The Cannery Wrote Off 40 Tons of Crooked Carrots Every Fall — Her Horse Ranch Built a Waiting List

PART 2

She said she wasn’t planning to sell them to the cannery. Gene said that was fine, but what was she planning to do with them? She said she was planning to feed them to horses. Gene looked at her for a moment, looked at the back six acres, and then looked at the truck, which was a 1963 Ford F-100 with a dented left rear panel, and 140,000 mi on it.

He said she’d need a bigger truck. She said she knew that and asked if he could help her borrow one. He could, and he did, and that’s the last time Gene Vickers appears in this story as a skeptic. Let me tell you about Della Vickers, because what she did with $60 worth of rejected carrots and 6 acres of Vernon County loam only makes sense if you understand who she was.

Della Mae’s Vickers was born in 1940 on a beef and hay operation outside of Viroqua, the second of four children, and the only one who showed any interest in the horses her father kept for work, and when work allowed, for pleasure. Her father, Raymond Mays, ran 60 head of Hereford cattle on 280 acres of hilly ground that was more useful for grazing than for row crops, and he understood this about his land the way a man understands something he didn’t choose, but has made his peace with.

Raymond was not a romantic about farming. He was a bookkeeper about farming. He kept a ledger, a green-covered composition notebook that he bought three at a time from the hardware store in town. And he entered every dollar that came in and every dollar that went out in a handwriting so small and precise, it looked typeset.

He taught Della to keep the ledger when she was 9 years old, not because she asked, but because she was the one who sat with him at the kitchen table without being told to. He said the ledger told you the truth about your operation. And that most people preferred not to know the truth about their operation. And that this preference was the reason most people eventually lost their operations. Raymond kept four horses.

Two were working animals, a pair of Belgian drafts named Albert and Clarence that he used for logging in the wood lot, and for moving hay bales in the low fields where the tractor got stuck in spring. The other two were a mare named Pepper and her foal, which Della named Biscuit when she was 11, and which she broke to saddle herself at 13, following instructions from a library book and her own patient observation of how Pepper moved when she was comfortable and how she moved when she wasn’t.

Raymond watched this from the fence without interfering. He told his wife that Della had a feel for it. His wife said she knew that. Raymond said it was unusual. His wife said she knew that, too. Della finished high school in Viroqua in 1958 and had a scholarship offer from the University of Wisconsin in Madison for a teaching program.

She had a suitcase. She had a bus ticket. She had a roommate assignment and a letter from the housing office with instructions about what to bring for the dormitory. She did not go. This is not a story about why she didn’t go because Della never explained it in terms that invited analysis. What she said when people asked was that the farm needed her that year and then the next year and then the years after that and at some point the question stopped being relevant.

What she didn’t say but what the ledger showed was that Raymond’s health had begun declining in 1957. And that by 1959 he could not reliably get through a full day of field work without stopping. Della ran the cattle operation alongside her father through the early 1960s and she ran it alone through the middle part of that decade.

And Raymond died in the winter of 1967 at the age of 62 leaving Della the farm the equipment, the ledger system, the horses, and a savings account at the Viroqua State Bank with $14,200 in it which was every dollar Raymond Mayes had ever saved that he hadn’t put back into the land. The farm had no mortgage.

 Raymond had paid it off in 1954 and had not borrowed against it since. He told Della the year before he died that a paid for farm was the only thing a bank couldn’t take from you. And that everything else in agriculture was just borrowing time. She wrote that down in the ledger. Della married Carl Vickers in 1964. Carl farmed his family’s ground 2 mi north and was a capable, steady man who had no particular gift for horses, but respected Della’s.

 He died of a heart attack in the field in 1969 at 33 years old, leaving Della with the maze farm. The Vickers ground combined to 410 acres total, two horses, 60 cattle, and the green ledger. She was 29. She did not sell anything. She did not take on a partner. She hired one part-time hand for planting and harvest seasons and ran the rest herself.

By the fall of 1971, when the Holmgren liquidation sale happened, Della Vickers had been farming 410 acres alone for 2 years. She had $19,400 in the bank. She had no debt. She had the ledger. Now, the carrots. When Della looked at 40 tons of rejected Holmgren carrots sitting in 6 acres of Vernon County loam, she did not see what the cannery saw.

The cannery saw product that couldn’t be processed on their line. The auctioneer saw a lot that couldn’t be separated without embarrassing himself. Gene saw a problem that required a bigger truck. What Della saw was winter feed for horses at a cost she could calculate to the penny. And she had been calculating it for 3 months before the auction happened.

Here is what nobody at that sale knew. In August of 1971, 6 weeks before the Holmgren liquidation, Della had driven to a horse boarding operation outside of La Crosse and spent 2 hours talking to the woman who ran it about what horses ate in winter, what it cost, and what they’d eat that wasn’t hay.

 The woman’s name was Francis Oberlin, and she had been boarding horses for 20 years, and she told Della that horses would eat root vegetables, carrots, beets, turnips, as a supplement through the cold months, that it broke the monotony of dry hay, that horses who got root vegetables in winter came through in better condition than horses who didn’t.

And that the only problem with feeding roots at scale was the cost of buying them from produce suppliers who charged retail prices for something that was, at its core, a field crop. Francis said she’d been trying to source bulk carrots for years and couldn’t find anyone willing to sell at a price that made sense.

Della asked what price would make sense. Francis told her. Della drove home and did the arithmetic in the ledger that night. She had also, in September of 1971, before the Holmgren sale, driven the back roads of Vernon County looking at what was growing and what was being written off. She knew about the Holmgren carrot situation because everyone in Vernon County knew about it.

The cannery rejection had been the subject of considerable discussion at the co-op and at least two conversations she’d overheard at the feed store. She had driven past the Holmgren back six and looked at it from the road. She had gotten out of the truck and walked into the rows and pulled up three carrots and looked at them.

They were crooked. They were forked. One of them had grown around a rock and emerged from the soil in a shape that would have jammed a commercial peeler in under 5 seconds. She bit the end off it. It tasted like a carrot. She was back in the truck in 4 minutes. That’s why nobody understood the bid. They were seeing a woman pay $60 for something a cannery had already rejected.

They were watching someone who had been doing arithmetic for 3 months execute the final step of a plan that was already complete. Let me tell you about the build because this is where Della Vickers proved that the difference between a buyer and a builder is not talent. It’s the willingness to see what something actually is instead of what it’s supposed to be.

The root washer with the cracked drum came back to the Maze Farm on Jean’s borrowed flatbed and went into Raymond’s shop behind the house. The shop was a poured concrete floor under a tin roof, 40 ft by 24, with a wood stove in the northwest corner, and a workbench along the south wall that Raymond had built from 2-in oak planks in 1948.

The tools on that bench had been accumulating since before the Second World War. There was a cutting torch Raymond had bought used from a pipeline crew in 1951. There was a Lincoln Arc Welder he traded a calf for in 1955. There was a drill press, a bench vise, a set of taps and dies in a wooden case with a broken hinge that Della had fixed with a strip of leather when she was 14.

 The cutting oil in the torch reservoir was the same cutting oil Raymond had poured in the last time he used it, which was the winter before he died. Della lit the wood stove, let the shop come up to temperature, and looked at the root washer for the better part of an evening before she touched it. The crack in the drum was 4 in along the weld seam, as the auctioneer had noted, which meant the drum would flex under load and the crack would propagate.

She could see where it had already begun to open at one end. The brush rollers were worn to the steel cores, which meant they were useless for washing anything, but would serve as a template for replacement. The hand crank mechanism was intact, and once she oiled the shaft bearings, turned smoothly. The frame was sound.

 She welded the drum crack in one evening using the Lincoln and a rod she found in a coffee can on the shelf above the welder. She ground the beads smooth with a wheel she mounted to the bench grinder. She measured the brush roller cores and drove to a farm supply in LaCrosse the following week, where she found replacement brush stock in a bin near the back of the store.

Stiff nylon bristle material used for grain elevator cleaning equipment, And bought enough to repack four rollers at a cost of $11 for the material and an afternoon of work to cut, fit, and attach it. The drum seal she fabricated from a strip of conveyor belting she found folded under the workbench which had been there so long it had taken on the shape of the floor.

She cut it to width with Raymond’s tin snips, punch the bolt holes with the drill press, and fit it in 40 minutes. She also modified the washer’s output chute. The original chute dropped cleaned carrots straight down into whatever container was below it, which worked fine for bins, but not for the burlap feed bags she intended to use for portioning and storage.

 She bent a new chute from a piece of sheet steel she found in the corner of the shop. 18 gauge, roughly the right width, left over from a repair Raymond had done on a grain bin years before, and welded it to the output housing at an angle that directed carrots into the bag opening without her having to hold the bag and operate the crank simultaneously.

The crates she sorted by condition. 22 were sound enough to use for field hauling. The remaining 25 she broke down for lumber, which she stacked in the shop and used over the following winter for miscellaneous repairs. The cost when she entered it in the ledger, $60 for the lot at auction, $11 for brush stock, $4 for welding rod, $2 for hardware, $77 including the gas for three trips to La Crosse and back.

 The commercial root washing and bagging equipment she’d priced at the farm supply for reference started at $400 for the smallest unit available which was designed for operations larger than what she was building and would have required a power take off connection she didn’t have a convenient way to run in the shop. She didn’t buy it.

She spent $77 instead and had a washer that fit her operation exactly because she had built it to fit her operation exactly. She pulled the home grown carrots in October working the back six acres over three weekends with the Ford and a borrowed two-row digger. The ground was soft from early fall rain and the carrots came up cleanly.

 She ran them through the washer in the shop bagged them into 50-lb burlap bags at a cost of 60 cents per bag from the feed store and stacked them in the root cellar under the farmhouse which Raymond had built in 1946 with a poured concrete floor and walls and a ventilation system that kept the temperature between 34 and 40° through the coldest Vernon County winters without any mechanical assistance.

40 tons of carrots 1,800 bags roughly. The root cellar held 400. She rented cold storage space at the Viroqua grain elevator for the remainder at a cost of $40 for the season. Total cost of the entire operation $60 for the lot $11 for brush stock, $4 for rod, $2 for hardware, $108 for bagging material, $40 for cold storage, fuel and miscellaneous.

Call it $240. She had 40 tons of horse grade carrots in storage by the first week of November. She called Francis Oberlin in La Crosse and told her she had carrots available at a price that would make sense. Francis asked what price. Della told her. Francis said she’d take 200 bags to start and would Della deliver.

Della said she would in the borrowed flatbed and she did in November. And Francis wrote her a check that covered Della’s entire cost for the operation and left her with $3,800 worth of inventory still in storage. If you have ever watched a community write something off, a piece of ground, a harvest, a woman working alone in a shop behind a farmhouse, and then watch that woman turn the right off into the foundation of something the community couldn’t imagine, stick with me because this is where the story stops being about carrots. Let me tell you

about what happened over the next 8 years because this is where the story stops being about a root washer and starts being about something else entirely. Della sold the remaining carrot inventory by February of 1972 to Francis Oberlin and to two other boarding operations she found by asking Francis who else she knew.

She netted after all costs just over $4,000 from $60 bid at an auction and $240 in total expenses. She entered every dollar in the ledger. Then she started thinking about what the carrots had told her. What they had told her was this. There were horse people in the Coulee region of Wisconsin who needed things that the agricultural system was not organized to provide them.

And that the agricultural system’s disorganization was not their problem. It was her opportunity. The cannery needed uniformity. Horse people needed nutrition and availability and a price that didn’t punish them for feeding their animals well. These were different markets with different requirements. And the Holmgreen back six had produced a crop that was perfectly suited to one of them and completely useless to the other.

She started building the horse operation in 1972. Not a boarding stable. She had watched Francis Oberlin’s boarding operation and understood that boarding was a service business with service business problems, which were people problems. And Della was not interested in people problems. What she built was a breeding and training operation, starting with Pepper’s bloodline and two mares she bought at a dispersal sale in Crawford County for a combined price of $600, which the ledger showed she could absorb without touching the savings account.

She had Raymond’s eye for horses, which was actually her own eye, which Raymond had recognized and named when she was 11 years old. She could look at a horse’s movement and tell you things about its structure that a veterinarian would need an examination to confirm. She could tell you which falls were going to develop and which weren’t.

She could tell you from watching a horse move at a walk for 4 minutes whether it was going to be comfortable to ride or whether it was going to fight its rider for the next decade. She had never been taught this. She had learned it the way Raymond had learned the ledger by paying attention to the same thing every day for years until the truth of it became visible.

By 1975, she had seven horses. By 1977, she had 12. By 1979, she had 18 horses, a waiting list for falls that ran 14 months, and a reputation in the Wisconsin and Minnesota horse community that had been built entirely by word of mouth, which is the only kind of reputation in that world that means anything. She had also, by 1979, stopped running cattle entirely.

 The cattle had been Raymond’s operation and Carl’s operation, and they had been her operation by inheritance and necessity. The horses were her operation by choice, and the ledger showed clearly which one was performing. She was still sourcing root vegetables for winter feed, not from the Homegrens, whose back sick she had bought outright in 1974 for $4,200 cash, which was the first land purchase, but from a network of produce operations across three counties that she had built over four years by being the person who

called when the cannery said no. The cannery rejection was her sourcing mechanism. She had a standing arrangement with two cannery operations in Vernon and Crawford counties. When they rejected a load for cosmetic reasons, they called Della before they called anyone else. She paid cash on delivery at a price that was better than the alternative, which was plowing it under.

And she got winter feed for her horses at a cost that was a fraction of what the boarding operations around her paid for hay and commercial feed supplements. The ledger by the end of 1979 showed a savings balance of $41,000. The farm had no debt. The back six acres had been paid for in cash. The horse operation was generating net income that Raymond, looking at the cattle numbers from the same ground, would not have believed possible.

Then the 1980s arrived. You know what happened in the early 1980s in agricultural Wisconsin. You know about the interest rates. 18% some of them on operating loans that farmers had taken out when were six. You know about the land values that had been climbing through the 1970s and then dropped by a third in two years, leaving farmers holding mortgages larger than the appraised value of the ground underneath them.

 You know about the farm auctions that weren’t liquidation sales, but were bank-forced sales. And the difference between those two things, which is the difference between a choice and a taking. In Vernon County, between 1981 and 1985, 11 farms within 12 miles of the Mayes place went through some version of financial crisis. Four of them lost ground to the bank.

Two of them sold equipment at auction prices that didn’t cover the loans against it. The Kettner family, who farmed 600 acres 3 miles east, and who had expanded aggressively through the late 1970s on borrowed money at rates that had seemed manageable when corn was above $3, lost 200 acres in a bank action in the spring of 1983.

Dale Kettner had been one of the men at the co-op in 1971 who had laughed about the carrot auction. Della did not find this satisfying. She found it sad because Dale Kettner was not a bad farmer. He had built his operation on borrowed money at a time when borrowed money seemed like the rational approach. And the interest rate had done to him what interest rates do when they move faster than the underlying economics can absorb.

Not because he was reckless, because he had trusted a system that changed the rules while he was mid-operation. Della’s expenses in 1982 were not meaningfully different from her expenses in 1978. Her feed costs were low because she had built a sourcing network around rejected produce. Her land costs were zero because the land was paid for.

Her equipment costs were low because Raymond’s shop had taught her to repair rather than replace. And because she had spent 11 years making decisions that kept the equipment load proportional to what the operation could support without borrowing. When hay prices spiked in the drought summer of 1983, she had root vegetables in cold storage and the horses came through the winter in better condition than horses on hay-only rations at twice the cost.

Her waiting list for falls did not shorten during the farm crisis. It lengthened. Horse people with discretionary income were not the demographic most exposed to agricultural credit collapse. And the reputation she had built through the 1970s was paying dividends in a market that was, for her specific operation, largely insulated from the forces destroying her neighbors.

By 1984, she had $78,000 in the bank. In the spring of 1985, the Kettner ground came to auction. Not all of it. Dale had managed to hold the home place and the buildings. But the 200 acres the bank had taken, the east fields that ran along the ridge above Creek, came up at a forced sale in April. Good ground, flat enough to work easily with a natural drainage pattern that kept it from ponding in wet springs.

Della had looked at it from the road for 2 years. The auction was held at the county fairgrounds in Viroqua. There were 11 bidders registered. Three of them were land investment companies from outside the county. Two were neighboring farmers who had survived the crisis with enough credit still available to bid, though not enough to bid high.

The rest were individuals. Della Vickers registered as bidder number seven. She was 44 years old. The bidding opened at $280 per acre, which was below the pre-crisis value, but above what the distressed market had been producing. The investment companies bid methodically. One of the neighboring farmers dropped out at $310.

The other stayed through $340 and then stopped. At $355 per acre, it was Della and two investment company representatives. At $370 per acre, one of the investment company stopped. At $385 per acre, Della bid against a man in a sport coat from a land company based in Madison. And he looked at her once and raised to $390.

And she bid $400. And he paused for long enough that the auctioneer started his countdown. And then the man in the sport coat set his bid card down on the table in front of him. 200 acres at $400 per acre. $80,000. She wrote a check. The room was not loud when she wrote it. It was the specific kind of quiet that happens when a group of people who have been operating on a shared set of assumptions watches something that does not fit those assumptions and has to stop and recalibrate before it can make any noise at all. People who

had known Della Vickers for 20 years, who had watched her pull carrots out of the Holmgren back six in 1971, who had been at the co-op when the carrot auction story made its rounds, were standing in that room watching her write an $80,000 check for 200 acres of Vernon County ridge ground while the rest of the county was losing farms to the bank.

Dale Kettner was there. He had to be there. It was his ground. He was standing near the back of the room. When Della finished writing the check and looked up, their eyes met for a moment. He nodded at her. She nodded back. That was the entirety of it. And it was enough. Let me tell you how this ends. Because the ending is the part that Raymond Mays would have understood without a word of explanation.

Della farmed the expanded operation through the rest of the 1980s and into the 1990s. The horse breeding and training operation grew to 24 horses at its peak. The waiting list for falls remained in good years and bad years between 8 and 16 months long. She bought two more parcels in the early 1990s. A 12-acre wood lot adjacent to the home place in 1991 and 30 acres of creek bottom hay ground in 1993.

Both for cash. Both entered in the ledger the same day. Raymond’s shop behind the farmhouse was still standing. The wood stove still worked. The Lincoln welder was still on the shelf where Raymond had put it next to the coffee can of welding rod. The root washer she had rebuilt in 1971 was still in the corner of the shop.

Still functional, still running on the modified chute she had bent from Raymond’s leftover sheet steel. She had used it every fall for 22 years. In 1993, Della’s niece, Carol, her brother’s youngest daughter, 17 years old, who had been coming to the farm on weekends since she was nine, started spending full summers at the May’s place.

 Carol had the same quality Della had shown at 11. She could watch a horse move and tell you something true about it. Della put her to work in the shop first before she put her in the barn because Raymond had put Della to work in the ledger before he put her on a horse, and Della understood why. You had to know the cost of things before you could know the value of them.

Carol learned well on the Lincoln welder. She learned to read the ledger. She learned over three summers the sourcing network for winter feed, which canneries called, which produce managers to ask for, how to calculate the cost per horse per day for root vegetables versus hay versus commercial supplement, and why the arithmetic consistently favored the sourcing network over every alternative the feed stores could offer.

In the summer of 1995, the Vernon County Agricultural Extension Office held a meeting for farm operators to discuss alternative income strategies in the post-crisis landscape. They asked Della to speak. She was 55 years old. She had not spoken at a public meeting since a school board session in 1974. She stood up at the front of the room and said this more or less.

In the plain declarative way she said everything. She said she had started with a paid for farm and a ledger and $60 at an auction. And that everything she had built since then had been built on the arithmetic of not owing anyone anything. She said the farm crisis had not been caused by bad farming. It had been caused by borrowed operating money at rates that were presented as stable and turned out not to be.

And that the only defense against a rate that could change was an operation that didn’t depend on the rate staying where it was. She said she had fed her horses rejected carrots for 20 years because the carrots were nutritionally equivalent to what the feed store sold and cost her a fraction of the price. And that the difference between those two prices compounded over 20 years was the Kettner East Fields.

She said she didn’t think she was smarter than anyone in the room. She said she thought she had been lucky to have a father who kept a ledger and taught her to read it. Then she sat down. Frances Oberlin, who had driven from La Crosse for the meeting, found Della in the parking lot afterward. Frances had been buying Della’s surplus root vegetables for 23 years.

She said she’d told that carrot story to every horse person she knew. Della said she appreciated it. Frances said what she actually appreciated was the consistency of the delivery schedule. Della said that was the same thing. Carol Mayes took over the primary management of the horse operation in 1998. She was 22.

 She kept the ledger in the same green composition notebooks bought three at a time from the hardware store in Viroqua because Della had bought them that way and Raymond had bought them that way. And Carol saw no reason to change a system that had worked for two generations. The root washer was still in the shop. The sourcing network was still running.

The waiting list for falls was 14 months. Let me ask you something. What do you see when you look at 40 tons of crooked carrots sitting in six acres of black Wisconsin loam after the cannery has already told you they’re worthless? Most people see a failed harvest. A problem somebody else is going to have to plow under.

A lot at an auction that isn’t worth separating into individual items because none of the individual items has individual value. Della Vicker saw winter feed at a price she had already calculated on ground she would own outright in 3 years that would feed a horse operation that would build a waiting list that would generate the cash that would buy the Kettner East Fields at $400 an acre while the man from Madison set his bid card down.

$60. A cracked root washer and a root cellar and a ledger her father taught her to read. The carrots nobody wanted in the hands of the woman nobody understood until the check cleared and the room went quiet. And Dale Kettner nodded from the back wall and she nodded back. And that was all there was to say.