He hated it.
“They don’t understand farming, Dot,” he’d say at the dinner table. “They look at a farmer and see a risk. They see dirt and old boots and a pickup truck with rust on the fenders. They don’t see the man who’s been feeding this country for three generations.”
He watched First National turn down loan after loan. Good farmers. Honest men. Men whose fathers and grandfathers had worked the same land for a hundred years. They’d come in with their hats in their hands and their best shirts on, and some young man in a suit would look at their boots and their hands and say no.
One afternoon in 1967, my own father went in for a loan.
He needed eight thousand dollars to replace his milking equipment. The old system had broken down. Without new equipment, he’d have to sell the herd. Forty cows. Thirty years.
