For children of the corn, it's Nebraska

[Eric the Red]

For children of the corn, it's Nebraska

 

By John Henderson

Denver Post Staff Writer

Article Last Updated:11/07/2006 07:12:10 PM MST

 

 

Emerald, Neb. - I'm sitting 6 feet in the air inside a combine that's gobbling thousands of cornstalks into its gaping maw. I am surrounded by cornfields as far as I can see. It is an ocean of faded yellow cornstalks seemingly stretching all the way to the horizon. If I were in an ocean I'd be looking for a life preserver about now.

 

Yet if I turn around, find my car and drive 15 minutes I'd run into Nebraska's Memorial Stadium and home to, yes, the Cornhuskers.

 

I never realized the magnitude of corn and its importance to the state of Nebraska until I started coming to Lincoln for football games. Enter Lincoln from the south and you see a sign reading "Welcome to Lincoln." On the other side of the sign are cornfields.

 

Inside the city limits.

 

Yes, in the state capital, home to a major state university of 22,000 students, there are cornfields. Hundreds of acres of them. It looks like something out of a Far Side cartoon. Talk about stereotypes. It's the equivalent of reading "Welcome to Seattle" and seeing a sheet of rain or "Welcome to Los Angeles" and seeing a mall full of plastic surgeons.

 

But this is real. Ron and Chad Deinert are third- and fourth- generation farmers who have tilled the same land Chad's great-grandfather farmed in the early 1900s. It isn't much of a haul from my Lincoln hotel. About 10 minutes down Interstate 80 I turn off and west a few hundred yards toward Emerald.

 

Just past Merle's Food and Drink and before the local convenience store advertising "Live Bait, Tackle, Ice and Food," I turn right up the hill to find Chad driving his tractor along the sea of corn.

 

Chad Deinert, 36, is a burly guy wearing an un-tucked blue work shirt and neatly cropped hair under a ball cap. He's not the kind of person you ask what the "N" on the Nebraska football helmet stands for. I do anyway and, yes, he says with a laugh, he knows it stands for "Knowledge" but then he does too, having graduated from Nebraska in 1993 with a degree in business management.

 

That's what farming really is about today. In his grandfather's day, the family picked the corn by hand and threw it into a truck. I notice Chad isn't sweating.

 

"Anymore there's not much physical labor," he says. "It's all mechanical. It's nice being outside all the time and we have all the modern conveniences."

 

As he says this, Ron Deinert drives up in his modern convenience. His combine is tricked out like a limo without the champagne on ice. It has a radio and an air-conditioner that automatically blows in more cool air when you turn toward the sun. A computer shows you how many bushels of corn per acre you're driving over.

 

It also steers like a Lamborghini and at $200,000 is about as expensive. But let's see how many corncobs a Lamborghini can fit in its trunk.

 

The first question that comes to mind is if they eat corn. They're looking at it all day. Do they really eat corn or send out for Chinese? I remember in grade school picking green beans in Oregon. It started out as a summer job for baseball-card money and grew into a gross violation of child labor laws. I hated it. I lasted two days. To this day, my idea of manual labor is transcribing interview tape.

 

But I remember a foreman I worked for saying he couldn't stand the look of green beans. I ask Chad if he eats this stuff. I thought it was a good question.

 

"It's all used for feed," he says, resisting the impulse to deck me. "Cattle. Hogs."

 

Oh.

 

Still, in Nebraska, that is serious business. According to the University of Nebraska Extension in Lancaster County, the state produces 1.27 billion bushels of corn per year. That's 142 billion ears which, if placed end to end, would stretch to the moon and back - 47 times. And you wonder why hogs are fat.

 

I ask Ron if there's a certain pride about farming corn in Nebraska, the kind that moves football fans to wear those plastic corncob hats to games.

 

"In farming in general there's a certain pride to be involved in it," he says as we go down one long row and back and then down another and back. "Farming has always been a family business."

 

This year's drought has cut production in Nebraska from 35-50 percent but going around and around his 60 acres makes me wonder how bad business could be. I'm seeing so much corn I start hallucinating about Stephen King's "Children of the Corn." I keep seeing glassy-eyed teens approaching me with scythes.

 

However, I can't help noticing there's a certain beauty in a Nebraska cornfield. The sea of yellow is a calming backdrop for stressed-out souls seeking an inner peace. Ron isn't impressed with my poetry.

 

"Well, maybe so," he says. "Other people talk about driving through Michigan and seeing all the beautiful trees. My wife and I drove through there in the summer and after a half day of trees, I'm sick of trees. You drive around Nebraska, on the Interstate from one end to the other and you're watching the cornfields and they ain't so beautiful."

 

I thank them for their hospitality and hit Merle's for a beer. Then as I leave the parking lot, no more than 50 yards away, is a signing reading, "Welcome to Lincoln." And in the distance I think I hear the clash of shoulder pads.

 

Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road. He can be reached at 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.

[huskernumerouno]

Good read

[Eric the Red]

That writer has a hard on for pissing Nebraska people off