Every other farmer had looked at the Dawson place and seen one hundred sixty acres of ruin. Curtis looked at the fence lines and saw proof of resurrection. He just had to figure out how to wake it up.
Let me tell you about the first three years, because this is where Curtis nearly lost everything. Curtis didn’t plant a cash crop in 1971, not one acre. In a county where every farmer planted every field every year because every dollar counted, Curtis Wade planted nothing anyone could sell.
Instead, he planted cover crops, a mix of crimson clover, hairy vetch, and cereal rye, the same species his grandfather had used on the fence line margins of his own farm. Curtis seeded all one hundred sixty acres and then did something that drove his neighbors insane. He left it alone, didn’t plow it under, didn’t spray it, just let it grow, die back, decompose, and feed the soil. Then he planted another round, and another.
Word spread fast. “That Wade boy bought the Dawson place and he’s growing weeds on purpose. He’s planting clover on dead ground. Might as well plant prayers. Must have left his brain in Vietnam.” Phil Mercer heard the talk at the diner, drove out to the Dawson place in October of 1971, saw one hundred sixty acres of clover and rye waving in the wind, and shook his head all the way back to town.
Curtis heard every word, the mocking, the pity, the whispers. Some nights he sat on the porch of the old Dawson house, roof half gone, no running water for the first two months, and wondered if they were right. He’d spent everything he had on land that might never produce a crop. He was eating beans and rice every day, working winter jobs at the grain elevator just to keep the lights on.
Year two, Curtis planted the same cover crop mix again. He also started doing something he’d watched his grandfather do. He walked his fields every week with a shovel and a notebook. He’d dig a hole, study what he found, and write it down. Worm count, root depth, soil color, moisture level, smell.
By the fall of 1972, the changes were small, but real. The soil was darker in patches. The clover had started fixing nitrogen into the ground. When Curtis grabbed a handful from the spots where the cover crops were thickest, it didn’t blow away. It held together. Barely, but it held.
Year three, 1973. More cover crops, more waiting, more neighbors shaking their heads. Curtis was running out of money. He took a full-time job at the elevator that winter, worked dawn to dark, and spent every spare hour walking his fields with that shovel.
Then, in the spring of 1974, three years after he’d bought the Dawson place, Curtis planted his first cash crop. Forty acres of winter wheat on the ground that had received the heaviest cover cropping. The other one hundred twenty acres stayed in cover. The wheat came up thin. His neighbors’ fields were already knee-high when Curtis’s was ankle-high.
The gossip intensified. Phil Mercer drove by, saw the scraggly wheat, and stopped at the diner to tell everyone that the Dawson place was still a graveyard. But Curtis watched the wheat through June and July, watched it thicken, watched the heads fill, watched the stems strengthen in ground that everyone said couldn’t grow anything.