By the middle of June, that field was telling the whole story to anybody who drove past. And in our country, everybody drives past.
Corn planted right comes up like a church choir. Everybody the same height. Standing in straight rows.
This came up like a school picture. Knee high in one spot, four inches tall the next. Skips in the row as long as a man lying down. Then three plants crowded together in a clump. Yellow streaks where the roots couldn’t break out of a seed trench that had baked hard as a clay pot.
Nobody had put down a weed killer ahead of it, either. The waterhemp was coming up in a green haze between the rows.
And the pivot hadn’t turned once. It sat at the exact angle it had been parked at last September. With a flat tire on the fifth tower.
On the east eighty, they’d planted dryland corn at an irrigated population. Thirty-two thousand seeds to the acre, on ground that’ll only carry twenty-four thousand in a good year.
