The twenty-seventh of March, Friday, 11:20am. Delavan is twenty minutes south of the Pekin yard, and Janelle has never once had a reason to stop there that wasn't gas.
The co-op counter is every co-op counter. A seed-corn calendar from a company that doesn't exist anymore. A jar of pens with the caps chewed. A man named Riepe in a quilted vest who has run it since before Spread Week and has the forearms of somebody who still unloads his own pallets.
She puts the planner's printout on the counter.
LOT 41 T / NONCONFORMANCE 9.4 / SUPERSEDE SCOPE: SE-0611 ONLY. FIELDS 2-14: OPEN. NO GROWER RECORDS ON FILE.
Thirteen farm accounts, off the lot 41 T delivery tickets. At the committee, every objection to her tracer had come back to the same word. Potash. Farmers put it down after lime. It's potassium. Her whole tracer is potassium. Until somebody can say who put what where, every high bottle has an alibi, and the alibi is in Riepe's computer.
"You want to know who bought potash," Riepe says.
"Fall '47 through now. Those thirteen."
"I can't tell you that." He isn't being difficult. He slides a form across, half a page, carbon underneath. CUSTOMER RECORD RELEASE. "Grower signs, I pull it. Grower doesn't sign, I didn't see you."
She asks for thirteen. He tears them off the pad one at a time and counts out loud, and at eleven he says, "This the potash lady thing."
"Yeah."
"Mill guy called here in January. Wanted the same list. Didn't have forms either." He hands her the last one. "I told him the same."
In the truck she lays the forms on the passenger seat and puts her thermos on them so they don't slide. The planner wants to log the stop. It has OUTSIDE FORWARD SCOPE up before she's typed a number.
21. DELAVAN. RIEPE NEEDS A SIGNATURE PER FARM. 13 FORMS. MILL ALREADY ASKED IN JAN. 3/4 H GREY.
The thirty-first, Tuesday, 6:40pm. Kurt Lutz reads the release at his kitchen table with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, which means he isn't reading it. He's deciding. His wife puts coffee down for Janelle without asking and stays standing by the stove.
Lutz's field was one of the five high ones in December. K 5.9, on a bottle eleven days past hold that she'd marked expired and kept on the sheet anyway, because the number was the number.
"I'll sign it," he says. "You're not going to like it."
"Okay."
"I bought potash in Delavan. October. After the lime went on." He signs. "Hundred fifty pound of oh-oh-sixty on the south forty. Dad always did it after lime. I didn't think about it."
She does it in her head before she does it on paper. Ninety pounds of K2O an acre. Dale's number for a twenty-to-thirty-point soil-test jump on that ground was a couple hundred, but that was for K the clay had already locked up. Lutz's went on in October and the bottle came in December. Fresh potash sits loose in the top inch for a season before the clay takes it. Ninety is not nothing. On a December bottle it could be most of it. And Lutz's bottle sat on the south forty's tile.
"That's your field off the clean list," she says.
"Figured." He slides the form back. "Mill going to use it?"
"The mill's going to say it's all of them."
"It's not all of them. It's me." He taps the paper. "Put that I said that."
She writes it on the bottom margin, above his signature, in block letters so the planner's camera can read it: GROWER STATES K APPLIED SOUTH 40 ONLY, OCT 2047, ~90 LB K2O/A. ALL OTHER LUTZ GROUND NONE. He initials it. His wife watches the whole thing, and when Janelle leaves she hands her a coffee in a travel cup and says not to bring it back.
Same night, 8:15pm. The yard. She parks under the sodium light because the truck's dome is out and she needs to see the sheet.
Five high fields in December: Gary, Lutz, Ehrhardt, Miller, the Bloomington lease. Gary's is clean on paper. Donna pulled that herself. Lutz is now dirty, and he's the one who told her.
The planner reads the photo of the release and offers to fix the exhibit. What it means by fix is drop Lutz and recompute.
HIGH-K FIELDS: 4 OF 14. SIGNAL CLEANER.
Cleaner is what YardDesk would call a cherry-pick in the first line of its next filing. Dropping the field you don't like is how you get a method tabled.
She doesn't drop it. She adds a column.
GROWER K APPLICATION: YES / NONE (SIGNED) / UNKNOWN.
Lutz goes in YES. Gary goes in NONE. Twelve go in UNKNOWN, which is ugly and true. Under the table, in her words: ~90 LB K2O/A, 2 MONTHS BEFORE SAMPLING, UNFIXED. COULD BE MOST OF THE RISE. THIS FIELD IS CONFOUNDED AND STAYS IN.
She emails it to Dale and to Ines Okafor down in Mason County. Subject: LUTZ BOUGHT POTASH.
Dale answers in four minutes, which means choir let out early.
Good. Now you have a method that can be wrong.
Then a second one, a minute later.
Oh-oh-sixty is muriate. Every pound of K he spread came with most of a pound of chloride. Ash doesn't carry chloride. Ask the lab for Cl on the December bottles before somebody pours them out.
She reads it twice in the cab. Potash puts K and chloride in the tile together. Lime ash puts in K alone. Two lines on one graph, and the farmer doesn't have to say anything for them to show up. She forwards it to the lab with the bottle numbers and a request for chloride on everything still in the cooler, expired or not.
The ninth of April, Thursday, 6:50am. The Bloomington lease is the one field on her list with two names on it. Mick Brauer farms it. A company called Prairiefold owns it for a dentist in Naperville who has never stood on it.
Brauer is in the pole barn greasing a twenty-four-row planter folded up like a cricket. He wipes his hands on a red shop rag before he takes the form, then wipes them again, and still leaves a thumbprint of black on the carbon.
"Riepe sent you."
"Riepe sent me."
He reads it twice. "Account's in my name. I buy the inputs. I bill the owner half the lime." He signs it on the planter tire, the flattest thing in the barn. "No potash on that ground since '44. Soil test said I didn't need it."
"Then that's what it'll say."
"Prairiefold's going to want a copy."
"Send them one."
He does, a photo from his phone with his thumb in the corner, and cc's her. She is backing out of his lane when it answers.
PRAIRIEFOLD FARMLAND SERVICES / OWNER DESK: RECORD RELEASE DECLINED ON BEHALF OF OWNER. OWNER DOES NOT AUTHORIZE DISCLOSURE OF INPUT RECORDS RELATED TO PENDING CREDIT MATTERS. THIS IS AN AUTOMATED RESPONSE.
Eleven minutes. Nobody in Naperville read it. The owner desk saw CREDIT and RELEASE in one photo and did what it was built for.
She pulls onto the shoulder by the grain leg and calls Delavan.
"Whose name is on that account."
"Brauer's," Riepe says. "Owner never bought a thing from me in his life."
"Then the owner desk can't decline it."
"Owner desk can say what it wants. I go by the signature on my counter." A register drawer, closing. "I'll pull it Monday."
"Read me the top of your form."
Paper rustles. "Customer record release. Account number, account holder, signature." A pause. "Doesn't say a word about land. Never has. The dentist isn't on my form because the dentist isn't my customer."
So the owner desk objected to a paper it was never on.
She logs the half hour. Grey, OUTSIDE FORWARD SCOPE, and under that a line that's new this month: THIRD-PARTY OBJECTION ON FILE. The planner has put Prairiefold's email in her docket like it weighs something. It is an objection from somebody who isn't a party to a release that doesn't mention them, filed against a sampler who didn't ask them. She leaves it there. It's the funniest thing in her docket and it isn't hers to delete.
The sixteenth, Thursday, 7:30pm. Ehrhardt's yard. He doesn't ask her in. He stands on the porch step with the dog sitting behind his legs, and the planter is hitched in the drive with the lights already on it for the morning.
He doesn't take the form. He looks at it in her hand.
"Mill's lawyer called me too," he says. "February. Very polite."
"I'm not the mill."
"I know you're not. Anything I sign, somebody reads. That's all I know about it." He isn't angry. He's planting at five, and his hands are already in his jacket pockets, done with the day. "My dad signed a soil-conservation easement in 2031 and they're still reading that."
"If you don't sign, your field's unknown."
"Then it's unknown." He nods at the dog, and the dog goes in, and so does he.
She stands in the drive a minute with the planter lights on her. Then she puts the form back on the pile, under the thermos.
The twenty-fourth, Friday, 4:10pm. Planting started Tuesday. Every farm she needs is in a tractor cab now, which is why she spent two weeks of evenings at kitchen tables before it was.
Riepe has the pulls in a manila folder with a rubber band around it. He lays them on the counter like a hand of cards.
Brauer: none. Miller: none. Six small fields up toward Hartsburg, over the Logan County line: none, none, none, none, none, and one with forty pounds of starter. "Ten-thirty-four-oh," Riepe says, and turns the ticket so she can read the analysis. Zero K. And it went on Tuesday, at planting, four months after her bottles. It couldn't be in them if it were pure potash. Eight signed. Eight clean.
"Ehrhardt," he says.
"Won't."
"The other three?"
"An estate. A guy in Arizona. One I can't find."
Riepe puts the rubber band around his own wrist. "Mill guy's going to come back in here."
"With forms?"
"Not with forms."
In the truck under the yard light she puts the column back up.
GROWER K APPLICATION: YES 1 / NONE 9 / UNKNOWN 4.
Four of the five high fields have paper now. Gary, none. Brauer, none. Miller, none. Lutz, ninety pounds, his own words in his own initials. Ehrhardt, unknown.
The planner has read the folder photos. It offers a button she hasn't seen before.
INFER UNKNOWN FIELDS FROM CO-OP AGGREGATE SALES (TAZEWELL CO., FALL 2047)? ESTIMATED P(K APPLIED), EHRHARDT: 0.31.
Thirty-one percent. It would turn Ehrhardt into a number, and the number would be low, and the table would look better. It would also be the first thing YardDesk circled, and YardDesk would be right. Six of her fourteen rows are in Logan County. The planner wants to fill a Tazewell farm's blank with Tazewell receipts while a third of the sheet is across a county line it can't see. And a probability isn't a man who said no.
And he did say no. To her face, on his own step. The planner would be answering for him anyway, off what his neighbors bought.
She declines it. Four rows of UNKNOWN. Under the table: UNKNOWN MEANS NO SIGNED RECORD. NOT ESTIMATED.
The chloride is the harder one, and she knows it before the lab calls. Ehrhardt's December bottle is in the cooler with the rest. If it comes back with chloride riding up next to the K, that is his tile water telling her what he wouldn't sign. Same 0.31, only from his own ground. She doesn't cancel it. It's a water number and she reports water. But she types a second line under the table so nobody has to guess later what she meant: CL IS A WATER RESULT. IT DOES NOT FILL THE RECORD COLUMN.
Then she does the part that's hers. She opens the 2049 pilot draft Haskell sent from Springfield and adds a field to the bottle intake sheet, required, before anybody can log a fall sample:
GROWER K RECORD, LIME DATE TO SAMPLE DATE: SIGNED YES / SIGNED NONE / NOT OBTAINED. PRODUCT ANALYSIS FROM TICKET (N-P-K). DATE APPLIED.
Not "ever." Between the lime and the bottle. And off the ticket, not off somebody's memory of what a starter usually is.
If the pilot is going to flag lots in four districts, every sampler can carry a stack of half-page carbons to a co-op counter. It won't let anyone allocate. It will mean that the next time a bottle comes back high, somebody has already asked the farmer, in writing, before the mill's lawyer does.
She sends it to Haskell, Dale, and Ines.
Ines answers first. Mason has two co-ops. One of them is a Casey's.
Dale answers second. Not obtained is a good column. Most of my career is that column.
Haskell doesn't answer. Haskell answers on Mondays.
The planner logs the evening, 1.0 H, grey. The objection line is still sitting there under the Brauer stop. She doesn't clear it. She puts the folder of carbons in the glovebox with the tile thermometer and the spare probe tips, where she can find them in October, and starts the truck.
25. 8 MORE SIGNED, 8 CLEAN. EHRHARDT NO, 3 GONE. 1 YES / 9 NONE / 4 UNKNOWN. DECLINED THE 0.31. PUT THE FORM IN THE PILOT.