The weather and the work.
The work in these books runs on a real calendar, real prices, and real weather. This is the calendar.
The year is 2012.
2012 was a real drought year across Southeast Minnesota. That is not set dressing — a dry summer changes what a crop is worth, what a loan looks like in September, and how much room anybody has to be generous with a neighbor.
It is also a specific technological moment. Flip phones, or no phone in a pocket at all. A landline on the kitchen wall. A scanner in the corner, which is how the fire chief hears what has happened long before the newspaper does. Nobody in this book looks anything up.
The farm year.
A season on a corn and soybean operation is a sequence of windows, and each one closes whether or not you were ready for it.
Late April into May
The planting window
Everything else waits. The ground has to be dry enough to carry equipment and warm enough for seed to do anything once it is down, and those two conditions overlap for a matter of days. Machinery that breaks in that window does not break conveniently; it breaks expensively.
May into June
Storms
Straight-line winds do more damage in this country than tornadoes, and they arrive fast. Seventy to eighty miles an hour will take a scaffold limb off a two-hundred-year-old oak and put it through whatever is standing underneath.
June
First cutting
Hay is cut, dried, raked and baled on a forecast, and the forecast is frequently wrong. A haybine, a rake and a baler all have to run on the same three days, which is why equipment that has been sitting under a tarp is a problem you find out about at the worst moment.
Late summer
Community Days
The town’s weekend. Booths, a pie table, a corn dog stand run by the Jaycees, and a dance at the park on Saturday evening. Everyone attends. Everyone is watched.
Fall
Harvest, and the reckoning
What the year actually produced, measured against what it cost to produce. This is the conversation the bank has been waiting all season to have.
The money.
Land economics run underneath every decision in these books. A replacement hydraulic lift cylinder for a planter costs $893.47, plus tax, from the parts counter in Rochester. There is no rebuild option, because you cannot reseal a crack. If you do not have it, you have epoxy and nerve, and you buy yourself another sixty hours.
Operating loans are renewed annually. Crop insurance is reviewed. Land contracts are signed. In a four-county area all of that crosses one desk at First Fillmore Bank, which is why a bank in a farm town is a social institution rather than a building you visit.
A cattle operation makes its own fertilizer. Selling the herd solves a cash problem this year and creates an input problem every year after.
The country itself.
Fillmore County, in the bluff country of Southeast Minnesota — rolling farmland with oak groves, not the flat prairie people picture when they hear Minnesota. Millfield sits on the Highway 52 corridor with about twenty-five hundred people in it. Rochester is forty-five miles off, the county seat is twenty-five, and the Root River runs through the real map underneath the invented town.
Millfield is fiction. Chatfield, Harmony, Rochester and the Root River are not, and they are where they have always been.