The county’s soil inspector looked at the test results, looked at the field, and looked back at the results. Then he said something no one in Caddo County, Oklahoma had ever heard before. “This can’t be right. This soil is better than anything in the state.”
The farmer standing next to him, a thirty-eight-year-old man in muddy boots named Curtis Wade, just smiled. He’d been waiting twelve years to hear someone say that, but twelve years earlier every person in this county had told Curtis the same thing. “That ground is dead. Nothing will ever grow there again. You just wasted eight thousand dollars on a grave.”
This is the story of how a broke twenty-six-year-old bought the worst land in Oklahoma and turned it into the best. But it’s also a story about what happens when you listen to the soil instead of the people standing on it.
Let me take you back to 1971. Curtis Wade came home from Vietnam in March of 1970 with a Purple Heart, a bad knee, and six thousand two hundred dollars in savings from two years of combat pay he’d never had a chance to spend. He was twenty-five years old. He worked odd jobs for a year, fencing, hay hauling, anything that paid, and saved another six thousand dollars.
Before the war, he’d worked on his grandfather’s farm outside Binger, Oklahoma. Eighty acres of red clay and wheat stubble that his grandfather Elton Wade had farmed since 1932. Elton was the kind of farmer who talked to his dirt, not in a crazy way, in the way a man talks to something he respects. He’d kneel down in his field, grab a handful of soil, smell it, crumble it between his fingers, and tell Curtis things no textbook had ever printed.
“You see how this breaks apart? That’s life in there. Worms, roots, fungus, all working. When the soil crumbles like cake, it’s healthy. When it clumps like concrete, it’s dying. And when it turns to powder and blows away, it’s already dead.” Elton died in 1969 while Curtis was overseas. The eighty acres went to Curtis’s uncle, who promptly leased it to a corporate operation and moved to Tulsa. By the time Curtis got home, his grandfather’s farm was being run by strangers who didn’t talk to the dirt.
Curtis needed his own land, but in 1971, farmland in Caddo County was running one hundred eighty to two hundred twenty dollars an acre for decent ground. His twelve thousand two hundred dollars wouldn’t buy sixty acres of good land, and sixty acres wasn’t enough to build a real operation. Then he heard about the Dawson place.
Howard Dawson had farmed one hundred sixty acres six miles north of Anadarko from 1948 to 1965. He’d pushed that ground hard, wheat every year, heavy chemical fertilizer, no rotation, no rest. By the early 1960s, the yields were dropping. By 1965, the soil was so depleted that wheat barely made twelve bushels an acre, less than half the county average.
Howard gave up, moved to Oklahoma City, and left the land sitting. For six years, nobody touched it. No cover crops, no management, nothing. The topsoil started washing away in the spring rains. The organic matter, already low from years of abuse, dropped to almost nothing. The county soil survey classified it as severely degraded, one step above worthless.