I’ve been working the last several days putting fence back around a 120 acre field.  A few parts of it were in CRP until a couple years ago.  Due to how those parts laid, we kept the cows off it during that time.

We bid the parcels in for ten years.  The intent was to focus on other fields, and other parts of this one, in building terraces, building fertility, clearing trees from fence rows, and installing tile.  Once the ten years were up, during which the acres were to sit idled in grass, we’d finish these parcels.

CRP is a tool that works for many landowners.  It worked for us in getting to where we wanted to be.  But the idea that conservation and farming are two different things is bothersome.  The reality is that they need to go hand in hand.

A year or two after we bid it in, my father was diagnosed with a lung condition.  I came to regret these acres.  I was worried he’d never see the completed project.

In 2020, the acres came out.  In the spring of 2021, we completed the terraces on it.  Dad put the final touches on them himself.  When they were done, we hosted a local Boy Scout chapter intent on earning merit badges.

After a year of soybeans, we seeded a few of the acres back down this spring.  This time we seeded them to alfalfa and let it go to work, protecting the most sensitive acres with year-long cover, and converting sunlight to the protein found in beef.

Tonight, we got cows back out onto those stalk acres.  Dad helped with that, too.  They’ll graze for a few weeks on the residue that makes up the afterthought of last fall’s harvest.  They’ll speed that residues break down into the soil, and in the process we will will channel it to build fertility on the acres most in need.  Here in the bleak winter, they’ll convert some of summer’s leftover sunshine, caught by a corn crop now in the bin, to the protein a family will put on their plate.

Tonight, it felt like a long process was finally done.  Tonight, talking to Dad, we talked about what lie next.

The Oxford Dictionary defines merit, in its verb form, as follows:  deserve or be worthy of.  Perhaps we, the land, and our animals all merit each other.