Pastoral Ponderings:
A Shepherd's Blog

Samantha

“I told my neighbor, Bob, that I can make beer out of rice straw!” Troy is one of those farmers whose sense of humor is as much in demand as his hay. “And Bob can’t wait to find out how I do it.” He had stopped by with his 15 year old daughter, Vicky, to check on a high school friend, his ’67 GTO. The ‘Goat’ perched on supports in Lance’s shop having been lovingly disembodied and repaired in the restoration process. Vicky was impressed. She was one of three of Troy’s teenagers and she had laid claim to the classic.

Today Troy was pedaling rice straw as opposed to the more traditional wheat and oat straw. We would be lambing soon and the wet weather forced the ewes into the barns at night. The mud and moisture needed dry bedding for the pregnant ewes until spring’s sunshine dried and disinfected the shelters.

The valley’s rice farmers would burn their crop’s residue after harvest on breezy fall days. California’s growing population resented the resulting haze and banned the practice. Rice straw, unlike other chaff, is dense and difficult to decompose. Thus, the need to remove it from the fields expeditiously. If our barns’ rice straw bedding didn’t break down to crumbly fertilizer for our pastures, we would just utilize it for erosion control on some of our steeper hillsides.

Troy had uprooted and moved his young family from southern Oregon to Northern California to improve his business opportunities. He had purchased a bare corner lot in a small town and built an unpresuming home and several hay barns. When the banks were lending, Troy built his business. A squeeze and a receiver were added to his inventory of two truck and trailers for hay hauling. His bare corner lot became a thriving enterprise as he conquered competition with his ‘can do’ attitude. Marketing the undesirable rice straw was just one more avenue for Troy to welcome a challenge and to improve his bottom line.

The first time I saw Samantha, Troy’s wife, she was talking animatedly on a cell phone, her broad smile deflecting the difficulty of her predicament. Her truck-and-trailer loaded with 25 tons of alfalfa hay was stranded in one of the two lanes in our small town of Penn Valley. Not a note of drama in her demeanor, she unflappingly directed traffic around her rig as she called for assistance.

The second time I saw Samantha, she was driving the squeeze behind Troy’s truck-and-trailer for a delivery to our ranch. A squeeze is like a giant forklift that removes the hay in large blocks off of the trucks. This thirty-something Miley Cyrus look-alike was eager to finish the day’s deliveries so she and Troy could return home to watch her son in a baseball game. She discussed the imploding economy before the rest of us were aware of an imminent crisis. Bounced checks, credit card checks, IOU’s were becoming all too frequent phenomena in their business. Their barns were full, commented Troy. They had something solid to show for their financial investment.

While most of us are now struggling through the financial meltdown, Samantha and Troy have had to find even more fortitude. Shortly after her hay delivery at our ranch, Samantha was involved in a recreational accident that permanently limited her physical mobility. Immediately after the devastating event, extended family members and neighbors alternated in supporting Troy and Samantha’s young family with meals and schoolwork and also assisting with on-site hay sales. When Troy resumed deliveries, he would often truck his hay into the night. During one of these after-hours deliveries of straw, Troy opened up about the accident and Samantha’s recovery. “We’ll get through this,” Troy confirmed. “I’ve got great insurance.”

Troy’s neighbor, Bob, is a portrait of the more typical consumer during this unpredictable economy. He had used an equity loan to enlarge an already large home as well as to purchase other unnecessary embellishments. The amount that Bob is underwater on his home, around $80,000.00, is the approximate amount that Troy owes to the State of California due to the latest legislative whims of the California Air Resources Board. All diesel mufflers need to be retrofitted with state-approved emission devices and installed by state-approved contractors. Troy’s immediate priority is retrofitting his rigs so Samantha can drive in tandem with her husband once again for the hay deliveries.

Bob is nevertheless preoccupied with the tricks that Troy employs with his alchemy that transforms crop residue into home brew. One day Troy offers Bob a ride on one of his many daily deliveries. This day’s last delivery consisted of ten tons of rice straw bales after which Troy stopped at the local market for a couple of beers. Bob enjoyed the ride and the beer at the end of the day. Bob still doesn’t get it.

copyright@2010.
Lance and Gay Columbel. All rights reserved.