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I still open at six.
Habit.
And nobody comes at six now.
My name is Junie Ostrander.
Roy and I opened this shop in 1998, in a Quonset off County Road F-62.
He died in 2038. I kept the sign up.
There are eleven machines left in this county that a person can fix.
I keep all eleven running. And that's the whole job now.
The rest of the iron out here belongs to Ridgeline Field Systems.
They farm 41,000 acres in Jasper County from a floor in Cedar Rapids. Their machines sleep in a fenced yard by the old elevator, nose to tail, like hogs.
When one throws a code, a van comes out from Ankeny.
The kid brings a sealed part and a tablet. He is not allowed to open the case.
I asked him once what was inside it.
He said he didn't know. He wasn't lying to me… he just doesn't get told.
We had the codes once.
Back in the thirties there was a settlement, then a law behind it. For ten years I could clear a fault, pair a new part, wake up a machine that shut itself down in the middle of a field at dusk.
Ten years is a long time when you're in the middle of it.
But it's nothing when it's over.
The new iron isn't built to be fixed. It's built to be subscribed to.
My son Trevor leases our 320 acres to Ridgeline on a twelve-year term.
The check comes March 1 and it is a good check. He lives in Des Moines and does something with claims.
He has never planted a row in his life.
I don't hold it against him. The math quit working for Roy back in 2029, and Trevor was smart enough to read it.
Verna Ver Hoeven held out longer than anybody.
She bought the drive kit in 2041. Forty grand for the hardware, eighteen a year to let it steer itself.
She worked it out in pencil on the back of a feed sack and showed me.
The kit did what they said. It ran clean. It paid for itself in three seasons.
But the note on the ground did not.
She filed in March. Ridgeline had her acres by August.
So that's how it went.
Not one big collapse. Just good weather, cheap corn, and a payment that came due every year whether it rained or not.
I miss the co-op at seven in the morning.
Forty men, bad coffee, everybody arguing about rain that never came. It's a charging pad now. Twelve bays and a vending machine.
And I miss being needed at three in the morning.
That's a strange thing to miss. It's true anyway.
But some of this is better and I won't pretend it isn't.
Nobody in Jasper County has died in a grain bin since 2039.
Not one soul. And Roy lost two fingers and a friend to that kind of work.
My granddaughter eats strawberries in February and pays less for them than I did in 2026.
The ground yields more than it ever did under us. And that's just true.
Still.
Here's what I know at six in the morning with my hands in a 2031 gearbox.
A machine can farm ground.
It can't miss it.
Somebody has to remember how the dirt smelled in April when there were still people out in it. I'm on that list.
The list is short… and I open at six.
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