Should I stay, or should I go? Farm families are living Maggie's question
By Grant Overstake
Farm succession turns on who takes it over. The families in the Harvest Public Media story are real. The Steeles are not, and in my novel the son who would have taken the farm is buried in the Grain Valley churchyard, which leaves an empty chair at the harvest dinner, and leaves his seventeen-year-old sister to answer the question, “Should I stay, or should I go?”
Harvest Public Media published a story this week about what it costs to hand a farm to your kid. It ran on KMUW here in Wichita and on public stations across the Midwest and Great Plains. The families in it are real. The one in my novel Maggie Vaults Over the Moon is not, and it is working the same problem.
Mike Langseth took 14 years to take over his family's operation in Barney, North Dakota, buying in a larger share at a time. "Every time it stepped up to a bigger percentage of the farm, it was always a little bit of a financial stretch to have that money to operate on a bigger scale," he told reporter Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval. The house he lives in was built by his great-great-grandfather.
A hundred years, and a buyout
In Barnesville, Minnesota, Rick Maier is 70 and getting ready to hand his farm to his son Andy. The farm turned 100 this year. To finish taking it over, Andy has to buy out his father and his uncle, and the buyout depends on the farm having good years. "I don't have a big savings account somewhere," Andy said. "It's all pretty much tied up in the business."
The part I keep rereading is Andy Maier remembering the year his neighbors quit. Crop prices fell in 2018 and people his age walked away.
"People my age, they had a college degree," he said. "Why am I out here working real hard and not gaining anything when I could just go to town and get a decent job at a bank or wherever doing something much easier, much less stressful, and make a decent living for my family?"That question is the engine of my novel.
The question lands on his sister
Maggie Steele is seventeen, a senior, on a thousand acres of Kansas wheat. I took more from her than these families have lost. One crash on Highway 39 killed her brother Alex. What she finds afterward is a twelve-foot bamboo pole her father bought years earlier at a school consolidation auction, sitting behind the straw bales in the hayloft where nobody had thought to look. She starts vaulting at a school that has never had a girl in the event.
Every family in the Harvest story is working out which child takes over. In my book that child is gone before the first chapter ends, and the question lands on his sister.
Underneath the sport is the choice the Maiers are working through at their kitchen table. The Steeles already made their version of it. They lost two thousand acres to the bank during the Farm Crisis and stayed on the thousand that was left. You can love a place and still not be able to afford to stay on it. You can leave and carry it anyway.
Kirkus called it "a fine YA novel about perseverance in sports and in life." US Olympic pole vaulter Becky Holliday said, "This book captured me cover to cover. I highly recommend it."
The late Kansas poet Diane Wahto wrote, "Overstake gets everything right about Kansas. The story is set on a farm not too far away from my home town, and it is sweet to read about a land I knew so well."
That is the review I think about most. Grain Valley Township does not exist. I made up the town, the school, the co-op, and the family. Wahto knew that and said it felt like home anyway.
Read the Harvest Public Media story.
Harvest Public Media is a Local Journalism Center, established in 2010 with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to strengthen collaboration among Midwest public broadcasting stations. You can support the work with a gift to Harvest through its partner KCUR 89.3.
Grant Overstake is the author of Maggie Vaults Over the Moon and The Real Education of TJ Crowley. He lives in Wichita.