shown with care and compassion, making this novel a far cry from "Child 44" in writing style and tone.

It was a good surprise and I think its writing style is better than "Child 44". It can be a bit creepy at times, it's a thriller after all, but it is all linked to the heroine's state of mind and paranoias. The only other narrative voice is her son's, with a much more controlled and composed tone, tenderness even, so that it all comes together in the end. Readers shouldn't dismiss this novel if they didn't like "Child 44", because it doesn't compare in writing style and tone. Well worth it!

[iambookish-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a joy to have found an actual page turner! A book that actually lives up to the expectations I had for it from initial reviews. Part mystery and part family drama, this intelligently written novel slowly reveals its true nature with every word written.
A son, an only child, is close to his Swedish mother and British father, but after their retirement back to his mother's native Sweden, he realizes that much of what they all perceived about one another was riddled with underlying secrets.

[dianekeenoy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 when I read it years ago so I was very excited to get a copy of the Farm from an LT friend! When I sat down to look through the first chapter, the thing I love most happened...which is I just kept reading it until I finished it last night. What would you do if your father called you up and told you that your mother was psychotic and had been committed to a psych ward and then your next phone call was from your mother telling you not to believe anything your father said and she was on her way to you for help. Yikes! Who do you believe? The fact that Smith's mother had a psychotic breakdown (which she recovered from) makes this book even more interesting to me. Highly recommended.

[terran_9 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not a "thriller" as advertised, but suspenseful. Based on an episode in the author's life when his own mother experienced a psychotic breakdown.

[far2manybooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Your mother's not well. She's been imagining things - terrible, terrible things. She's had a psychotic breakdown, and has been committed to a mental hospital."

But then his mother rings to say: "I'm sure your father has spoken to you. Everything that man has told you is a lie. I'm not mad. I don't need a doctor. I need the police. I'm about to board a flight to London. Meet me at Heathrow."

Daniel then has to decide which of his parents to believe. A gripping mystery.

[techeditor_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Daniel's father tells him that his mother has had a psychotic breakdown. Then Daniel's mother tells him that his father is dangerous. What follows is a four- out of five-star book. And that's generous; I considered three stars.

Most of THE FARM, that is, more than 3/4 of it, is Daniel's mother's story since she and his father retired in Sweden, as she perceives it. Page after page Daniel patiently listens to her paranoia. She is so obviously paranoid, even to the point of believing she knew what people were thinking, that I didn't believe a word of it. Daniel does, though.

The last bit of this book is the part I liked best, no more paranoid story. Something really happens. The story is such a surprise that I gave it four rather than three stars.


Don't think that THE FARM is the book that finally measures up to Tom Rob Smith's first one, CHILD 44. Not that THE FARM is bad. Maybe it's that CHILD 44 is so excellent that we expect too much.

[seeword · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Library book. A young man in London receives and alarming phone call from his father in Sweden telling him his mother is mentally ill. Then his mother calls. She has checked herself out of the hospital and is on her way to London. When she arrives, she tell an incredible story. Is she ill, or does she have information about a crime? Hard to tell just what is going on. This is a real page turner.

[delphica · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an extremely strong three stars.

A little ways into to novel, I had the thought that "oh no, this is going to be one of those times when I caught an interview with the author on NPR and that was so interesting that I assumed I would like the book, but it turns out that what I really liked was the NPR story." But it pulled together.

I should make the note that this isn't a genre I'm particularly interested in, it's a bit of a thriller, one of those small town conspiracy types. I guess I never really believe there are conspiracies in small towns, who has the time?

The basic set up is that you've got a young adult whose parents have retired to Sweden, and out of the blue it suddenly happens that the mom and dad are telling extremely different stories about some alarming events that are going on. (And what hooked me -- and it's introduced in the first chapter so I don't think it's a spoiler -- is in the interview, the author talked about his own parent having a mental health crisis, and how difficult this was to recognize because his interactions with the parent seemed very coherent and reasonable.)

[nikon_11 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The story starts off brilliantly way way better than most and then as the pages roll by it begins to fade. The smack I felt at the start no longer stings it's still good-ish but somehow it just seems to be lacking another punch or kick. I was never quite sure what was adrift in the story and so I kept reading on and on to the end and all the time as I turned the pages the whole story became less and less interesting, mind you, it still had a bit of a grip but even that was slowly slipping away. Finally the story ends. And that's it!

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Farm by Tom Rob Smith is a psychological mystery that is full of family secrets. From the moment Daniel receives a frantic phone call from his father in Sweden about his sick mother, the reader is pulled into a story that may or may not be true. Who is Daniel to believe? His mother and father are telling totally opposite stories. His mother could be in great danger or she could be a totally unreliable narrator. Daniel has choices to make, but whichever parent he chooses to believe, he runs the risk of alienating the other. This is a family has been concealing the truth about things for some time. Daniel did not know that there is no money for his parents to retire on, this small farm in Sweden is all they have. Daniel himself has been hiding something from his parents for some time but with everything that is happening, now does not appear to be the right time to reveal his secret. All these truths and lies need to be exposed, but is the truth a straightforward belief in one parent or the other, or does Daniel have to travel to Sweden to discover the answer for himself?

This story definitely drew me in and I had to read to the end as quickly as possible so that I could find out the truth. I do admit that I found Tilde very difficult to put my faith in, her tense and unyielding manner always felt a little off . As her narration becomes more and more paranoid and delusional, my admiration for Daniel’s patience grew. Daniel’s father, on the other hand, appears to have been deliberately left as an incomplete character. This man could have been anything or anybody.

The Farm is a testament to both the fortitude and the fragility of family bonds. Although I did feel a little let down with the ending of the story, it seemed a little rushed and perhaps I wanted a even bigger truth that what was eventually revealed.

[sparemethecensor · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 trilogy and I loved The Farm. The writing is stunning. I liked the experimental formatting of the mother's narrative: not only did it make it clear where the information was coming from, but it gave this artistic rendering of the distance between her and all other people.

Great mystery, but great writing to accompany it -- that's rare. Recommended.

[she_climber · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I guess I expected so much more after the Child 44 trilogy. This story just got so bogged down by mom's accounting of her side of the story: it was a never-ending narrative with very little to break it up. I did believe she was crazy because I had nothing more than Daniels word regarding the personality of his parents to know what made sense and what didn't. I thought the outcome was interesting and the saving grace of the story but it was a very long road to get there.

[sandra.k.heinzman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wow, this author can write! Will write a review later today. Highly recommend this book!

September 19, 2014: I have let this book percolate for a little while before writing this review. Daniel’s parents have retired to a remote farm in Sweden from England, the country where Daniel’s mother was born and raised until she left at age 16. One day he gets a call from his father that his mother has suffered a mental breakdown and has been hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital. Daniel decides to fly to Sweden to see them and find out what is going on. But when he’s at Heathrow airport ready to board, his mother calls him and says, “Everything that man has told you is a lie. I'm not mad... I need the police... Meet me at Heathrow.” Thus, Daniel does not get on his flight and, instead, meets his mother’s plane, and takes her to his home. The book mainly takes place in Daniel’s kitchen as his mother lays out the entire story, in chronological order, of events that happened starting in 1963 to the present, along with “proof” of events, which she has brought with her. Meanwhile, his father is calling him, telling him his mother has convinced the doctors to release her from the hospital and he believes she is on her way to England to see Daniel and that he needs to convince her she needs to go back. His mother is convinced her husband is going to fly to England to take her back himself and that he is involved in a conspiracy. The book is about Daniel’s dilemma in whom to believe, his father or his mother? Meanwhile Daniel has his own secret that he has not been able to share with his parents, that he is gay and living with his partner. This is not an essential element in the story and not covered extensively, but it is another layer to this novel about family secrets that they each have, and illustrates how family members don’t really know everything about each other, as they think they do. The novel is a psychological thriller, told in a crime novel way, inspired by the author’s own mother’s psychological break. Daniel’s mother’s narrative is extensive and detailed, and we do not find out until the end of the book which parent is telling the truth! The story is incredible and unbelievable and believable at the same time. Eventually Daniel goes to Sweden, to try to unravel the mystery himself, to determine the truth.
I think Tom Rob Smith is an excellent writer and the story just flowed. I understand that his Child 44 series is excellent, and he won numerous awards for it, so I will definitely read them at some point.

[jolerie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are two versions of the truth. One told by your mother who shares an unbelievable story about a cover-up of a crime that deals with the depravity of man and his needs, a story that embroils an entire community of people. The other is told by your father who claims your mother needs help, that she has had a psychotic episode and nothing she says should be trusted. Who do you believe? Daniel is caught in the middle of two completely different stories, but equally horrific if either one has an echo of reality. He alone is judge and juror as he weighs the evidence against experience and hopes that somewhere in all of it, the truth will be found.

Smith is masterful at leading you down rabbit trails, thinking you understand where the story is heading until you realized you didn't have a clue. His twists, turns, and revelations are mind spinning, leaving you breathless and unable to stop even though you are fully aware that the destination may not be what you expect or want. The Farm is no exception, employing similar tactics found in his previous books, letting you, the reader hang by the edge of your seat, heart racing, and mind blown. Recommended.

[suzannie1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

loved this, even though never read Tom Rob Smith before ,sinister and fast paced , i had no idea what was going to happen , this Swedish author is great i will read his other novels now ,Daniel receives a call from his Dad now retired to Sweden where his mother is originally from and she has been institutionalised for irrational behaviour , she flies to england unannounced and Daniel unwinds her story and finds it to be a representation of the truth - loved it .

[mikedraper · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Daniel tells the story in "The Farm" as he learned it from his mother.

Daniel was living with his life partner. Daniel was barely eeking out a living but thought that his parents were having a comfortable retirement in Sweden.

He receives an urgent call from his father telling him that his mother, Tilde, has had a nervous breakdown and Daniel needs to come to Sweden to help.

Wondering if he could ask his partner for money for the airfare, he gets another call. This time it's from his mother. She tells him that she's on her way to Heathrow. She also tells him that everything he's heard has been a lie and that she needs the police. She also feels that she's in danger.

From then on, the plot moves slowly to the details of his parent's lives since they moved to Sweden. For one thing, they are broke, they squandered their retirement money in a failed property investment. Also, Tilde suspects things about one of her neighbors and feels there is a conspiracy against her.

One of the biggest problems with the story is the slowness of the plot. The other difficulty I had is that none of the characters is really likable and I never felt compelled to learn more about them.

I enjoyed Smith's "The Child 44" which had excellent suspense and a feeling of dread as the story progresses. In "The Farm" I felt the story was overly long and with most of the story coming from Daniel based on what he learned from his parents, who are mundane. I also didn't care for the conclusion of the story which left me flat.

[jan0fleming · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you refuse to believe me, I will no longer consider you my son...

Daniel believed that his parents were enjoying a peaceful retirement on a remote farm in Sweden, the country of his mother's birth. But with a single phone call, everything changes.

Your mother...she's not well, his father tells him. She's been imagining things - terrible, terrible things. In fact, she has been committed to a mental hospital.

Before Daniel can board a plane to Sweden, his mother calls: Everything that man has told you is a lie. I'm not mad... I need the police... Meet me at Heathrow.

Daniel is immediately caught between his parents - whom to believe, whom to trust? He becomes his mother's unwilling judge and jury. Presented with a horrific crime, a conspiracy that implicates his own father, Daniel must examine the evidence and decide for himself: who is telling the truth? And he has secrets of his own that for too long he has kept hidden...

In a thrilling novel as transfixing as it is meticulously crafted, Tom Rob Smith creates a community, a family, a marriage and a mind in crisis, striking to the very heart of the relationship between a mother and her son.

A gripping ingenious read with excellent characters and a beautifully described location that keeps you reading because you have to know the truth....