Grief made her tired.
It made quiet rooms too quiet.
It made ordinary decisions harder than they should have been.
But work still had to be done.
Cattle needed feeding whether Carl was alive or not.
Fence failed whether Raymond was there to repair it or not.
Numbers accumulated.
So Della kept working.
Every evening she opened the green ledger.
If she spent forty-seven cents on bolts, she wrote forty-seven cents.
If she sold a cull cow, she recorded the price.
If she drove to La Crosse and used two dollars and thirty cents worth of gasoline, she wrote it down.
By 1971, she had nineteen thousand four hundred dollars in savings.
No mortgage.
No operating loan.
No machinery note.
That did not mean she was rich.
It meant she had margin.
And Raymond had taught her that margin was what kept bad years from becoming permanent problems.
The carrots entered her thinking in August 1971.
Six weeks before the Holmgren auction, Della drove to a horse boarding operation outside La Crosse.
The owner was a woman named Frances Oberlin.
Frances had boarded horses for twenty years.
She managed thirty-six animals on leased and owned ground and understood winter feeding better than anyone Della knew.
Della had gone there originally to look at a broodmare Frances was considering selling.
They spent twenty minutes with the mare and two hours talking about feed.
Della asked:
"What does it cost you per horse through winter?"
Frances laughed.
"Too much."
"How much?"
Frances gave her the numbers.
Hay.
Oats.
Mineral supplement.
Occasional commercial feed.
Della asked about root vegetables.
Frances looked interested.
"Carrots?"
"Carrots."
"Beets."
"Turnips."
"Anything like that."
"Sure."
"How much?"
"As supplemental feed?"
"Enough to matter."
Frances explained that horses ate root crops readily when introduced properly.
Carrots provided energy, moisture, and variety.
They were not a complete ration.
They did not replace forage.
But used correctly, they could supplement winter feeding.
Frances had tried buying carrots in bulk before.
The problem was price.
Produce suppliers charged based on human food markets.
At those prices, feeding roots to thirty horses made no economic sense.
Della asked:
"What price would?"
Frances told her.
Della memorized it.
When she got home, she opened the ledger.
She wrote:
ROOT FEED POSSIBILITY.
Then she calculated.
Price per hundredweight.
Estimated daily ration.
Storage.
Transport.
Spoilage.
Labor.
Compared with commercial supplements.
Then she recalculated at different assumptions.
The numbers worked only if the carrots were cheap.
Very cheap.
Retail carrots were useless to the idea.
Cannery rejects were different.
In September, everybody began talking about the Holmgren crop.
The cannery rejected it.
Forty tons.
Della drove past the farm.
She did not stop at the house.
She parked along the road beside the back six.
Walked into the rows.