Farm Life Lost

By Jeremy Kester

Farming, as we understand it, is obsolete. And though Willa knows it, she holds onto her farm refusing to give into the political pressures and tricks to capture her land and stop her. But everything around her is falling apart. And something is making it more difficult to even operate the farm – or for her to live the only way she knows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeremy Kester
• Release date: Aug 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223086697

Book preview

For my wife and son, the two people who most tolerate me.

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Farm Life Lost

Willa wiped the sweat from her brow as she shut the panel on the large machine next to her. It was the third time it had broken down in the last week. An inconvenience on any normal time of the year, but during harvest, it was more troubling. Crops needed collecting before the first days of the frost hit. Equipment breakdowns only threatened that possibility.

Were she more influential, she would petition the collectives of the world to postpone the frost. It wasn’t real anyway. At least it wasn’t real like she had been told by her father that frosts should be, a natural phenomenon brought on by weather patterns such as high pressure systems, cold fronts, and other nonsense that meant little to the society Willa was now a part of. The natural cycle as they called it, was anything but natural.

Give it a try, she yelled up to the boy operating the controls.

The boy nodded before disappearing back into the cab. Her nephew Quinn was an honest boy. He worked hard for her, which was important as he was one of only a few in the family who had opted to stay. His hair was rusted brown, usually streaked with grime from any one of the many tasks he kept himself occupied with. It almost seemed he thrived on the farm more than she did.

That day he was operating the harvesting equipment since John had disappeared the week before. John claimed he found a better job working in one of the collection towers. She was glad for it though; John was a real sonofabitch.

John had left to work at one of those growing centers — vertical farms. Abominations, really. They called them collection towers.  How and why that name came about she never knew. She guessed the name to reference all the farms like hers that were collected as they proliferated. She hated them, although she didn’t hate them for their purpose, only the effects they have brought forth. They made her life obsolete.

Farming was no longer considered efficient. Or environmentally friendly for that matter. The amount of food