Watching the grain market one more time as the fat lady sings

As I write this on Monday, May 12, I recall filing my first grain column for Farm and Dairy exactly 37 years ago.

Today, I am writing the last one!

I grew up on what was called a “dirt” farm, to differentiate it from a dairy farm. At that time, the county had something like 700 farmers shipping milk and one large dirt farm. The last I knew, there were 15 dairies, and when asked one day, I could only name six. The county, at that point, was known for all of the black and white cows and was referred to as “the Holland of Ohio.”

We actually were more of a “mud” farm, with soil so poorly drained that after you put a tile line every 35 feet, you had improved the land to a rating of “very poorly” drained! Before Dad bought a tiling machine and took his kids out to figure out how to tile the farm, there were some ugly memories.

I remember the night he walked in to get me, his 7-year-old, and his 1937 L Case tractor to pull his Cletrac B out of a mudhole. He was trying to ditch off a ponded field, and he got stuck.

By the time he gave up going forward and back, the hood of the crawler was level with the ground. A previous owner had bored the L engine a quarter inch over-bore, so the result was an awesome 448 cubic inches in four holes! With the governor turned up a few hundred rpm, the exhaust had burnt the elbow off the exhaust manifold, and it was beyond loud. This was maybe the most memorable-and-miserable-to-operate tractor I was ever on, but we did get the crawler out of the mud.

My grandfather had even worse luck with his Cletrac. He used it to skid logs at one of his sawmills. He had the contract to take much of the timber off the swamp that was being dammed up to form the Pymatuning Resevoir. He worked in the winter while the ground was frozen and had a tramline that he used to haul lumber along the state line to an old road near the current causeway.

The winter of 1932-33 was warm, and they had trouble working. As spring got near, they gave up and moved the mill out. They were at least a day late because they got the Cletrac stuck, with nothing there that could pull it out.

In 1933, they closed the gates on the new dam in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, and my grandfather’s Cletrac is still there, at the bottom of the lake. Every time I cross the 2-mile causeway, I get to the state-line marker and look north, thinking about it.

Early in 1987, I sold out my farm and agribusiness after five straight years of poor grain prices and poor crops at the same time. Since my business had been getting concentrated in grain dealing, I hired on with The Ashtabula County Farm Bureau Cooperative Association (later part of Western Reserve, and then part of Centerra) to create a grain business for them. This was the first break in six generations of Clarks farming in Cherry Valley Township, Ohio.

The coop walled off an office in the feed mill warehouse, and I went to work. A little later, Rick Swart, then the editor of Farm and Dairy, began calling for grain prices to add to his commodities page. As we got acquainted, he asked me to try writing a column for him about the grain markets. We struggled to make the idea work, recognizing that it needed to be timely.

This was at the start of the desktop computer age, and we had to figure out how to transmit with dial-up connections and how to translate my musings into his newspaper in a timely fashion. I think when he started, he had to actually retype the piece into the paper.

There were some problems, but the technology got better, and we got more confident. I needed to file before 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning, and it was often the last hole filled in that week’s issue. I never met Rick, because he left after a couple of years in 1989 to go back to a family publishing business in eastern Oregon.

Susan Crowell became the editor for many years. In some respects, Rick was just a placeholder between the long terms of Eldon Groves and Susan Crowell. They were editors for most of my life.

In my column notes and on my computer, this is column number 2,072, but that is only because every time I got a new computer, I started a new number series. My best guess is that I have filed 1,850 columns, most written at the last minute, regurgitating what I had been talking about on the phone the previous few days.

A few years ago, I did some research to see what other ag publication might be interested in my writing. I came across an internet article that listed the 10 best ag publications in the country. On the list was Farm and Dairy! I was already writing for the best!

While at Ohio State University, I had a writing teacher that liked an essay of mine. She commented, knowing I was an aggie, “You must write, even if it’s for the Farm Journal.” Instead, it was for Farm and Dairy.