Ada Marie called every baked good “pie.” When she wanted to cook together, she grabbed my apron, stowed in her toy bin for such a moment, clutched the pink checkered cloth, and said “Pie” with a long “i.” She handed me the fabric, took my hand, and led me to the kitchen.

She was at the stage between baby and toddlerhood. Small, but full of personality and emotion. Her vocabulary consisted of “Mama,” “Dada,” “Bye,” “Hi,” and now, “Pie.” Occasionally she would say, in a slightly garbled voice, “What’s that?” Though her vocabulary was limited, she found ways to communicate her thoughts through body language. 

We often baked together in the afternoons. To reach the counter, she stood on an old green wooden chair at the end of the island. The chair was part of a dining set given to me in college by my grandmother. She pushed the seat to the counter, leaned her body against it, laid her arms on the wood, and grabbing the opposite edge, hoisted herself up and stood tall. Then she looked up at me with her baby blue eyes and said again, “Piiiiiieeee.” 

I had discovered any baked good satisfies her wish; muffins, pancakes, pie, cookies. We cooked a lot with maple syrup, homemade oat flour, and apples. The combination of texture and sweetness, working together on a project, and being tall enough to see into each other’s eyes motivated her to say “Pie” at least once a day.

Watching the chair become Ada Marie’s has added a new layer of memories to the seat for me. Before my grandmother had owned the chair, it had been used in a barn owned by my great-great uncle. The barn, located hours away, had long since fallen down, on land no longer in the family.  

After school, I had moved the chair to Minnesota, Michigan and then a dozen years ago back to Iowa when I started farming. I have farmed at three places. I was a generation removed from farming and did not have access to family land. Twice I farmed on rented ground with inconsistent living situations. The chair moved through town apartments, friends’ homes who graciously let me live with them, and a combination machine-shed/apartment I’d built on a rental farm. 

Four years ago, the chair had been at our newlywed table on a rental farm, and three years ago, we purchased a farm and moved it to our 100-year-old farmhouse.  Watching Ada Marie stand on the chair was a way for me to see the future standing on the past. 

Afternoons were for naps and “Pie.” But the mornings were for field work. Ada Marie and I walked to the field on a fall morning. She followed me from the house to the red metal pack shed, holding a dinosaur pink water bottle in one hand, and adjusting her bright orange hat with the other. Each time her hand came up to the bill, she looked like an old farmer readjusting her cap. She wore new velcro, gray leather shoes, a blue, hand-me-down zip-up sweatshirt, and blue and white polka dot pants.

I placed Ada Marie in a wagon, gave the handle to a crew member and hopped on a tractor parked in the yard under a large maple tree. One crew member drove a gator with a hayrack of harvest bins to the field, and the other pulled Ada Marie in the red flyer. 

I drove past the tall old wooden hayloft barn, built 100 years ago by a farmer just before the Great Depression. Sometime in the last 20 years a metal roof had been added, and we had repaired some wood inside to keep it functional. It was a living piece of history on our farm. It sat across the yard from our house built in the same era and next to a greenhouse we had added. 

At every place I’ve farmed, the potato field is always the farthest field from the house. It hadn’t bothered me in the past, but with a young toddler in tow, it made the morning a little bit more of a logistical puzzle. 

We plant potatoes, squash and onions in the ground rented from a neighbor that adjoins the northeast corner of our farm. These three crops are rotated on the leased ground which has no water access. It typically rains pretty reliably in late spring and early summer, when these crops need water. We reserve the fields with hydrants for the crops that absolutely require irrigation. 

I drove through the open gate to our neighbor’s field. I arrived at the potato plot in the middle of the expansive area on a pathway between two smaller fields, and parked the tractor. The crew came in behind me with their wagons. We gathered as a group and I started the harvest day with communicating the plan for the morning. 

“Between today and tomorrow we need to get the rest of these potatoes harvested,” I said. “I’m going to have you two watch Ada Marie for a few minutes while I run the tractor, then we’ll all pick up potatoes together.”  They agreed, and I walked towards the tractor.

I climbed up and sat on the green, cabless utility tractor, built in the 1980s. I placed my left foot on the clutch and my right foot on the brake, turned the key with my left hand, and inched the throttle forward with my right hand. The engine started and I put the tractor in first gear.

I looked back to ensure Ada Marie was still in the wagon and then let my feet off the clutch and brake simultaneously. The tractor inched to the edge of the field and I lined it up with a row. I engaged the clutch again, pausing the tractor so I could sight a line down the field. It was difficult to see the row. The potato vines had been mowed off in August and a mound of soil, one inch higher than the soil around it, was the only signifier of where the row had been. The mound had been created by row cultivation earlier in the season. 

I pushed the lever down to lower the middle plow buster and let my feet off the clutch and brake. Moving forward, I held the steering wheel with one hand and turned my shoulders and head to watch the flow of potatoes pop out of the ground. My head bobbed front to back as I worked to maintain a straight line, or as straight as when I planted the potatoes in April. I constantly adjusted my steering to keep the blade under the row of potatoes. I looked up behind me to see Ada Marie and the crew chatting. She babbled and the crew nodded along, engaging with her. 

A middle buster plow is a simple implement. It attaches on the back of a tractor with a three-point hitch. It has a single, 15-inch-wide blade with winged tips at the end of a shaft that digs a trench. It lifts the potatoes from their enclaves under the soil.  The downside of the plow: you have to crawl on your hands and knees to pick up the potatoes. It’s a little bit of a treasure hunt. The plow digs the soil, placing some to the sides, the rest falling back on top of the potatoes. 

Our soil is too difficult and at risk for damage when worked wet. If it’s too dry it can be too hard to dig. We have tried many methods to dig potatoes. We have dug them with a pitchfork by hand. We have used a fancy expensive machine, costing thousands of dollars, that digs them then shakes off the dirt. We’ve used a horse-drawn digger adapted for use with a tractor. But our preferred method is a new, tractor-drawn, middle buster plow, costing less than $200 at the local farm supply store. We like the plow because it works, reliably, every single time. The fancy machine only works in the right soil conditions, and with absolutely no weeds in the field.

The combination of perfect conditions and no weeds has only happened once since I’ve started farming.

I used the tractor to unearth the potatoes. When I finished digging, there were three perfectly straight deep brown trenches six feet apart. We harvested every other row to give the tractor wheels space and avoid running over potatoes. 

I turned the machine off, jumped down to the ground, and, leaving the tractor at the far end of the field, walked towards the crew. Half the field was in the warm bright sunlight, the other covered in chilly shadows from nearby trees. I picked up Ada Marie and set her out of the wagon onto the ground, thanked the crew for watching her, and picked up an empty crate from the farm wagon to begin picking potatoes.

I started on one row, the crew took the other two, Ada Marie eagerly joined me. Her orange hat, a safety measure during hunting season, had fallen off, showing her golden hair that matched the color of the frosted mowed weeds between the rows. I texted the neighbor’s hunter that we would be out digging, and he replied that he wasn’t hunting that day, so I wasn’t as worried as usual about making sure she wore it.   

Ada Marie squatted with flat feet firmly planted on the brown soil, determination in her blue eyes. Her blond curls bounced up and down each time she swayed to pick up another potato, her eyes intent on searching the field for the little treasures. Her confident stance came from a familiarity with rough terrain. 

Barely taller than the wooden harvest container, she clung to the side of the crate with one hand, and leaned to pick up a potato with the other.

“Plop, plop, plop.” Her little plump hands hefted potatoes from the field into the wooden crate. She quickly placed a dirty gold sphere in the container and then leaned down for another. Leaves, crackling and popping, fell from the trees to our south, 50 at a time, sporadically cascading onto the field. 

I worked in my own row, six feet from her.  The soil felt cool to my hands and the sun warmed my back. An unusual combination. We were in a drought, but it had rained about half an inch the week before, giving our normally heavy clay soil a beautiful texture, almost resembling the sand on a beach. Potatoes lay scattered in rows around us, some visible, some cocooned by soil. 

I looked over at Ada Marie and thought about how full my life felt now – living a piece of a dream that I could once only imagine. It was beautiful. But it was also so much work. This summer of juggling had really tired me out. 

Our farm is a direct market CSA farm and we deliver vegetables directly to families in our community. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. And it means that community members pay a flat rate at the beginning of the season, and then we grow a consistent supply of veggies for them all season long. At the time, our CSA was the largest in Iowa, and between wholesale and our 260 CSA shares, we had fed over 300 families each week that summer. 

I was tired. I wondered how to move forward in this occupation with a new generation tagging along. Could I juggle like my grandmother had? She had managed the workload of the land along with five kids, a dairy farm, a large garden, and the stress of holding onto a farm through the Farm Crisis.  

Our neighborhood is at the precipice between farming and development. There is farmland on one side of us, and a rural subdivision with large houses and multiacre wooded lots on the other. A close neighbor, Glenn, lets us pick apples for our pies from his timber. He had turned 95 the summer before, and loved to share stories of the area. His parents and grandparents were early settlers and he grew up finding Indigenous artifacts down by his creek where his apple trees are now. Glenn’s father was best friends with the man who built our house and barn 100 years ago.

When Glenn was Ada Marie’s age, 30 percent of the population farmed. Now less than one percent of people farm in the U.S. Glenn has told me so many stories about our farm including how Glenn came to cultivate the ground as a young man. When Glenn was eight years old, his father’s best friend, Joe, the man who owned our farm, died by suicide in our old barn. It was 1936 and the height of the Great Depression. After Joe’s death, Glenn’s father rented the ground. In his teenage and young adulthood, Glenn cultivated oats and corn on what is now my farm.  

I stand in the middle of the older generation – Glenn and my grandparents, who only knew the way of life of farming, and my parents’ generation, whose whole professional lives have been off the farm. Rural baby boomers were told by their parents to leave the farm for a better life. Unintentionally, this desire for progress caused people and the land to decouple. It resulted in a mass exodus from the landscape. Farms are now bigger than at any time in history and there are fewer farmers than ever before. Our farm is striving to be a living example of linking people and the land back together. 

The potato field was a few hundred feet long and two dozen rows wide. Rows were exactly three feet apart. The CSA shares had included potatoes since late summer and the field was partially harvested. We had one other field of potatoes that we had finished a few weeks prior and we were on the home stretch for the year’s harvest. Each time we cleared out a field, we were one step closer to winter’s rest. It was a season of bringing in large hauls to the barn. The day before, we had harvested 600 pounds of storage carrots.

Potatoes directly from the field come in all different sizes – round, oblong, marble-shaped and the crew’s favorite, heart-shaped. We plant at least ten varieties – brown potatoes with white centers, gold potatoes with gold centers, white potatoes with gold centers and with white centers, red potatoes with white centers, with gold centers and red centers, blue potatoes with starburst blue designs inside. We plant a lot of potatoes. 

Potatoes planted in early April are ready to dig by late July, but can stay in the ground until November, or until the ground freezes too solid to dig them. They will keep in storage at least another three months after that.

In the early 1990s, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother in the garden. We planted potatoes on Good Friday. Grandma and Grandpa fought over how deep to plant the Yukon Golds, my grandma’s favorite variety. Potatoes were a central part of her cooking – hash browns, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, potato pancakes, boiled potatoes. Every year I listened to them banter about planting the potatoes three inches or six inches deep, each one warning the other of the woes of the opposite way. 

Despite the depth, large hills of beautiful potatoes would be harvested every August and lugged down to the storm cellar in their basement to keep cool for a winter of meals. When I started farming, the torch had been passed to me to provide potatoes for the family, and I reserved a 50-pound crate each year for my grandmother. Grandpa, a farmer his whole life, had passed away almost six years before. Though I was 50 miles from where he farmed, I thought of him that day in my potato field. Ada Marie would have delighted him. 

Ada Marie kneeled on the ground and put the potatoes from the piles into the empty crate. “Plop, plop, plop.” The potatoes went into the wooden box. I crawled on my hands and knees in the row and threw potatoes in piles eight feet or so apart. The soil felt therapeutic between my fingers, like the crumbles of pie crust. 

When the crate was filled, Ada Marie grunted and tried to move the heavy mass of potatoes. Realizing she couldn’t, she came to take my hand and walked me over to it. She took my hands in hers and placed them on the crate and pointed with insistence that she wanted to move the wooden box of potatoes. 

She placed herself across from me with her hands firmly on the wooden edge, indicating she was going to help me move it. She grinned. She wanted to help, but she also wanted to be useful. 

Together with my pint-sized companion, I carefully moved the very full, 65-pound crate at a slow and measured pace. My rough hands held the sides of the crates, her soft hands held the edge in front of me. She waddled backwards. I slowed my walk to avoid stumbling against her. The potatoes were piled high in the crate, an immovable mass of pebbles in a mound between us. I looked down at her face, a mixture of concentration and delight, her bottom lip pulled back, breaths coming in short measured succession. I thought of my grandmother’s garden, harvesting potatoes into five-gallon pails, my little hands holding the edge of the yellow bucket, my grandfather in the distance riding on his big green tractor in the field.

A hawk had been circling the potato field. Ada Marie looked up from her crate and said, “What’s that?” My eyes followed the majestic bird. It landed in a tree close by. Ada Marie kept ambling, her hands still on the crate. Some cultures believe that hawks are messengers from our loved ones that have passed. I guided Ada Marie towards our destination and wondered, was my grandfather watching us now? I wanted to call Grandma later and tell her about the harvest. 

We reached our destination at the next pile of potatoes, set the crate down, and Ada Marie reached her little hands to pick up a potato. “Von, von, von,” she babbled, her version of “one, two, three.” 

I returned to my task of crawling through the row, mining potatoes. I threw them in front of me till I reached my makeshift pile and then behind me as I passed it, then returned with a crate to pick up the piles. 

The crew each worked at their own pace, sometimes slower than my practiced hands, other times faster, when I became a distracted mother. 

Ada Marie wandered from her crate, to the crew members, saying “Hi” to each one, then back to me. She passed by me and I caught a whiff of her poopy diaper. “Let’s go to the house,” I said. She ran toward her child-sized wagon, parked right next to the big farm wagon. When we got there, I tried to put her in the little one, but she ran and pointed at the stack of wooden crates on the large wagon next to her. I got a crate down. I asked her again. “Would you like your diaper changed?” She ran away from me, back to the field. I followed with the empty crate, and we picked potatoes for another 20 minutes.

It was almost ten o’clock and I knew my dad was coming soon to watch her. Childcare for Ada Marie was a community effort pieced together by bringing her to the field sometimes, and other times with the help of my in-laws, or my parents, or Derek, my husband. Derek has an off-farm job but works remotely from home and helps by making and feeding Ada Marie lunch or changing a diaper during his breaks, other times putting her down for a nap so I could get a few extra hours of work in.  

“Let’s go get some ‘num num,’” I said to her, knowing that a snack would entice her inside. She acquiesced and I picked her up. 

“Wave goodbye to the potatoes,”  I said, while we walked to the wagon. She took one serious last look at the field and waved goodbye. I placed her in the wagon and started pulling her towards the house.

We passed by the now dead, hot pepper field, not yet cleaned from the season.  A few red chili peppers lay limp against the brown plants. A flock of birds flew out of the debris. We waved at the birds. We passed through the gate back to our farmstead and saw, by the hydrant,  a cluster of milkweed seeds bursting from their pods. 

Our shadows were cast on the farm lane and we waved to the figures. On our right we walked by the old broccoli field, now empty and smooth with a cover crop of oats popping up across the soil. On our left, the new high tunnel, filled with perfectly spaced lettuces, bok choy and spinach, looked like a vision of spring. 

We arrived in the farmyard. It was covered in leaves and pine needles from the windbreak behind our house. My dad drove in, parked and walked around the circle drive towards where we were standing between the house and the old granary. Ada Marie sweetly said “Hi.” And waved. My dad had recently retired from a career in technology and was enjoying being Grandpa. He and my mom had moved back to the area earlier in the year after having been out-of-state for almost 25 years. They lived in a subdivision down the road from Glenn, about a mile away. 

My dad wanted to talk about my mom’s upcoming surprise birthday party.  I wanted to talk to him too, but I felt the urgent need to get the potatoes out of the ground. The conversation won out and I took longer than I intended at the house. Dad planned to watch Ada Marie till lunch, then Derek would feed her and put her down for a nap. 

This would be the only time all day I would be able to work on the farm without interruptions. I arrived back at the field 40 minutes after I had left. I used the tractor to dig a few more rows of potatoes and then grabbed a crate and set to work quickly. I put my head down and tried not to notice how fast or slow the crew was working.

I looked up when I heard the purr of the gator, Glenn was cruising by on the gravel road across the fence. His orange cap and tall orange caution flag whizzed past. I tried to wave him down, but he didn’t see me. I stopped working and called his cell. “Glenn, stop by and come see the potatoes. I’m at the neighbor’s field.” 

“Where?” he replied. 

“You know, the field just next to my place. The field I rent.” 

He paused, confused. I could tell he had no idea where I was. I tried again. 

“The one you used to farm back in the 1940s and then the field that used to have the hog barn in the 80s, before it went bust in the Farm Crisis.”

“Oh yes, Malacheck’s old place.” He replied, citing the name of the farmer from the 80s, three previous owners ago. 

Glenn drove in, with a grin on his wrinkled face, a tuft of grey hair showing under his orange cap. He wore a white t-shirt and jeans rather than his standard denim blue overalls. He turned the gator off and looked up at me, staying seated. 

“Where’s your girl?” he asked.

“You just missed her. She’s inside with my dad now,” I replied. 

“I’m the oldest man in the neighborhood, you know? I love to see the little one getting her hands in the soil,” he said.      

I stood up from my crouched position in the field. I readjusted my beige cap to the rising sun and dusted off my cotton button-down and well-worn jeans. The light blue men’s dress shirt, now covered in dirt, was purchased at a thrift store. It was loose fitting and worn over a bright pink Target clearance tank top that said “Mind Over Matter.” I wore the unfashionable, yet cheap combination, to keep me cool and covered from the sun. 

I looked over at Glenn on the path next to the fence. I imagined him in my spot, 60 years before, possibly bending over a piece of equipment, broken down in the middle of the field, maybe working urgently, needing to fix it quickly so harvest could go on. 

I wanted to show him our operation in action. I was proud that this land was still being actively worked, and not yet developed. When we bought our 16 acres, we learned it had been part of an original 160-acre farm. The remainder of the farm was either developed or preserved in a county park. Our 16 acres was the only part still owned by a farmer. The seller chose us because we planned to farm the land. All the other interested buyers planned to bulldoze the farmstead and build a new house. 

I dug a short section of potatoes to show Glenn how our digger worked.

I looked at him when I’d finished. 

“You didn’t get them all,” he said, chuckling. 

I quickly picked up the potatoes and dug again to prove to him we had. He conceded. We chatted for a few minutes then I sent him on his way with some Yukon Gold potatoes in the back of his gator. His parting words were to remind me there were apples to pick if I needed more. I assured him I still had some in the fridge, but would be up soon to get some. He puttered off in his gator and I went back to work. 

“Plop, plop, plop.” Eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock, one o’clock, two o’clock. 200, 400, 700, 1000 pounds. We threw the potatoes in our crates, dragging them through the field as we went.  When it appeared that we were close to finishing the harvest, I hefted each crate onto the wagon.

Finished with the last row, the crew got on our gator and took the wagon of tubers back to the barn. I left the tractor in the field, ready for the next morning. I walked back to the house feeling guilty about not helping them unload the heavy crates into the temperature-controlled storage room in the pack shed. I needed to be in the house when Ada Marie woke up.  

I arrived back at the porch, removed my boots, and brushed the dust off of my jeans. I carefully opened the white storm door. If I was quiet, I thought, I might get to rest for a minute. I turned the worn gold handle and closed the wooden red door with the glass front.  I walked inside and found a plate of food on the top shelf of the fridge that Derek had left for me. 

I carried the cold plate into the living room and placed my feet gingerly on the wooden steps to go upstairs, putting my weight on the inside of the wooden steps to avoid the creaky spots. I silently grabbed the monitor from Derek in his office at the top of the stairs, and retreated to our bedroom. Playful light came through from the west. Tree branches, framed by the shadow of three windows, danced on the plaster wall. I wearily sat down, took two deep breaths, and longingly looked at the books on the side table. Should I rest or read? Static from the monitor turned to cries. The fleeting moment to myself had passed. I jumped up, ready for the next phase of the day. 

I grabbed my plate of roasted potatoes, sautéed kale and adobo-seasoned ground pork. Vegetables from our farm, meat from a friend’s. I walked into Ada Marie’s nursery, and set the plate down. She stood in her crib looking up at me, immediately stopping her cries when she saw me. I bent down and kissed her on the forehead. 

“Pie?” she asked. 

The corners of my mouth curled into a smile. Feeling nostalgic for my own childhood visits on the farm with my grandparents, mornings in the field with Grandpa and in the vegetable plot with Grandma, and afternoons in the kitchen making cookies. My tiredness faded for a moment. 

“Yes,” I said. “We will go make pie.” 

Reinvigorated by the look of sheer delight on her face, I gathered her in my arms and balanced the plate of food in my hand. We went down the steps to the kitchen, not caring if they creaked on our way.  

Tomorrow would bring another long workday in the field. I looked out the kitchen window and saw the hawk fly by again. I got out my phone to facetime Grandma while we baked.  The juggling was worth it. I don’t expect Ada Marie to become a farmer when she grows up, but I hope by being on the farm she knows its importance.

Ada Marie stood on the old green chair and patted the counter with her hands, saying “Pie, pie, pie.” I grabbed the apples from the crisper drawer and we set to work. 

Copyright © 2023 by Kate Edwards
Photographs courtesy of Derek Lehman, Jeff Edwards and Kate Edwards.