Water lines.
Then breeding records.
Movement.
Conformation.
Handling.
Carol learned the produce network too.
Which cannery to call.
Which manager returned calls.
Which loads were safe.
Which loads to refuse.
How to calculate hauling cost before accepting "free" produce.
That lesson mattered.
Free was often expensive after labor and transport.
Della made Carol calculate every load.
"Twenty miles?"
"Yes."
"Truck fuel?"
Carol answered.
"Labor?"
She answered.
"Storage loss?"
Another answer.
"Then is it still cheap?"
Sometimes yes.
Sometimes no.
Della wanted her to understand the difference.
The farm crisis slowly eased.
But agriculture after it was different.
Larger operations.
Different credit habits.
More caution in some families.
More consolidation in others.
In 1995, the Vernon County Agricultural Extension Office invited Della to speak at a meeting on alternative farm income.
She refused first.
Then Carol said:
"You should."
Della looked at her.
"Why?"
"People ask you the same questions every week anyway."
"That's different."
"Only because there's no microphone."
Della went.
She was fifty-five.
The meeting room held farmers of every age.
Some dairy.
Beef.
Vegetable.
Hay.
A few families looking for side enterprises because their primary operations no longer produced enough margin.
Della stood in front.
No slides.
No prepared speech.
She placed one green ledger on the table.
Then said:
"I started with a paid-for farm, a ledger, and sixty dollars at an auction."
People smiled.
Many knew the story.
She continued.
"The sixty dollars wasn't the important part."
"The paid-for farm was."
The room became quiet.
"My father paid the mortgage off before I inherited it."
"That gave me choices other people did not have."
"So if anybody tells this story like I outsmarted every farmer who borrowed money, don't believe them."
That surprised some people.
Della continued.
"The farm crisis wasn't caused by people forgetting how to farm."
"A lot of very good farmers got caught with operating debt whose cost changed faster than their farms could change."
She looked toward Dale Kettner, who happened to be sitting near the side wall.
He met her eyes.
She continued.
"I don't know how to control interest rates."
"I know how to control whether I build an operation that requires a certain interest rate to survive."
Then she opened the ledger.
"For twenty years, I fed part of my winter ration with produce other markets rejected."
"Not rotten produce."
"Not unsafe produce."
"Produce that failed somebody else's requirement."
She held up a page.
"The cannery needed straight carrots."
"My horses did not."
A few people laughed.
Della smiled slightly.