Simpler Times - Prolog
Glenn Murphy smoothly merged the big old Cadillac Fleetwood Talisman into the high speed stream of traffic on Interstate 55 South, leaving St. Louis behind him. Actually, it was less that Glenn was leaving as it was he was headed for something.
Glenn’s Uncle Titus had died and left his farm and ranch near Cape Girardeau, Missouri to Glenn. It had been a very long time since he’d visited his Uncle. Not since he was a teen. His memories of the summer he’d spent on the farm and ranch were fond ones.
He was tired of the nine to five, conniving, back stabbing life of the corporate world. It was time for a change. A change back to simpler times.
…Well, it was a thought.
Simpler Times - Chapter 1
Glenn arrived at the hotel just in time to freshen up, change clothes, and get to the graveside funeral service. There weren’t very many people in attendance. Glenn remembered his Uncle as a gregarious man, with a ready tip of the hat to women, and a slap on the back or handshake for men. It had seemed he knew everyone they met when Glenn went into the Cape with him to pick up supplies, or look at a prospective purchase of farm equipment, or attend a stock sale that Uncle Titus either had stock in to sell or was there looking to buy some.
Very much to his surprise, the black veiled widow was pointed out to him. Glenn didn’t even know Uncle Titus had remarried after Aunt Cecelia’s death. With the first handfuls of dirt on the coffin, the small group began to break up.
An elderly man in a black suit came over to Glenn and introduced himself. “You must be Glenn, Titus’ nephew. I’m Harvey Benbeck, your Uncle’s attorney. We have quite a bit to talk about. A few things have come up since I called you about your Uncle’s death.”
“Okay. When and where?”
“At my office, before the official reading of the will. If you want, you can follow me in.”
Glenn nodded, his glance suddenly going to the widow. The veil was still down, but Glenn could tell she was laughing, along with the man at her side. He suddenly had an uneasy feeling in is stomach.
It took nearly twenty minutes to get to Benbeck’s office. Glenn had a hard time keeping up with him. He was a very fast and risk taking driver, unlike Glenn. But they both got to the office alive, much to Glenn’s surprise.
Benbeck looked at his watch as they entered his office suite. “The reading of the will is set for one. We have a few minutes.” Again Glenn followed Benbeck, this time into his private office, past a very attractive secretary/paralegal.
Motioning to one of the leather chairs in front of the desk, Benbeck sat down behind the desk. “Okay, son, there are some things you need to know. I’m skating on thin ice, but I’ve been Titus’ attorney and friend for many years. I think I owe it to him to try to see that his wishes are carried out.”
“But the will… That would be his wishes, wouldn’t it?”
“Debra is going to contest the will. She says she has a more recent one that Titus entrusted her with just before his death She’s always had her own attorney. She says he wrote it up and Titus signed it. She hasn’t produced it yet, but she will at the reading. I just wanted to let you know that this will not be cut and dried the way I thought it would.”
Glenn could only nod. So much for going back to simpler times.
It was as Benbeck said. When she arrived, no longer wearing black, or a veil, she had her attorney with her, and he immediately gave an envelope to Benbeck as they seated themselves around the large table in Benbeck’s conference room.
“Who’s this? The kid’s lawyer?” Debra asked, looking closely at Glenn.
“Not quite,” Benbeck said, carefully hiding his smile. “This is Titus’ nephew, Glenn.”
“Him! But Titus’ nephew is twelve!”
“Afraid not, Aunt Debra. I was twelve when I came to stay with Uncle Titus when my mother was going through a difficult pregnancy.” It still pained Glenn to bring it up. His mother had died giving birth to Glenn’s sister. Still unnamed, the baby girl died after two days in pediatric intensive care.
“But Titus said…” Her words faded and a grim line replaced the earlier smile.
“Be that as it may,” Allan Stockmeyer, Debra’s attorney said, “Glenn’s age does not matter. If you will be so kind as to look at the papers I handed you, you will see that his presence, no matter what his age, is irrelevant in these proceedings.”
Benbeck opened the envelope and took out the legal papers it contained. He read through the entire document silently. Stockmeyer and Debra were whispering back and forth. Glenn just stared into space, the memories of his mother occupying him.
Finally, Benbeck put the papers down. He looked at Debra and said, “File the papers. We’ll see you in court.”
“Allan you said…”
Stockmeyer cut her off. “I know what I said. I told you this was not only possible, but probable. Let’s go. I’ve already got the papers ready to file with the court.”
“Of course you know that you will have to produce the original will in court. Titus had a very distinctive signature.”
“Careful what you say, Benbeck,” Debra said, her voice showing her anger. “You imply that we are doing something illegal, I’ll slap a libel suit on you so fast you won’t believe it.”
“Not implying anything,” Benbeck calmly replied, rising from his chair. “Just stating a fact.”
“We’ll let the facts speak for themselves,” Stockmeyer said coolly. “Come along, Debra.”
The two left and Benbeck turned to Glenn. “I can recommend a good attorney,” he said.
“Oh. I thought you would represent me.”
Benbeck grinned. “I need to be free to be an unbiased witness in the case. Stockmeyer isn’t the Perry Mason he thinks he is. I intend to see that Titus’ real wishes are carried out.”
It took three months, but Glenn finally owned the farm and ranch. The signature on the original documents Stockmeyer had drawn up were quickly proven to be very competent forgeries, but forgeries never the less. That, in addition to Benbeck’s and three other witnesses’ testimony that Titus had talked to them about what he wanted when he died, just three days before his death, a month after the supposed new will date, sealed the case.
Debra had received the clothes, jewelry, and car that Titus had bought for her, plus the condo that Titus and Debra had moved into after they were married. She claimed that it had been all Stockmeyer’s doing and that she was innocent of perjury, and attempted fraud. Stockmeyer eventually got disbarred. Debra went scot-free.
Glenn got the farm and ranch property and operation, along with a goodly sum of money that Debra had not known about. Glenn had been under a restraining order not to approach the farm during the legal battle. When he finally was able to go out to it, he was shocked. The ranch house, barns, and other out buildings were a mess.
Immediately after they were married Debra began pestering Titus to sell everything, but he had resisted that. He had completely quit operating the farm, at Debra’s insistence, selling all the stock and equipment, leasing out the land, and moving to the condo in the Cape. She continued to try to get him to sell the farm and ranch, up until the day he died.
Glenn was at a loss. He was no farmer or rancher. He’d expected to come to the place, hire a General Manager, and live on the property and learn how to run it over time. That wasn’t going to be the case.
He did move to the ranch house, but was more camping out there than living in it. The place had been heavily vandalized, as had the other buildings over the last few years, with no one there to prevent it.
It had been a party house for college students for a couple of years, until the people running a meth lab took it over. A lot of damage was done when the Missouri Joint Drug Task Force shut the lab down. That included hundreds of bullet holes in the buildings and several small fires caused by flash/bang and teargas grenades fired through the windows of the buildings. Titus was lucky the land wasn’t confiscated because of the meth lab operation, despite his not knowing anything about it.
Glenn was sitting on what was left of the front porch of the house, contemplating the future for the place, when a pickup truck came up the lane and stopped. A young woman got out of the cab of the truck and walked up to the porch.
Glenn took note of the woman’s youth and beauty, despite the ragged college sweatshirt and torn jeans she was wearing, her long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. “Can I help you?” Glenn said.
“I hope so,” the woman said. “Are you Glenn Murphy?”
Glenn nodded. “And you are…?”
Brittany Jones-Shaeffer. I want to talk to you about the farm and ranch.”
He didn’t know what he wanted to do with it, but Glenn knew he didn’t want to sell it. His uncle had resisted some pretty strong persuasion to keep it in the family, and Glenn wanted to honor his uncle’s wishes. He said as much. “The place isn’t for sale.”
“I doubt if we could afford it, anyway,” Brittany said. “What I want to talk to you about was what it would take to start an organic farming operation on part of it.”
“We? Who is we?”
“Some fellow graduate students at the agricultural college, and a couple of interested investors.”
“I see. Look, I’d invite you in to discuss it, but the place is a mess. Can we meet somewhere else to talk about this? I have my doubts, but am willing to consider it.”
“Okay. I know the place has been trashed. I’m sorry about that. I hate to admit it, but when I was a freshman I came to one of the parties out here. It was a big mistake on my part and I never came back.
“How about the Steak & Shake in town? Tomorrow? You can pick the time.”
“Noon is… No it will probably be crowded then. Two o’clock?”
Brittany nodded. “Please do keep an open mind about this.”
“I will,” Glenn replied.
“I may bring a couple more people to help with the pitch.”
Glenn laughed. “The more the merrier.”
When he turned in for bed that night, he found himself looking forward to the meeting. He wondered if it was because of Brittany or the prospect of doing something with the place.
He was eating a steak sandwich, with fries, when Brittany arrived. She had indeed brought other people with her. A woman somewhat older than Brittany, by her looks, and a man about Brittany’s age.
The three sat down at his booth. When the waitress came over, all of them asked for water or tea, with nothing to eat. Brittany made the introductions. The woman was Tabitha Sheriton, and the man Thomas Hooper.
“Okay,” Glenn said, “Let the pitch begin.” He was smiling when he said it.
Brittany laughed lightly, though the other two didn’t even crack a smile.
“Mr. Murphy…” Brittany started, but Glenn interrupted her.
“Make it Glenn.”
“Okay. Glenn it is. As I said yesterday evening, the group I’m involved with, all with good college educations in modern agricultural practices, plus a couple very experienced in small scale farming, want to start up an organic farm. Primarily because it is better for the environment, as a showcase to encourage more ventures like ours, and to provide more organic product to those that prefer it. Both plant and… I guess animal.”
“Sounds simple enough. My uncle has leased the land the last few seasons. They will be up for renewal this fall. You haven’t said how much land you need, and if you wanted to use existing structures. I don’t see why you can’t pick up one or more of the leases for your project.”
“We need at least three hundred acres, with buildings. But… Well… You see,” said Thomas, “We don’t anticipate turning a profit for several years.”
“
I see. That does change things, doesn’t it?” Glenn said.
“It is a very worthy cause,” said Tabitha, rather insistently. “And we could use the entire three sections. You would need to bring the buildings up to spec.”
“How long have you been trying to get this project going?”
“Three years,” Brittany said.
“You mentioned investors. They wouldn’t be able to pay the lease fees and building improvements?”
Tabitha immediately shook her head. “No. They will provide some equipment and such, seed, and other things for using the site for a test bed for their products in development. Some pro-green advertising, which some of them need desperately. Profits are secondary to them right now. Exposure in the field of greening the planet, and testing are their priorities. Profit is for future consideration.”
Brittany looked a little embarrassed at her friend’s comments. “We do have several grants lined up, but they will only pay for certain things. The lease payment isn’t one of them. We might be able to fix up the buildings.”
“What will happen to any permanent improvements to the property if the operation folds?”
Tabitha looked sour. “Not much we could do. But it’s not likely we’d fail. We’re all very good. And committed. We’re hoping to get some of the corporate mentality turned around from greed to doing the right things”
“I see,” Glenn said. He was going to need to think about this. He was all for green, but a person still had to make a living. It was sounding not only like they wanted to use all the land, but wanted him to improve it. At his expense. And there was Tabitha’s attitude. It was grating.
“I need to think about this,” he told the three. “Probably need to get more details.”
Tabitha looked angry, Thomas rather neutral, and Brittany disappointed.
“Okay. She wrote her telephone number on a napkin and handed it to Glenn. “Call me when you’ve had a chance to think it over.”
Tabitha and Thomas were already heading for the door of the Steak & Shake. Brittany slid out of the booth from beside Glenn. “Please, really do consider it. I know Tabitha can be a bit… harsh… but she really believes in this project. Her family has some land. They wouldn’t even consider it.”
“I will consider it,” Glenn replied. Brittany turned around and left, her slumped shoulders showing her dejection. He shrugged his shoulders and finished his sandwich and fries.
While he was driving back at to the farm he was listening to the news on Sirius radio. It was pretty much all bad, the weather news especially. It was pouring down rain when he got to the farm house. Glenn had a hard time finding a place that didn’t have a drip from the leaking roof coming down.
He put on a rain coat and just wandered around the various buildings on the property, checking for roof leaks. He found plenty of them. Dejected, Glenn went back to the house as it was getting dark. He found a new place to roll out his sleeping pad and bag and crawled in, wondering what the next day would bring. He needed to make a decision quickly. He either needed to go back to work in a normal job, try to fix up the farm and get some help running it, continue to lease it out, or be super generous and let the students use it.
“I’m not that generous,” Glenn muttered as he fell asleep.
After a cold breakfast the next morning, Glenn called the number Brittany had written down on the napkin the day before. It was only courtesy to let her down in person, so Glenn made arrangements to meet her at the Steak & Shake again that afternoon.
With nothing better to do, Glenn went in to Cape Girardeau early and went down to the river view. The Mississippi was running high, due to two months of nearly steady rains. He watched the river flow, and the tugboats and barges going past. He’d never gone down to the river much when he was in St. Louis.
The rain started again and Glenn went back to the Talisman. He drove around town aimlessly, just checking it out. It looked like a nice enough town, not like some river towns. It was still pouring when he got to the Steak & Shake, plus he was very early for the meeting, so he sat in the Talisman and listened to a Sirius news channel.
“Just more of the same,” he muttered and found an oldies rock and roll station. “This disaster and that disaster, this flood and that drought, this war and that war, this group hates that group, and everybody hates the US, contaminated food, changing climate, interest rates up and housing down. What’s the world coming to?” Glenn asked himself.
Suddenly Glenn sat up a little straighter. “Contaminated food… shortages of food, bad weather… And I like to eat,” he muttered. “And I need a permanent home… And something to do.”
He saw Brittany arrive and go into the restaurant. Glenn got out of the car and followed her in. When she saw him, she headed for a booth. Glenn joined her.
Brittany didn’t look hopeful when Glenn started to speak. “I wanted to tell you face to face that I wasn’t going to go for the deal.” Brittany’s face fell further.
“Not really much to say…”
Glenn cut Brittany off. “But I am having second thoughts. I want to hear more about exactly what you plan to do. And how much it would cost me.
They both ordered bowls of chili when the waitress came over.
Brittany’s face brightened a little, but not much. “It’s much as we told you yesterday. An organic farm to test out the best of various crops, refine procedures to maintain the organic label, that sort of thing.”
“Tabitha seemed reluctant to include farm animals. Would you do organically raised meat, too?”
“Tabitha is a vegetarian, though not a Vegan. I think she would like to be, but… Well, that’s her business. But, yes, we would want to try to raise organic meat animals.”
“Why the hard core refusal to consider making a profit?”
Brittany sighed. “Several of us don’t want the pressures to make the operation a large commercial success. We want to be a trend setter. Learn to do it better, more efficiently, and cheaply, to provide a showcase where people can come and learn.”
“Well, wouldn’t it be a better showcase if it was profitable?”
“I suppose so,” Brittany mused, “But we have so many in the group opposed…”
“I see,” Glenn said. Something suddenly came to him. The farm operation, and especially the ranch side of it, had been very self-sufficient when Titus’ family first started it in the 1880’s. “Are there plans for biodiesel production? And how about methane and alcohol?”
“A couple of the guys are into biodiesel, but we don’t have funding to pursue that line of research. And we don’t want to spread ourselves too thin. Taking on too much is a sure way to fail.”
“I can’t argue that,” Glenn admitted. “Were you planning on greenhouses?”
“Yes. We have funding for a small one with which to do research.”
“Thomas mentioned three hundred acres. Tabitha said you needed it all. I don’t see the need for all three sections.”
Brittany sighed. “Tabitha wants us to try and get an experimental hemp growing permit. We need acreage for that.”
“Why hemp?” Glenn said, but then quickly added, “Never mind. Better if I look it up on the internet on my own.”
Brittany looked a little annoyed. “I wouldn’t lie to you about any of it!”
“I know. It’s not that. I just do better researching on my own. I’d have a million questions and I’m sure you have something to do today besides talk to me.”
“I’ll take as long as needed, if there is a possibility we’ll get to use the land.”
“I’m beginning to lean toward it,” Glenn said. “But don’t get your hopes up too much. There are going to be some stipulations that you and the group might not like.”
“Oh,” Brittany said, calming back down after hearing Glenn’s initial words. “If they are reasonable…”
Glenn grinned. “I think they’d be reasonable. You might even. I’m not sure all your group will.”
“I can only take the proposal to them and let the majority decide.”
“It will take me a couple or three days to do some research and think this over. I’ll let you know in three days.”
Brittany nodded. It was still better than nothing. She was sure that Glenn was right about one thing. Several in the group weren’t going to like Glenn setting conditions. It didn’t sit real well with her. “But beggars can’t be choosers,” she said to herself as she finished her chili.
Glenn had his laptop with him, but found it easier to go to the county library to do his research. The telephone line for the farm, with DSL, hadn’t been turned on yet. He e-mailed himself many articles and complete web pages to study when off line. He found a WiFi spot in town and downloaded his e-mail and went back to the farm to read up on several things.
He was ready for the meeting on Friday. Glenn gave Brittany his proposal and sat back to let her read it. She would look happy one moment and unhappy the next as she read. Glenn couldn’t get a real feel for what she was thinking when she set the papers down.
“I really like some of these ideas,” she finally said, looking earnestly at Glenn. “They go further even than some of ours. But we’d loose our grants if we did some of them. Even if we didn’t, we don’t have enough money to even start on some of these projects.”
“How much are the grants?”
“One is for $25,000, one for $35,000, and a small one for $10,000.”
“$70,000 total,” mused Glenn. “Okay. I can cover that if you lose them. And I’d be footing the bill for everything I’ve suggested that you weren’t planning on doing.”
“Do you realize how much that would be?” Brittany exclaimed.
“I do. I think. My Uncle wanted both the farm and ranch parts of the property to be successfully passed down the family line. I’m willing to risk my retirement, and my family’s legacy, on the chance to see that come to pass, and the chance for some pretty good profits, relatively early. I had something of an epiphany the other day, while listening to the news. I want to be sure I’ll have food available when I get old. The way things are going in this old world, that could be a problem.”
“I suppose so,” Brittany said, somewhat absently. She was thinking of all the good things her group could still do with the property, despite the things that Glenn wanted done.
“I’ll take this to our next meeting. That’s this Sunday. I’ll get back to you on Monday. Is that okay?”
Glenn nodded. He went back to the farm and found the phone company waiting on him. He was doing more research on the internet by the end of the day.
Simpler Times – Chapter 2
Thomas and Tabitha were with Brittany Monday afternoon when she arrived at the Steak & Shake to meet with Glenn. None of the three looked very happy.
Again they didn’t order anything except tea and water. Glenn ordered a BLT and looked at the three expectantly as he waited for his order.
After long moments of silence Brittany finally spoke. “We can’t do it. There are too many provisions that don’t have anything to do with our project.”
“I see,” Glenn said. “Okay.”
“That’s it?” Tabitha asked. “Just ‘Okay’?” She was definitely angry, Glenn decided.
“What else is there to say? You don’t want to do it. I’ll just do what I want to do. It’ll be harder, and a little more expensive, but it is all still doable. Organic food is a big business now. I’m sure I can find other people interested in it to help me.”
“That’s not really fair,” Thomas said.
“This is our project!” Tabitha said. “You can’t take it away from us and use it for your own selfish ends!”
“I thought you’d be pleased,” Glenn lied. “Your project being expanded and taken to new levels. Isn’t the fact that it will be done more important than who does it?”
“You’re just twisting words!” Tabitha cried and scrambled out of the booth. Thomas followed, without saying anything more.
“You did that deliberately!” Brittany said, accusingly.
“I don’t like her high and mighty attitude,” Glenn said slowly. “It was a rotten thing to do. Tell her I said I’m sorry. But I do stand by what I said. You guys are on the right track. I do want it to succeed. I don’t see anything wrong with incorporating other ideas and trying to make a profit at the same time.”
Brittany sighed. “I’ll tell her, though you should do it yourself. It was close… the vote… Several people really liked some of your ideas and the fact that you are willing to foot the bill. I didn’t know you were that wealthy.”
“I’m not,” Glenn said. “I’m risking my entire retirement fund, plus quite a bit more. I’m selling my house in St. Louis and will be using that money, too. And I’ll borrow against the farm and ranch as it gains value. I believe in this. Greening the planet is a noble cause and has its place. But I think it should be integrated into existing ways of life.”
Brittany sighed again. “I guess I can’t really argue that. Some of us, like Tabitha, just take this so personally.”
“I take what I’m going to do personally, too.”
“I guess you would. I wish we could work this out.”
“Give it another shot,” Glenn said. “Take the proposal back. Talk it over more. One thing I might not have made clear is that the profits will be shared. Whatever group entity you set up will get twenty-five percent of the profits.”
“Oh. That wasn’t really clear. But I don’t know if it will make a difference. It really is a matter of principle. I’ll talk to them again.”
They set another meeting date and time and Brittany left. Glenn left as well, and went looking for a regional phone book. The local office of the telephone company had one. He took it and went back to the farm to make a few calls. “This is going to work, one way or the other.”
Two days later a salvage crew showed up to start dismantling all the buildings on the farm and ranch. Glenn had made a deal to sell the highly sought after old lumber, particularly that in the barn. The company would do the dismantling and clean up, and pay Glenn for the wood. They already had a market for it.
With the house coming down last, Glenn had time to find a used travel trailer and get it delivered to the farm. He would live in it until the new house was built the next summer. The other buildings would have priority.
When the crew was done, Glenn basically had virgin land. He’d even had the old, unreliable well and septic systems removed, as well as the concrete slab for the old house. Only the power and telephone lines were transferred to the trailer. He had water delivered and sewage pumped out of the trailer holding tank.
He had a general idea of what he wanted the farm and ranch compound to be like, but wanted to wait until he knew if he would be working with Brittany’s group, or another one, before he finalized any construction plans.
Glenn had given it two weeks between the meetings. He sighed when he saw Thomas and Tabitha with Brittany when they came into the Steak & Shake. Tabitha looked stony. Thomas actually looked a little pleasant. Brittany was smiling and Glenn began to believe she bore good news.
“Well?” he asked when the others had taken their seats and more orders for water and tea were given.
“There was a shift in the new voting,” Brittany said. “The majority agreed to your terms.”
“Excellent!” Glenn said.
“It was only by one vote,” Tabitha informed Glenn coldly.
“That’s democracy at work for you,” Glenn replied. “Okay, then. When can everyone come out to the place and tell me what they need in the way of structures, equipment, and etc.?”
“Structures?” Thomas asked. “Aren’t we going to be using the barns?”
Glenn shook his head. “I razed everything. We’re starting fresh. You can get exactly what you need.”
“Such a waste,” Tabitha muttered.
“Had a timber recycler come in and take everything useable,” Glenn said in a normal tone of voice. “It’s already headed for a new home.”
Tabitha just frowned.
Before that conversation could go any further, Brittany spoke up. “Everybody has different schedules. It might take a week or two to get everyone’s input.”
“That’s fine,” Glenn replied. “I’ll be available whenever anyone can get loose.” He gave Brittany his cell phone number. “I take it everyone knows how to get there?”
“Well, no. But the ones that don’t can go out with those that do,” Thomas said.
“I want to have everyone’s needs down on paper before we lay out the place. Anything we can dual use or even triple use, I want to do.”
“So we’re going to be limited on what we can ask for.” That from Tabitha.
“You can ask for anything,” Glenn said, his voice taking on a bit of chill. “It’ll be up to the group as a whole to verify actual need for each person’s requests.”
“You’re going to let the group decide?” Thomas asked, his surprise evident.
“Oh, I maintain veto power, but yes. You’ve all been planning this for some time. I imagine the group as a whole knows approximately what each person plans and needs.”
Tabitha looked startled, but said nothing.
“As soon as we have the basics, we’ll finalize a plan and you can take it to your grant people and see what they will still do. I need to budget things and I need to know how that money will be spent.”
Ever angry, it seemed, Tabitha said, “That’s not your money to do anything with. The group will decide how to spend it.”
“Actually,” Thomas said, “The individual grantees will do that, since they are individual grants for their special projects.”
“The group will be giving advice and help, but yes, it will be up to the individuals or teams that applied for the grants to spend the money within the parameters of the grant,” Brittany said.
Tabitha looked annoyed that her friends had contradicted her, but she said nothing else.
“Well, have them let me know as soon as possible. And if additional outside funds can be used to add to or improve what the grant actually pays for.”
“That I can answer now,” Brittany said. “The grant money has to be used for specific things in all three cases, but there is not a limit on how much additional funding can be used.”
“That’s good,” replied Glenn. “Okay. If there is nothing else, I need to get going. I’ve got a ton of work to do now that I know which group I’ll be working with.”
Brittany moved out of the booth and then Glenn did as well. Unlike the other meetings, Glenn was leaving and the others seemed to be staying. “To talk it over,” Glenn thought with a small smile.
Glenn was eager to get on with his research. He was coming up with some very interesting things on his internet searches. One never knew quite what would pop up, with even some of the simplest word choices. But he was learning quite a bit more than he set out to learn, and that was good. Plus, it was interesting, to boot.
It was nearly a week before anyone called to come out to the property and submit their list of what they would need for the project. Then there was a flood, with two or three coming out together, one group after another. He began to get a clear idea of what they wanted, and how it would mesh with what he wanted.
Except for the fact that he wanted to profit from it, there really wasn’t that much difference between what the group wanted and what he wanted. It was going to be expensive. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t be able to do it. But it would take all he had. Glenn smiled. “Should have some good eats, though.”
When he was sure the last person that was involved with the group had been out to see him, Glenn went back to St. Louis to meet with a former client of his. An architect for whom he had handled the regional advertising. With his notes and a general drawing of the property, Glenn described the plan he had in mind.
“A bit out of my field,” Clay Montgomery said. “But I think I can handle it.” He grinned at Glenn. “Get a little of my own back from the rates you charged me.”
Glenn laughed. “Add a line item for that. “Payback fee.”
“I may just do that. Give me two weeks for a preliminary set of drawings.”
Glenn shook hands with Clay. “Okay. Thanks. I really appreciate this.”
Clay waved his hand negligently and Glenn left.
Two weeks later, with plans in hand, Glenn went to his bank. They were not at all interested in financing a farm operation, so he went shopping for a new bank. With the thought that one of the banks in the Cape might be more used to agricultural loans, he tried there first.
Sure enough, the second bank he talked to was more than willing to deal with him. Glenn closed his account in St. Louis and transferred all his funds to the bank in Cape Girardeau. They were just a little unsure about the unconventional structures he was planning, but Glenn put them onto several websites and asked them to consider the earth sheltered construction he wanted.
Assuming he would get the money, Glenn began to order long lead time items. He also got a local dirt contractor out to do some rough landscaping on the property, to suit the building layout he was planning.
Glenn called Brittany and told her the plans were in the works. If she wanted to set up a meeting with the group he’d show everyone the plans. She immediately agreed. Two days later Glenn met with the group at a restaurant in town that had a small banquet room.
It was a spirited meeting. Mostly due to the fact that each member of the group had what they need, plus much more. Even Tabitha didn’t look as stony as she had when she first started looking over the plans.
“This is wonderful!” Brittany said, her eyes shining brightly. “We never expected something this large and comprehensive. Thank you.”
Glenn shrugged, wondering what a big hug from Brittany would feel like. “Just don’t forget that I’m in this for the profits.”
“Believe me,” Tabitha said, frowning again, “We won’t. Now, I think we should vote on approving or rejecting these plans as they stand, and then discuss changes.”
Glenn smiled slightly. “This isn’t a democracy. My money and future are on the line here. I will gladly accept suggestions and consider them, but the final decisions are mine, not the group’s.”
Now wait a minute!” Tabitha almost yelled. “We never agreed to that!”
“Calm down, Tab,” Brittany said. “I guess it wasn’t really said quite the way Glenn put it just now, but I do think most of us understood that he would have direct control of the operation, except for the grant money.” Several of the other group members were nodding in agreement with Brittany.
“Grant money!” Tabitha snorted. “You know that two of the grants were pulled when they found out we had access to private funding.”
“I know. I know. But we still have the big one. And everything we asked for is being provided. More than we asked for.”
“And all he cares about is his profits,” Tabitha said as Brittany gave Glenn a quick look and led Tabitha off to one side to continue to talk to her.
Glenn didn’t know what Brittany said to Tabitha, but Tabitha stayed quiet the rest of the meeting, only occasionally looking daggers at Glenn.
Tabitha was the first to leave, and Brittany the last.
“I want to thank you again,” Brittany said. She gestured at the plans and diagrams on the tables. “We really didn’t expect this. And I’m sorry about Tabitha. I really don’t know what her problem is, but I’ll try to get her to be a bit more civil.”
“One person isn’t going to spoil this,” Glenn replied. “Getting this done is my future.”
“I understand,” Brittany replied. With that she left.
Glenn gathered up his papers and headed back to his trailer.
The bank called the following day and Glenn went in to sign the loan papers he’d taken out on the farm and ranch. He called the earth shelter building outfit he selected from his internet research and put in an order. He faxed over drawings of the earth sheltered buildings he wanted built. He would have an estimate in a few days of the ones he wanted to start building first. The barn and the greenhouse support building.
He hired a labor temp to help him stake out the areas for the buildings and other construction projects on the plans. It took him and Jeremy two days to get it all done. “Wow!” Jeremy said as they were finishing up. “Going to be a big place. How many hands you going to need?”
“Several,” Glenn replied. “You interested?”
“If it’s full time,” Jeremy replied. “My girlfriend and I are barely making it doing temp jobs.”
“What skills does each of you have?”
“Well, we both do labor jobs. Helen doesn’t like inside work. She took welding in trade school and I took machining. Neither one of us has found work in our specialty.”
“Can’t guarantee all that much specialty work, but I need simple labor for now. Could put you both on after the temp service time is over.”
“I’ll talk to Helen.”
“Are you tied to town or could you move out here if I got you a trailer?”
“Actually, we’re living in my Dad’s fifth-wheel. We could bring it out. I’m just not sure Helen will want to, but I’ll ask her.”
“Okay.”
That evening Glenn called the three students involved in animal science and asked them to come out the following morning. All were agreeable.
Jeremy and Helen showed up promptly at eight, as did the three students. Between them they got the pastures and other animal spaces marked off for the fencing contractor to come in and start putting up the fences. Except the fencing guy fell and broke his leg the day before he was supposed to start. The parts showed up, but he didn’t.
Glenn decided it was a sign. He climbed into the Talisman and headed for St. Louis again, giving Jeremy and Helen the day off. Glenn had an equipment list of items he was planning on purchasing for the farm, just not this soon. But things needed to progress smoothly for everything to get done on the timetable he had laid out.
Instead of dedicated machines for every task that needed to be done on the farm and the ranch, Glenn had decided to get utility equipment that, with appropriate attachments, could do multiple tasks, with less money tied up overall. He’d read about their use in a fictional story he’d read on the internet and liked the idea.
He’d researched brands on the internet and decided on two brands of tool carriers that he thought would do most of the farm and ranch jobs. One company was Bobcat. They had several machines that would work, but Glenn opted for the Bobcat A300 skid steer/all wheel steer model and the Bobcat Toolcat 5600T Utility vehicle. A pair of each, plus a good assortment of attachments, Glenn thought, would handle all the small to medium sized jobs on the place.
For medium to large tasks, Glenn opted for Mercedes Benz Unimog U500 utility trucks. They were becoming more available, as were service and parts, through the American distributor, Freightliner. And there were plenty of attachments for them to cover most of what Glenn planned for the operation. That included the open field farming. Unimogs worked well as tractors.
He went ahead and placed the order at Bobcat for one A300 and one Toolcat 5600T. He wouldn’t need the others until the following year. He also asked for delivery of several attachments with the two machines, including a posthole digger.
Likewise, at the Freightliner dealer, he bought the one well equipped U500 they had in stock and ordered a second. The other four would be purchased as the demand for them came up.
Glenn got back to his trailer late that night, with assurances that the three pieces of equipment and attendant attachments would be delivered the following afternoon from the two dealers.
The morning of the delivery, Glenn went in to town and bought several shovels and a couple of tampers, along with a set of fence tools. The trucks with the equipment showed up just after two that afternoon. It took the rest of the afternoon for the delivery drivers to familiarize Glenn, Jeremy, and Helen with operating everything. Helen fell in love with the Toolcat and claimed it as her own.
With the weekend coming up, and the availability of several of the group members to contribute their labor, Glenn put Jeremy and Helen to digging post holes and laying out post for insertion by the larger crew the next day. The A300 with auger and the Toolcat hauling the posts in the rear bed was an ideal team.
Glenn went in to get the Unimog licensed and insured. With that done, he stopped at a petroleum wholesaler and ordered double wall fuel tanks for the farm, along with a load of fuel. A transfer tank with pump, mounted on the bed of the Unimog, would provide fuel until the tanks were installed.
Things went well that weekend. It wasn’t just the animal science people that came to help. People in several of the other disciplines showed up, too. Everyone was excited that they were actually working toward their project goals.
Glenn had wanted something visible on the property to show progress. The fencing worked. So did the equipment, particularly the Bobcats. People were looking for reasons to use them.
One of the attachments that had been in stock at the dealer for the Bobcats was a roto-tiller. The plant science people decided to start a basic garden, just because. Taking turns with the machine, after Jeremy showed them how, three of them tilled up a large space while two others went in for seed.
Glenn gave them money for the seeds, which wasn’t much, but also enough to get some basic gardening tools. The garden was in by the end of Sunday, as was most of the fencing.
The following week additional progress was made, though much of it wasn’t visible the way the garden and fencing was. While there were several irrigations wells on the three sections of property that were in good shape, Glenn had early on pulled the house well. It was very old and the old steel mesh point was leaking sand. That was on top of not producing much water.
A new six inch well was drilled near where the farm buildings would go, and a four inch well was installed for the new house. Both wells had basic solar powered pumps with a battery box installed for the construction phase. Permanent pumps and tanking systems would be installed later.
Both pumps could feed the huge Invisible Structures Rainstore3® water storage installation, as did the controlled runoff from all the buildings and grassy areas of the farm compound. The water could be used for irrigation as stored. In the unlikely event it was needed for human consumption it would be treated.
In addition to the new fresh water supply, sewage disposal was addressed. A large septic tank was installed for the house and an over engineered leach field put in for it. A similar system was placed to serve the farm and ranch buildings.
Whenever Jeremy and Helen weren’t helping with those installations, Glenn had them planting set after set of blackberries. And not the thornless kind, to the two’s slight misery. Neither one of them could see any pattern to the planting, but planted the sets where Glenn told them he wanted them.
That weekend several of the students came out again, to finish the fencing, and to lay out the planting grid for an orchard. The tree spade for the Bobcats had come in and the planting holes were dug for both a large permanent fruit and nut orchard, as well as a smaller experimental orchard that the plant science tree specialist would be handling.
The earth shelter building contractor showed up the following Monday with two crews to start the construction of the greenhouse support building and the barn. Glenn got the dirt contractor out again to begin stockpiling earth for the earth sheltering, creating a small lake in the process, near the irrigation well nearest the building site. There were county inspection people on the property several different days to make sure everything was permitted properly and going in to code.
The permitting process was keeping Glenn fairly busy. With the non-traditional construction, he had to get variances from the county to get the buildings built the way he wanted. The bank having been willing to lend the money had helped.
There was a steady stream of students from the group coming out to work in the garden and orchard, as the trees were put in, and to just check on the progress. Glenn had delivered a small open plan mobile home for them to use to clean up in, and have a place for lunches and what not. It was plumbed to the house well and septic systems, as were Glenn’s trailer and Jeremy and Helen’s fifth wheel.
With the new building in place Glenn and Jeremy and Helen were spared the constant traipsing in and out of their dwellings by the students needing to go to the bathroom.
The second Unimog, second A300, and second Toolcat were delivered. Those of the group that would be dealing with field crops were sent on a farm equipment hunt, with it in mind that the Unimogs would be the tractor. It was too late to get started with all the various crops the students would be working with, but they planted those that were okay to plant late spring.
Glenn installed a sophisticated weather reporting system in the group’s mobile home for the students to use in recording weather data.
The greenhouse support building was finished shortly after the greenhouse components arrived. The steel frames and poly-carbonate panels went up quickly in the twelve moderate sized, and four large greenhouses Glenn had purchased. When the greenhouses were furnished, another weekend party put the four that were for the project into operation, much to the delight of the plant science people.
When Glenn had the students begin planting in his commercial greenhouses, Tabitha threw something of a fit. Brittany got her out of Glenn’s way before she could make more of a scene than she already had.
It was only later that Tabitha heard that Glenn was having the students keep track of the work they did on his behalf. He would be paying them a wage for the work. When Brittany told Tabitha that she calmed down and managed to be civil to Glenn the rest of the time she was at the farm that weekend.
The next project the second building crew started, while the first crew was still working on the barn, was a long, south facing string of thirty-two feet wide by thirty-two feet long by sixteen feet high inside dimension rooms. They too, were earth sheltered, with a the south facing vertical wall two walls of concrete filled in between with a wall of thick insulation and earth.
Each room had a sixteen foot wide garage door in the south wall, next to a set of metal double entrance doors. There were several windows in the south wall, and a standard metal door and window allowing exit out the north side. There were six light tube skylights in each ceiling. Each room also had metal double entrance doors connecting to the rooms on either side. With twenty of the rooms the structure was almost seven hundred feet long. On top of the roof earth berming was poured a concrete slab with a four foot high perimeter wall.
Glenn got many questions about the rooms. Not a one of the group had requested anything like them. They weren’t really suitable for the work that many of the group would be doing. Glenn would only smile and say, “Time will tell. Right now they are just spares.”
The other question he began to hear was, “When will you start on our building?”
“Next.” It satisfied them. He’d been true to his word from the beginning.
And it was the next building project started when the string of rooms was completed. The barn was coming along nicely and, if kept on schedule, would be completed before winter.
The building housing the group’s workrooms, too, was earth sheltered, but it would be difficult to tell if one didn’t know. The walls and roof were built the same way the greenhouse support building was, and the south wall of the spare rooms structure. Walls of poured concrete, with a thick spray on layer of foam insulation on the inside of the outer wall and then the rest of the space between the insulation and inner wall filled with compacted earth. The outer wall would be brick façade. The flat roof, again like the spare room building and greenhouse building was thick concrete, topped with earth, a layer of foam board, and another layer of concrete. There was a four foot perimeter wall around it the roof line, too.
It was actually a very similar shape to the greenhouse complex. A central building with several wings. Greenhouses in the one case and rooms with windows in the other. It was two-story, with a veranda around the entire building at ground level and a balcony around the second story. What the members of the group didn’t realize, until the second story was started, was that the building would include housing as well as the first floor working spaces.
The housing consisted of bunk rooms which would share kitchen privileges and separate men’s and women’s locker rooms, individual bedrooms with bath; efficiency/studio apartments; and one-bedroom apartments. All the rooms and work areas were wired for digital and analog electronics, including high-speed internet access, and satellite TV.
When the barn was finished, the crew that had been working on it began helping with the new structure. Animal science students were turned loose to begin acquiring their animals, plus those that Glenn wanted.
Glenn brought in the plumbers and electricians to do their job, and then the interior finishers. The barn was finished, and then the work and housing building. The group had what they needed, and Glenn had the beginnings of his working farm.
Simpler Times - Chapter 3
Those in the group, which was growing due to the funding that Glenn was providing, that were willing to work for Glenn were allowed to live at the farm rent free, in the housing units. They were also given a share of the food the farm was starting to produce.
Jeremy and Helen moved into one of the one bedroom units of the housing and work building and gave Jeremy’s father back his fifth-wheel travel trailer.
Through the original students in the group, Glenn made contact with recent graduates that had business degrees. He found one willing to work with him in marketing the products the farm and ranch were producing, and would produce in the future.
At the moment the products included some very high quality greenhouse raised organic salad makings and a few vegetables, grown in the greenhouses. The future would bring higher yields, a wider variety, and organic meats. The animals were coming in as Glenn, on the advice of the animal science students, bought stock.
The farm would raise chickens for eggs and for meat; milk cows for milk and other dairy products; Black Angus cattle for meat and leather; American Bison for meat and leather; Ostrich for meat, feathers, and leather; swine for meat and leather; sheep for meat and wool, goats for meat and milk, rabbits for low fat meat and pelts; tilapia, trout, and catfish for food, worms for fish food and chicken food.
Additional animals would be Barb horses for riding and light harness work, and Clydesdales for medium and heavy harness. There was kennel in the barn for those that wanted to have their own dog on the property.
As winter settled in, so did the tenants of the farm. No construction was planned, though finishing and equipping the work areas continued, using the grant money the group had. Though the group had lost two grants due to the private funding, it picked up another large grant because of it.
With outgo slowing, and some income beginning, Glenn finalized some of the additional plans he had for the place and began ordering more long lead items for spring delivery for the projects he had in mind.
Glenn stayed out of the students work areas unless specifically invited, but he spent much of the winter in the other areas of the farm, learning what he could, from the hands-on things he was doing, as well as the reading and research he did every night on the internet.
With not that much for them to do, Glenn equipped one of the ‘spare’ rooms as a welding and machine shop for them. They would do what was needed around the farm for their base wintertime salary, but could take on outside jobs if they wanted for extra income. Glenn financed their purchase and conversion of an old ‘70’s model Chevy one-ton dually truck to a diesel powered welder’s truck so they could do off site jobs.
Quite a bit of equipment began showing up as winter waned. The other two Bobcats arrived, as did two more of the Unimog U500’s. The rest of the attachments for the Bobcats and Unimogs also arrived, including the field farming equipment. Six ROKON bikes converted to Hatz diesel engines were completed and delivered. They were primarily for use on the ranch property handling the herds.
Also delivered was the biodiesel production equipment, including an oil press. Ever since the tank farm had been put in, one of the students interested in alternative fuels had been going around town collecting waste oil from restaurants with deep fat fryers. As soon as the equipment was set up in one of the ‘spare’ rooms, the farm would be on its way to energy independence.
Another component of the planned energy independence also arrived in the form of a truck load of RWE Schott photo-voltaic panels with several Xantrex/Trace inverter systems. Another truck brought the Surrette deep cycle batteries for the systems. As soon as the weather broke, the electricians would begin the installations for each building.
Gregg decided to call the supplier that was supposed to be getting a set of generators for the farm. He hadn’t heard from him in a while. Sure enough, there was a hold up. It was going to be another three weeks before they could be shipped. There wasn’t anything Glenn could do about it. He’d just have to wait.
But he wasn’t idle while he waited for the generator. He got with Jeremy and Helen and put them on two projects. The first was to make a set of stills for the production of fuel alcohol. The second was to build a pair of methane generators to produce the fuel to run the stills and the biodiesel production.
Even Tabitha was calm and cool as her plant growth experiments went well in her workroom and one of the greenhouses. She had even taken advantage of the residency possibilities, though she paid a nominal sum rather than do any work for Glenn. Brenda, too, was living at the farm, working with three other people on her project. She helped in the greenhouses, for the most part, for the privilege of living at the farm.
The operation, despite the equipment that Glenn had, was very labor intensive. Fortunately, there were plenty of students needing affordable room and board. Glenn had plenty of students willing to lend a hand in return for residency at the farm.
Many of them had an interest in several of the aspects of Glenn’s approach to a self-sustaining farm and ranch operation. It wasn’t just the plant and animal research going on, that brought students out, but also the earth sheltering construction and off grid goal of the farm.
Though Glenn had not planned on a wind powered addition to the battery charging, two of the students whose interests lay in alternative power asked him to consider adding that option so they could study it further. He agreed and ordered an Air-X 400 watt, 48 volt dc unit and an Excel 48 volt dc, 7.5 kilowatt unit with the necessary materials needed to install and hook up the units to the solar power system that was going in rapidly.
Work was started on additional structures for the farm and ranch operation. In anticipation of the herds growing, weather shelters were constructed in several places on the section of ground set aside for grazing. Hay shelters were also constructed, as the farm would produce hay to carry the grazing animals for at least two years, plus enough to sell every year.
Silos were erected to hold the farm’s field crops. This was to allow the best profit for field crops, the crop being held until the best price could be obtained. In addition they acted as storage for grain fed animals, as did the concrete lined pits that held silage.
The four Unimogs, with three point hitches attached, with the recently delivered farm equipment, were used to get the fields planted. One of the crops was hemp. The group had managed to get a special use permit from the BATFE and Department of Agriculture to grow it for experimental use. There was enough acreage permitted to allow a significant amount of it to be processed for biodiesel. But the farm also planted other oil producing crops to ensure an adequate supply of biodiesel to for the entire operation.
The methane produced from plant and animal waste was providing enough gas to run the burners for the stills and for the biodiesel equipment. The alcohol was sold to a petroleum wholesaler for blending in gasoline. The farm kept its alcohol tanks full, only selling down one tank to half full at a time.
The students also planted several specialty crops for their research. The third full section of land was dedicated to cash crops for Glenn. The greenhouses, both the commercial production ones for Glenn, and those for the experiments for the group were going full bore.
Besides the breeding stock the ranch operation had acquired the previous fall, enough stock had been acquired for finishing over the winter to allow harvesting that spring. With the help of the marketing students, Glenn had made deals with restaurants in St. Louis, the Cape, and Memphis, to provide them with not only beef, chicken, and fish; but lamb, mutton, goat, rabbit, bison, and ostrich, as well. That was in addition to the organic vegetables and salad components. It would be another two years before the fruit and nut trees in the orchard began to bear commercially.
Two of the commercial green houses were dedicated to semi-tropical and tropical plants, including small trees. Much of the production of organic lemons, limes, bananas, kiwi, cocoa, spices, herbs, and coffee was used at the farm. What excess there was went to organic shops in St. Louis and Memphis. So did the farm produced eggs, milk, cheeses, and other specialty animal products. They were produced in two of the ‘spare’ rooms, now equipped to handle the processing of the farm’s products. Students did do some of the work, but the butchering and meat cutting was done by a butcher that Glenn had hired.
Work started on two additional large earth sheltered barns and the main earth sheltered house. The generators finally arrived and were wired into farm’s electrical system. The solar panels on each building were able to handle 100% of the normal draw during daylight hours and still put a charge to the batteries. The wind turbines added some battery charging capacity.
When electrical draws went over the norms, commercial power picked up the slack and recharged the batteries. If commercial power wasn’t available, the generator set kicked in. One generator would kick in if the solar panels and batteries weren’t handling the load. The one generator could handle the normal load, without the solar input. A second genset would kick in if higher than normal usage was needed, and the batteries were discharged. There was a third genset that would come on line if either of the first two was down for service. A fourth identical genset was available for use to replace one of the other three if one of them needed a rebuild.
The new house and barns were finished before fall and Glenn moved into the house. He sold the trailer.
The last two of the six Unimog U500’s came in and were available to help with the field crop harvest that fall. Between the small amount of hemp that was produced, the canola oil, and used deep fryer oil, the farm was able to produce all the fuel it needed, with enough left over to keep the tanks full and still sell off some excess.
Though the operation was often the butt of jokes because of the use of the Unimogs instead of conventional tractors, things were going well on the production farm. It was the same for the experimental crops those in the group were raising. Even the garden did exceptionally well. The farm was fulfilling all its contracts with the organic food distributors that served St. Louis and Memphis.
All-in-all, Glenn was quite pleased. He’d gone through the letter of credit he’d received from the bank with the property and operation for collateral, as well as half of his retirement funds. He still had half of the retirement and all of the money his uncle had left him. The farm and ranch was now bringing in significant income and Glenn began to invest again in his future retirement.
He went about it a bit differently than he had in the past, due, in part, to many of the things he’d learned on the internet. He transferred the remainder of his retirement paper assets to Treasury Bill investments, and began putting the new money into gold and silver as a hedge for the future.
It was going so well, that Glenn was becoming overwhelmed. He had quite a bit of help from the students on running the farm, but decided an experienced farm manager would be a good idea. It had been his original thought anyway. It was still a good idea. He put out the word and began to take resumes that fall for a manager to take over the next spring.
He talked to many applicants, including a couple of students that would be graduating with degrees in farm management, but had no working experience other than their work on their family farms. One had also worked at Glenn’s the past spring and summer.
Becoming one to really hedge his bets, Glenn decided to hire both an experienced farm manager and a green assistant manager. Glenn figured that between them, with his oversight, the farm and ranch could be run with the best of the old ideas and the best of the new.
He started the process to get two additional small earth sheltered homes built to house the manager and his family, and the assistant manager, who was currently single, but had a live-in boyfriend. For the meantime Glenn had two identical three bedroom manufactured housing units brought in and installed.
Fredrick Grebbs wasn’t too happy about working with not only an inexperienced assistant, but a female one, at that. But he agreed. And Alison McGrady was a difficult person not to like. Glenn thought it would work okay.
He had many talks with the two of them during the winter, getting across his short term goals and the long term goals he had in mind, and his thoughts on how to achieve them. It wasn’t long before Fred and Alison established a stable working relationship. Glenn was satisfied that things would go well.
He eased off his own labors at the farm and ranch and left the day to day running to Fred and Alison. Things did go well. That spring, despite bad weather, the crops went in on schedule. The greenhouses were producing well, and the herds were now large enough to begin some real harvesting. That included the bison and ostrich operations. They were not only doing better than Glenn expected, but the demand was higher, too.
The farm got good prices on the grains they’d stored and held for that very reason, keeping back enough for feed for the animals for two years and seed for two year’s plantings.
But Glenn was still restless and couldn’t explain why. He’d done what he wanted, to the best of his ability. He had food for the future. But suddenly he felt vulnerable. As vulnerable as he had before he got the farm. Why?
He began to access the steps he’d taken to get to where he was. Why had he decided to buy gold and silver as his retirement? That had been a sudden decision. It was as a hedge. Much like the farm itself. A hedge for bad times. Suddenly Glenn muttered to himself, “Holy cow! I’m a survivalist!”
Glenn began to go back and check some of the internet sources he’d used in planning the various elements of the farm. Sure enough, a few of them were actual survival sites, while many of his searches had pulled up survival related sites based on the words he used in the Yahoo search engine.
He began to research the survival movement just as he had organic farming. He found it a fascinating subject, starting with Civil Defense in the 40’s and WW II through the Cold War into the FEMA era. Then the actual Survivalist Movement with its roots in the late 50’s through the modern start in the 70’s and the media-made maniacal Survivalist, to the current movement that no longer used the word Survivalist.
It seemed he was a prepper. But in only two ways. Food and fuel. And even when it came to fuel, only the farm was relatively self-sufficient. The Talisman took gasoline, which they couldn’t make. And it would be extremely difficult to convert it to straight alcohol use. Better to get a new vehicle. “No,” Glenn muttered, “Not new. Something not too vulnerable to EMP, whatever that entails, and with a diesel engine so I can use the biodiesel.”
Glenn made that his next project. A diesel powered, EMP resistant vehicle. He did more research on the internet and the St. Louis newspapers. Then he went looking in St. Louis. In the end, he found a used 2000 ¾ ton four-wheel-drive Chevy Suburban with a blown engine. Just what he needed.
He ordered a crated GM 6.5L non-electronic diesel engine to replace the blown gasoline engine. To keep it as EMP resistant as possible, Glen opted for an old style generator rather than an alternator to supply the starting batteries and the deep discharge battery that was installed to run 12 volt equipment and the 110 volt inverter.
A St. Louis diesel mechanic would do the engine swap for him. Glenn looked at many different front and rear bumpers on the internet and in Off-road show rooms, but went with shop build models made by Jeremy and Helen. He did buy a commercial heavy-duty roof rack for the Suburban and mounted some pioneer tools and two spare tires on it. That gave him four spare tires with one each on the front bumper and rear bumper.
Though the Suburban had a forty-gallon fuel tank, it was for gasoline. Not only was that tank changed out, along with its associated fuel lines, to a forty-five gallon model, but a second tank was added. A fifty-six gallon in-frame tank.
He wasn’t planning to go rock scaling with the Suburban, it wasn’t really suited for it, but he liked some of the features on the vehicles that did. So an on-board welder alternator was added, as was an air pump. A second power steering pump was added to drive the front mount hydraulic winch, and the receiver mount hydraulic winch for use from the rear of the Suburban.
Getting the Suburban up and running kept Glenn occupied for a couple of months, though he did continue his research on prepping. Okay. He had food covered. Water, too. And transportation, especially when you considered the horses in addition to the Suburban. Oh. And shelter. His whole house was better shelter than most people’s basements.
But his further research had him concerned about hanging onto everything, if things got really bad. He didn’t see much that he could do if the government decided to take over his place. But what about brigands if there was a collapse of government. A place like his would be a prime target.
Glenn wasn’t much for firearms. Never had been. But the possibilities he was reading about in preparedness sites, especially the various forums, were giving him second thoughts. Glenn’s attempts to bring up the subject with several of the residents of the farm met with some hostility. So, as Fred and Alison ran things, Glenn began to research in depth an armory for the farm.
There were plenty of opinions on what was best, for a variety of scenarios. Glenn was becoming one that liked to cover all the bases. He picked up a variety of firearms, several of each, one or two at a time over several months. He kept the weapons acquisitions a secret.
He took a local hunting class, and a couple of other weapons handling classes in St. Louis, and then got a concealed weapon carry permit. Glenn went armed from then on, everywhere it was legal to do so.
Preparing for the worst became something of a hobby, since he now had a reliable income stream, and time on his hands. Glenn began to watch the news with a new eye, considering almost every news and weather story as to how it might affect him and his future.
One of the first things he did was to switch his gold and silver holdings from dealer storage vaults to his own vault in the house. The second thing was to double his buying program of the precious metals. It was no longer just his hedged retirement fund, along with the farm and ranch, it was a hedge against disaster. He also converted his T-bills to gold and silver.
As he accumulated the firearms, Glenn began to wonder what would happen in he did lose the farm and ranch, anyway. He began to plan a small retreat some distance away from the farm and ranch. There was plenty of land available, with the market the way it was. Glenn thought about setting up a second farm. A much smaller one. But he decided the place would be a simple hole-up retreat. A place to stay and recoup if he ever needed to do so.
It was relatively simple, and not all that expensive, to acquire a small piece of property several miles from the farm and ranch. It was hilly and of very little use for farming. Nor was it prime real estate for development. It was ideal for what Glenn wanted. He wanted as few people as possible to know about it.
Glenn decided to make it a one-man project. Everything was going well at the Farm. They could spare one of the Unimogs. For the first stage of the project, Glenn had the backhoe attachment mounted on the back of one of the U500’s. Glenn disappeared for three days with it.
He had his camping gear and camped out at the site for those days. It took him two full days to dig out the area where the retreat shelter would be. When he went back to the farm he had the backhoe dismounted and a dump bed mounted on the truck and the pallet forks mounted to the front lift arms. An equipment trailer was attached and Glenn headed for St. Louis.
The truck wouldn’t make it up to the site with the trailer. The truck alone had barely made it. Glenn securely blocked the trailer and unhooked it. He began to unload the trailer with the forks on the front of the Unimog, taking each pallet up and placing it where he needed it.
With the materials he needed in place, Glenn went back to the farm. One of the A300’s was loaded onto the trailer, along with several attachments and Glenn again disappeared for several days. After unloading and transferring the A300 and attachments to the building site, Glenn unhooked the trailer and went to the nearby gravel pit.
He made several trips to and from the local gravel pit to haul in aggregate with which to make concrete using the Portland cement he’d picked up in St. Louis. After moving the sand and gravel, Glenn took the Unimog into Cape Girardeau. It didn’t take long to buy and install a five-hundred-gallon plastic water tank on the bed of the Unimog. Glen also bought a pump and hoses with which to transfer the water. The farm store agreed to let Glenn fill it for a small fee.
Glenn took the load of water back to the building site. It was back breaking work mixing and pouring the concrete Glenn made up in the Bobcat cement mixer for the footings and floor of the shelter, using the trucked in water, aggregate, and cement.
He took a break when the floor was finished and just relaxed for several days while the concrete set up enough to add the walls. Glenn had thought the concrete work was bad. Laying the cinder blocks in the hole in the ground was worse. But he worked steadily, mixing up small batches of mortar as he worked around the perimeter of the building, laying the H-form blocks among the vertical rebar and adding horizontal rebar every course of blocks.
After a few rows were laid, Glenn mixed up another batch of concrete and filled the blocks. It took a solid week to compete the walls and columns that would support the roof. Glenn backfilled against the walls, after bringing the waterproof barrier up the outside walls that he had put down before he poured the footings and floor. He took another break then, taking the equipment back to the farm for security.
Glenn checked on the operation of the farm and ranch. Everything was going well. So, after two weeks of rest, Glenn took the Unimog again, with a flat bed mounted on it and the forks installed, and headed into St. Louis again to pick up the components he needed to make the roof supports for the concrete roof. It took him another week to place the timbers using an extension boom on one of the forks of the Unimog, and apply the cross timbers and galvanized metal.
When the rebar was in place above the metal he went after the A300 and cement mixer again. The roof pour took two days of steady work, with Glenn only taking twenty or thirty minute cat naps between pours, the same way he had when he’d poured the floor, to keep a good bond at the joints of the pours of the concrete.
He rested for a couple of days and then began the finish work. That consisted of laying a thirty-inch diameter galvanized culvert from the hole he’d framed in one wall of the shelter to a point forty feet away that would be used as an emergency exit/entrance.
Glenn also finished the regular entrance and the interior of the shelter. It took a couple of trips with the Unimog to move the stuff he’d bought to equip and supply the shelter. When everything was inside and secure, he went to a wrecking yard in St. Louis and bought five wrecked Cadillacs.
He paid to have the front seats cut out, large holes cut into the floor pans of all five cars, and their wheels removed. Glenn hauled them to the site and placed one over the main entrance/exit and one over the emergency exit/entrance. One of the cars was set over the buried water tank. The other two he placed randomly and added a few old appliances and other junk here and there.
Glenn broadcast grass and flower seed over the areas he had disturbed. In a few months the place would look like a wilderness dumping ground. Satisfied he had a secure place to which he could bug out if he needed, Glenn smiled and headed home, ready to take on the next project he’d been thinking about during the idle hours of the retreat building.
Copyright 2006
Glenn Murphy smoothly merged the big old Cadillac Fleetwood Talisman into the high speed stream of traffic on Interstate 55 South, leaving St. Louis behind him. Actually, it was less that Glenn was leaving as it was he was headed for something.
Glenn’s Uncle Titus had died and left his farm and ranch near Cape Girardeau, Missouri to Glenn. It had been a very long time since he’d visited his Uncle. Not since he was a teen. His memories of the summer he’d spent on the farm and ranch were fond ones.
He was tired of the nine to five, conniving, back stabbing life of the corporate world. It was time for a change. A change back to simpler times.
…Well, it was a thought.
Simpler Times - Chapter 1
Glenn arrived at the hotel just in time to freshen up, change clothes, and get to the graveside funeral service. There weren’t very many people in attendance. Glenn remembered his Uncle as a gregarious man, with a ready tip of the hat to women, and a slap on the back or handshake for men. It had seemed he knew everyone they met when Glenn went into the Cape with him to pick up supplies, or look at a prospective purchase of farm equipment, or attend a stock sale that Uncle Titus either had stock in to sell or was there looking to buy some.
Very much to his surprise, the black veiled widow was pointed out to him. Glenn didn’t even know Uncle Titus had remarried after Aunt Cecelia’s death. With the first handfuls of dirt on the coffin, the small group began to break up.
An elderly man in a black suit came over to Glenn and introduced himself. “You must be Glenn, Titus’ nephew. I’m Harvey Benbeck, your Uncle’s attorney. We have quite a bit to talk about. A few things have come up since I called you about your Uncle’s death.”
“Okay. When and where?”
“At my office, before the official reading of the will. If you want, you can follow me in.”
Glenn nodded, his glance suddenly going to the widow. The veil was still down, but Glenn could tell she was laughing, along with the man at her side. He suddenly had an uneasy feeling in is stomach.
It took nearly twenty minutes to get to Benbeck’s office. Glenn had a hard time keeping up with him. He was a very fast and risk taking driver, unlike Glenn. But they both got to the office alive, much to Glenn’s surprise.
Benbeck looked at his watch as they entered his office suite. “The reading of the will is set for one. We have a few minutes.” Again Glenn followed Benbeck, this time into his private office, past a very attractive secretary/paralegal.
Motioning to one of the leather chairs in front of the desk, Benbeck sat down behind the desk. “Okay, son, there are some things you need to know. I’m skating on thin ice, but I’ve been Titus’ attorney and friend for many years. I think I owe it to him to try to see that his wishes are carried out.”
“But the will… That would be his wishes, wouldn’t it?”
“Debra is going to contest the will. She says she has a more recent one that Titus entrusted her with just before his death She’s always had her own attorney. She says he wrote it up and Titus signed it. She hasn’t produced it yet, but she will at the reading. I just wanted to let you know that this will not be cut and dried the way I thought it would.”
Glenn could only nod. So much for going back to simpler times.
It was as Benbeck said. When she arrived, no longer wearing black, or a veil, she had her attorney with her, and he immediately gave an envelope to Benbeck as they seated themselves around the large table in Benbeck’s conference room.
“Who’s this? The kid’s lawyer?” Debra asked, looking closely at Glenn.
“Not quite,” Benbeck said, carefully hiding his smile. “This is Titus’ nephew, Glenn.”
“Him! But Titus’ nephew is twelve!”
“Afraid not, Aunt Debra. I was twelve when I came to stay with Uncle Titus when my mother was going through a difficult pregnancy.” It still pained Glenn to bring it up. His mother had died giving birth to Glenn’s sister. Still unnamed, the baby girl died after two days in pediatric intensive care.
“But Titus said…” Her words faded and a grim line replaced the earlier smile.
“Be that as it may,” Allan Stockmeyer, Debra’s attorney said, “Glenn’s age does not matter. If you will be so kind as to look at the papers I handed you, you will see that his presence, no matter what his age, is irrelevant in these proceedings.”
Benbeck opened the envelope and took out the legal papers it contained. He read through the entire document silently. Stockmeyer and Debra were whispering back and forth. Glenn just stared into space, the memories of his mother occupying him.
Finally, Benbeck put the papers down. He looked at Debra and said, “File the papers. We’ll see you in court.”
“Allan you said…”
Stockmeyer cut her off. “I know what I said. I told you this was not only possible, but probable. Let’s go. I’ve already got the papers ready to file with the court.”
“Of course you know that you will have to produce the original will in court. Titus had a very distinctive signature.”
“Careful what you say, Benbeck,” Debra said, her voice showing her anger. “You imply that we are doing something illegal, I’ll slap a libel suit on you so fast you won’t believe it.”
“Not implying anything,” Benbeck calmly replied, rising from his chair. “Just stating a fact.”
“We’ll let the facts speak for themselves,” Stockmeyer said coolly. “Come along, Debra.”
The two left and Benbeck turned to Glenn. “I can recommend a good attorney,” he said.
“Oh. I thought you would represent me.”
Benbeck grinned. “I need to be free to be an unbiased witness in the case. Stockmeyer isn’t the Perry Mason he thinks he is. I intend to see that Titus’ real wishes are carried out.”
It took three months, but Glenn finally owned the farm and ranch. The signature on the original documents Stockmeyer had drawn up were quickly proven to be very competent forgeries, but forgeries never the less. That, in addition to Benbeck’s and three other witnesses’ testimony that Titus had talked to them about what he wanted when he died, just three days before his death, a month after the supposed new will date, sealed the case.
Debra had received the clothes, jewelry, and car that Titus had bought for her, plus the condo that Titus and Debra had moved into after they were married. She claimed that it had been all Stockmeyer’s doing and that she was innocent of perjury, and attempted fraud. Stockmeyer eventually got disbarred. Debra went scot-free.
Glenn got the farm and ranch property and operation, along with a goodly sum of money that Debra had not known about. Glenn had been under a restraining order not to approach the farm during the legal battle. When he finally was able to go out to it, he was shocked. The ranch house, barns, and other out buildings were a mess.
Immediately after they were married Debra began pestering Titus to sell everything, but he had resisted that. He had completely quit operating the farm, at Debra’s insistence, selling all the stock and equipment, leasing out the land, and moving to the condo in the Cape. She continued to try to get him to sell the farm and ranch, up until the day he died.
Glenn was at a loss. He was no farmer or rancher. He’d expected to come to the place, hire a General Manager, and live on the property and learn how to run it over time. That wasn’t going to be the case.
He did move to the ranch house, but was more camping out there than living in it. The place had been heavily vandalized, as had the other buildings over the last few years, with no one there to prevent it.
It had been a party house for college students for a couple of years, until the people running a meth lab took it over. A lot of damage was done when the Missouri Joint Drug Task Force shut the lab down. That included hundreds of bullet holes in the buildings and several small fires caused by flash/bang and teargas grenades fired through the windows of the buildings. Titus was lucky the land wasn’t confiscated because of the meth lab operation, despite his not knowing anything about it.
Glenn was sitting on what was left of the front porch of the house, contemplating the future for the place, when a pickup truck came up the lane and stopped. A young woman got out of the cab of the truck and walked up to the porch.
Glenn took note of the woman’s youth and beauty, despite the ragged college sweatshirt and torn jeans she was wearing, her long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. “Can I help you?” Glenn said.
“I hope so,” the woman said. “Are you Glenn Murphy?”
Glenn nodded. “And you are…?”
Brittany Jones-Shaeffer. I want to talk to you about the farm and ranch.”
He didn’t know what he wanted to do with it, but Glenn knew he didn’t want to sell it. His uncle had resisted some pretty strong persuasion to keep it in the family, and Glenn wanted to honor his uncle’s wishes. He said as much. “The place isn’t for sale.”
“I doubt if we could afford it, anyway,” Brittany said. “What I want to talk to you about was what it would take to start an organic farming operation on part of it.”
“We? Who is we?”
“Some fellow graduate students at the agricultural college, and a couple of interested investors.”
“I see. Look, I’d invite you in to discuss it, but the place is a mess. Can we meet somewhere else to talk about this? I have my doubts, but am willing to consider it.”
“Okay. I know the place has been trashed. I’m sorry about that. I hate to admit it, but when I was a freshman I came to one of the parties out here. It was a big mistake on my part and I never came back.
“How about the Steak & Shake in town? Tomorrow? You can pick the time.”
“Noon is… No it will probably be crowded then. Two o’clock?”
Brittany nodded. “Please do keep an open mind about this.”
“I will,” Glenn replied.
“I may bring a couple more people to help with the pitch.”
Glenn laughed. “The more the merrier.”
When he turned in for bed that night, he found himself looking forward to the meeting. He wondered if it was because of Brittany or the prospect of doing something with the place.
He was eating a steak sandwich, with fries, when Brittany arrived. She had indeed brought other people with her. A woman somewhat older than Brittany, by her looks, and a man about Brittany’s age.
The three sat down at his booth. When the waitress came over, all of them asked for water or tea, with nothing to eat. Brittany made the introductions. The woman was Tabitha Sheriton, and the man Thomas Hooper.
“Okay,” Glenn said, “Let the pitch begin.” He was smiling when he said it.
Brittany laughed lightly, though the other two didn’t even crack a smile.
“Mr. Murphy…” Brittany started, but Glenn interrupted her.
“Make it Glenn.”
“Okay. Glenn it is. As I said yesterday evening, the group I’m involved with, all with good college educations in modern agricultural practices, plus a couple very experienced in small scale farming, want to start up an organic farm. Primarily because it is better for the environment, as a showcase to encourage more ventures like ours, and to provide more organic product to those that prefer it. Both plant and… I guess animal.”
“Sounds simple enough. My uncle has leased the land the last few seasons. They will be up for renewal this fall. You haven’t said how much land you need, and if you wanted to use existing structures. I don’t see why you can’t pick up one or more of the leases for your project.”
“We need at least three hundred acres, with buildings. But… Well… You see,” said Thomas, “We don’t anticipate turning a profit for several years.”
“
I see. That does change things, doesn’t it?” Glenn said.
“It is a very worthy cause,” said Tabitha, rather insistently. “And we could use the entire three sections. You would need to bring the buildings up to spec.”
“How long have you been trying to get this project going?”
“Three years,” Brittany said.
“You mentioned investors. They wouldn’t be able to pay the lease fees and building improvements?”
Tabitha immediately shook her head. “No. They will provide some equipment and such, seed, and other things for using the site for a test bed for their products in development. Some pro-green advertising, which some of them need desperately. Profits are secondary to them right now. Exposure in the field of greening the planet, and testing are their priorities. Profit is for future consideration.”
Brittany looked a little embarrassed at her friend’s comments. “We do have several grants lined up, but they will only pay for certain things. The lease payment isn’t one of them. We might be able to fix up the buildings.”
“What will happen to any permanent improvements to the property if the operation folds?”
Tabitha looked sour. “Not much we could do. But it’s not likely we’d fail. We’re all very good. And committed. We’re hoping to get some of the corporate mentality turned around from greed to doing the right things”
“I see,” Glenn said. He was going to need to think about this. He was all for green, but a person still had to make a living. It was sounding not only like they wanted to use all the land, but wanted him to improve it. At his expense. And there was Tabitha’s attitude. It was grating.
“I need to think about this,” he told the three. “Probably need to get more details.”
Tabitha looked angry, Thomas rather neutral, and Brittany disappointed.
“Okay. She wrote her telephone number on a napkin and handed it to Glenn. “Call me when you’ve had a chance to think it over.”
Tabitha and Thomas were already heading for the door of the Steak & Shake. Brittany slid out of the booth from beside Glenn. “Please, really do consider it. I know Tabitha can be a bit… harsh… but she really believes in this project. Her family has some land. They wouldn’t even consider it.”
“I will consider it,” Glenn replied. Brittany turned around and left, her slumped shoulders showing her dejection. He shrugged his shoulders and finished his sandwich and fries.
While he was driving back at to the farm he was listening to the news on Sirius radio. It was pretty much all bad, the weather news especially. It was pouring down rain when he got to the farm house. Glenn had a hard time finding a place that didn’t have a drip from the leaking roof coming down.
He put on a rain coat and just wandered around the various buildings on the property, checking for roof leaks. He found plenty of them. Dejected, Glenn went back to the house as it was getting dark. He found a new place to roll out his sleeping pad and bag and crawled in, wondering what the next day would bring. He needed to make a decision quickly. He either needed to go back to work in a normal job, try to fix up the farm and get some help running it, continue to lease it out, or be super generous and let the students use it.
“I’m not that generous,” Glenn muttered as he fell asleep.
After a cold breakfast the next morning, Glenn called the number Brittany had written down on the napkin the day before. It was only courtesy to let her down in person, so Glenn made arrangements to meet her at the Steak & Shake again that afternoon.
With nothing better to do, Glenn went in to Cape Girardeau early and went down to the river view. The Mississippi was running high, due to two months of nearly steady rains. He watched the river flow, and the tugboats and barges going past. He’d never gone down to the river much when he was in St. Louis.
The rain started again and Glenn went back to the Talisman. He drove around town aimlessly, just checking it out. It looked like a nice enough town, not like some river towns. It was still pouring when he got to the Steak & Shake, plus he was very early for the meeting, so he sat in the Talisman and listened to a Sirius news channel.
“Just more of the same,” he muttered and found an oldies rock and roll station. “This disaster and that disaster, this flood and that drought, this war and that war, this group hates that group, and everybody hates the US, contaminated food, changing climate, interest rates up and housing down. What’s the world coming to?” Glenn asked himself.
Suddenly Glenn sat up a little straighter. “Contaminated food… shortages of food, bad weather… And I like to eat,” he muttered. “And I need a permanent home… And something to do.”
He saw Brittany arrive and go into the restaurant. Glenn got out of the car and followed her in. When she saw him, she headed for a booth. Glenn joined her.
Brittany didn’t look hopeful when Glenn started to speak. “I wanted to tell you face to face that I wasn’t going to go for the deal.” Brittany’s face fell further.
“Not really much to say…”
Glenn cut Brittany off. “But I am having second thoughts. I want to hear more about exactly what you plan to do. And how much it would cost me.
They both ordered bowls of chili when the waitress came over.
Brittany’s face brightened a little, but not much. “It’s much as we told you yesterday. An organic farm to test out the best of various crops, refine procedures to maintain the organic label, that sort of thing.”
“Tabitha seemed reluctant to include farm animals. Would you do organically raised meat, too?”
“Tabitha is a vegetarian, though not a Vegan. I think she would like to be, but… Well, that’s her business. But, yes, we would want to try to raise organic meat animals.”
“Why the hard core refusal to consider making a profit?”
Brittany sighed. “Several of us don’t want the pressures to make the operation a large commercial success. We want to be a trend setter. Learn to do it better, more efficiently, and cheaply, to provide a showcase where people can come and learn.”
“Well, wouldn’t it be a better showcase if it was profitable?”
“I suppose so,” Brittany mused, “But we have so many in the group opposed…”
“I see,” Glenn said. Something suddenly came to him. The farm operation, and especially the ranch side of it, had been very self-sufficient when Titus’ family first started it in the 1880’s. “Are there plans for biodiesel production? And how about methane and alcohol?”
“A couple of the guys are into biodiesel, but we don’t have funding to pursue that line of research. And we don’t want to spread ourselves too thin. Taking on too much is a sure way to fail.”
“I can’t argue that,” Glenn admitted. “Were you planning on greenhouses?”
“Yes. We have funding for a small one with which to do research.”
“Thomas mentioned three hundred acres. Tabitha said you needed it all. I don’t see the need for all three sections.”
Brittany sighed. “Tabitha wants us to try and get an experimental hemp growing permit. We need acreage for that.”
“Why hemp?” Glenn said, but then quickly added, “Never mind. Better if I look it up on the internet on my own.”
Brittany looked a little annoyed. “I wouldn’t lie to you about any of it!”
“I know. It’s not that. I just do better researching on my own. I’d have a million questions and I’m sure you have something to do today besides talk to me.”
“I’ll take as long as needed, if there is a possibility we’ll get to use the land.”
“I’m beginning to lean toward it,” Glenn said. “But don’t get your hopes up too much. There are going to be some stipulations that you and the group might not like.”
“Oh,” Brittany said, calming back down after hearing Glenn’s initial words. “If they are reasonable…”
Glenn grinned. “I think they’d be reasonable. You might even. I’m not sure all your group will.”
“I can only take the proposal to them and let the majority decide.”
“It will take me a couple or three days to do some research and think this over. I’ll let you know in three days.”
Brittany nodded. It was still better than nothing. She was sure that Glenn was right about one thing. Several in the group weren’t going to like Glenn setting conditions. It didn’t sit real well with her. “But beggars can’t be choosers,” she said to herself as she finished her chili.
Glenn had his laptop with him, but found it easier to go to the county library to do his research. The telephone line for the farm, with DSL, hadn’t been turned on yet. He e-mailed himself many articles and complete web pages to study when off line. He found a WiFi spot in town and downloaded his e-mail and went back to the farm to read up on several things.
He was ready for the meeting on Friday. Glenn gave Brittany his proposal and sat back to let her read it. She would look happy one moment and unhappy the next as she read. Glenn couldn’t get a real feel for what she was thinking when she set the papers down.
“I really like some of these ideas,” she finally said, looking earnestly at Glenn. “They go further even than some of ours. But we’d loose our grants if we did some of them. Even if we didn’t, we don’t have enough money to even start on some of these projects.”
“How much are the grants?”
“One is for $25,000, one for $35,000, and a small one for $10,000.”
“$70,000 total,” mused Glenn. “Okay. I can cover that if you lose them. And I’d be footing the bill for everything I’ve suggested that you weren’t planning on doing.”
“Do you realize how much that would be?” Brittany exclaimed.
“I do. I think. My Uncle wanted both the farm and ranch parts of the property to be successfully passed down the family line. I’m willing to risk my retirement, and my family’s legacy, on the chance to see that come to pass, and the chance for some pretty good profits, relatively early. I had something of an epiphany the other day, while listening to the news. I want to be sure I’ll have food available when I get old. The way things are going in this old world, that could be a problem.”
“I suppose so,” Brittany said, somewhat absently. She was thinking of all the good things her group could still do with the property, despite the things that Glenn wanted done.
“I’ll take this to our next meeting. That’s this Sunday. I’ll get back to you on Monday. Is that okay?”
Glenn nodded. He went back to the farm and found the phone company waiting on him. He was doing more research on the internet by the end of the day.
Simpler Times – Chapter 2
Thomas and Tabitha were with Brittany Monday afternoon when she arrived at the Steak & Shake to meet with Glenn. None of the three looked very happy.
Again they didn’t order anything except tea and water. Glenn ordered a BLT and looked at the three expectantly as he waited for his order.
After long moments of silence Brittany finally spoke. “We can’t do it. There are too many provisions that don’t have anything to do with our project.”
“I see,” Glenn said. “Okay.”
“That’s it?” Tabitha asked. “Just ‘Okay’?” She was definitely angry, Glenn decided.
“What else is there to say? You don’t want to do it. I’ll just do what I want to do. It’ll be harder, and a little more expensive, but it is all still doable. Organic food is a big business now. I’m sure I can find other people interested in it to help me.”
“That’s not really fair,” Thomas said.
“This is our project!” Tabitha said. “You can’t take it away from us and use it for your own selfish ends!”
“I thought you’d be pleased,” Glenn lied. “Your project being expanded and taken to new levels. Isn’t the fact that it will be done more important than who does it?”
“You’re just twisting words!” Tabitha cried and scrambled out of the booth. Thomas followed, without saying anything more.
“You did that deliberately!” Brittany said, accusingly.
“I don’t like her high and mighty attitude,” Glenn said slowly. “It was a rotten thing to do. Tell her I said I’m sorry. But I do stand by what I said. You guys are on the right track. I do want it to succeed. I don’t see anything wrong with incorporating other ideas and trying to make a profit at the same time.”
Brittany sighed. “I’ll tell her, though you should do it yourself. It was close… the vote… Several people really liked some of your ideas and the fact that you are willing to foot the bill. I didn’t know you were that wealthy.”
“I’m not,” Glenn said. “I’m risking my entire retirement fund, plus quite a bit more. I’m selling my house in St. Louis and will be using that money, too. And I’ll borrow against the farm and ranch as it gains value. I believe in this. Greening the planet is a noble cause and has its place. But I think it should be integrated into existing ways of life.”
Brittany sighed again. “I guess I can’t really argue that. Some of us, like Tabitha, just take this so personally.”
“I take what I’m going to do personally, too.”
“I guess you would. I wish we could work this out.”
“Give it another shot,” Glenn said. “Take the proposal back. Talk it over more. One thing I might not have made clear is that the profits will be shared. Whatever group entity you set up will get twenty-five percent of the profits.”
“Oh. That wasn’t really clear. But I don’t know if it will make a difference. It really is a matter of principle. I’ll talk to them again.”
They set another meeting date and time and Brittany left. Glenn left as well, and went looking for a regional phone book. The local office of the telephone company had one. He took it and went back to the farm to make a few calls. “This is going to work, one way or the other.”
Two days later a salvage crew showed up to start dismantling all the buildings on the farm and ranch. Glenn had made a deal to sell the highly sought after old lumber, particularly that in the barn. The company would do the dismantling and clean up, and pay Glenn for the wood. They already had a market for it.
With the house coming down last, Glenn had time to find a used travel trailer and get it delivered to the farm. He would live in it until the new house was built the next summer. The other buildings would have priority.
When the crew was done, Glenn basically had virgin land. He’d even had the old, unreliable well and septic systems removed, as well as the concrete slab for the old house. Only the power and telephone lines were transferred to the trailer. He had water delivered and sewage pumped out of the trailer holding tank.
He had a general idea of what he wanted the farm and ranch compound to be like, but wanted to wait until he knew if he would be working with Brittany’s group, or another one, before he finalized any construction plans.
Glenn had given it two weeks between the meetings. He sighed when he saw Thomas and Tabitha with Brittany when they came into the Steak & Shake. Tabitha looked stony. Thomas actually looked a little pleasant. Brittany was smiling and Glenn began to believe she bore good news.
“Well?” he asked when the others had taken their seats and more orders for water and tea were given.
“There was a shift in the new voting,” Brittany said. “The majority agreed to your terms.”
“Excellent!” Glenn said.
“It was only by one vote,” Tabitha informed Glenn coldly.
“That’s democracy at work for you,” Glenn replied. “Okay, then. When can everyone come out to the place and tell me what they need in the way of structures, equipment, and etc.?”
“Structures?” Thomas asked. “Aren’t we going to be using the barns?”
Glenn shook his head. “I razed everything. We’re starting fresh. You can get exactly what you need.”
“Such a waste,” Tabitha muttered.
“Had a timber recycler come in and take everything useable,” Glenn said in a normal tone of voice. “It’s already headed for a new home.”
Tabitha just frowned.
Before that conversation could go any further, Brittany spoke up. “Everybody has different schedules. It might take a week or two to get everyone’s input.”
“That’s fine,” Glenn replied. “I’ll be available whenever anyone can get loose.” He gave Brittany his cell phone number. “I take it everyone knows how to get there?”
“Well, no. But the ones that don’t can go out with those that do,” Thomas said.
“I want to have everyone’s needs down on paper before we lay out the place. Anything we can dual use or even triple use, I want to do.”
“So we’re going to be limited on what we can ask for.” That from Tabitha.
“You can ask for anything,” Glenn said, his voice taking on a bit of chill. “It’ll be up to the group as a whole to verify actual need for each person’s requests.”
“You’re going to let the group decide?” Thomas asked, his surprise evident.
“Oh, I maintain veto power, but yes. You’ve all been planning this for some time. I imagine the group as a whole knows approximately what each person plans and needs.”
Tabitha looked startled, but said nothing.
“As soon as we have the basics, we’ll finalize a plan and you can take it to your grant people and see what they will still do. I need to budget things and I need to know how that money will be spent.”
Ever angry, it seemed, Tabitha said, “That’s not your money to do anything with. The group will decide how to spend it.”
“Actually,” Thomas said, “The individual grantees will do that, since they are individual grants for their special projects.”
“The group will be giving advice and help, but yes, it will be up to the individuals or teams that applied for the grants to spend the money within the parameters of the grant,” Brittany said.
Tabitha looked annoyed that her friends had contradicted her, but she said nothing else.
“Well, have them let me know as soon as possible. And if additional outside funds can be used to add to or improve what the grant actually pays for.”
“That I can answer now,” Brittany said. “The grant money has to be used for specific things in all three cases, but there is not a limit on how much additional funding can be used.”
“That’s good,” replied Glenn. “Okay. If there is nothing else, I need to get going. I’ve got a ton of work to do now that I know which group I’ll be working with.”
Brittany moved out of the booth and then Glenn did as well. Unlike the other meetings, Glenn was leaving and the others seemed to be staying. “To talk it over,” Glenn thought with a small smile.
Glenn was eager to get on with his research. He was coming up with some very interesting things on his internet searches. One never knew quite what would pop up, with even some of the simplest word choices. But he was learning quite a bit more than he set out to learn, and that was good. Plus, it was interesting, to boot.
It was nearly a week before anyone called to come out to the property and submit their list of what they would need for the project. Then there was a flood, with two or three coming out together, one group after another. He began to get a clear idea of what they wanted, and how it would mesh with what he wanted.
Except for the fact that he wanted to profit from it, there really wasn’t that much difference between what the group wanted and what he wanted. It was going to be expensive. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t be able to do it. But it would take all he had. Glenn smiled. “Should have some good eats, though.”
When he was sure the last person that was involved with the group had been out to see him, Glenn went back to St. Louis to meet with a former client of his. An architect for whom he had handled the regional advertising. With his notes and a general drawing of the property, Glenn described the plan he had in mind.
“A bit out of my field,” Clay Montgomery said. “But I think I can handle it.” He grinned at Glenn. “Get a little of my own back from the rates you charged me.”
Glenn laughed. “Add a line item for that. “Payback fee.”
“I may just do that. Give me two weeks for a preliminary set of drawings.”
Glenn shook hands with Clay. “Okay. Thanks. I really appreciate this.”
Clay waved his hand negligently and Glenn left.
Two weeks later, with plans in hand, Glenn went to his bank. They were not at all interested in financing a farm operation, so he went shopping for a new bank. With the thought that one of the banks in the Cape might be more used to agricultural loans, he tried there first.
Sure enough, the second bank he talked to was more than willing to deal with him. Glenn closed his account in St. Louis and transferred all his funds to the bank in Cape Girardeau. They were just a little unsure about the unconventional structures he was planning, but Glenn put them onto several websites and asked them to consider the earth sheltered construction he wanted.
Assuming he would get the money, Glenn began to order long lead time items. He also got a local dirt contractor out to do some rough landscaping on the property, to suit the building layout he was planning.
Glenn called Brittany and told her the plans were in the works. If she wanted to set up a meeting with the group he’d show everyone the plans. She immediately agreed. Two days later Glenn met with the group at a restaurant in town that had a small banquet room.
It was a spirited meeting. Mostly due to the fact that each member of the group had what they need, plus much more. Even Tabitha didn’t look as stony as she had when she first started looking over the plans.
“This is wonderful!” Brittany said, her eyes shining brightly. “We never expected something this large and comprehensive. Thank you.”
Glenn shrugged, wondering what a big hug from Brittany would feel like. “Just don’t forget that I’m in this for the profits.”
“Believe me,” Tabitha said, frowning again, “We won’t. Now, I think we should vote on approving or rejecting these plans as they stand, and then discuss changes.”
Glenn smiled slightly. “This isn’t a democracy. My money and future are on the line here. I will gladly accept suggestions and consider them, but the final decisions are mine, not the group’s.”
Now wait a minute!” Tabitha almost yelled. “We never agreed to that!”
“Calm down, Tab,” Brittany said. “I guess it wasn’t really said quite the way Glenn put it just now, but I do think most of us understood that he would have direct control of the operation, except for the grant money.” Several of the other group members were nodding in agreement with Brittany.
“Grant money!” Tabitha snorted. “You know that two of the grants were pulled when they found out we had access to private funding.”
“I know. I know. But we still have the big one. And everything we asked for is being provided. More than we asked for.”
“And all he cares about is his profits,” Tabitha said as Brittany gave Glenn a quick look and led Tabitha off to one side to continue to talk to her.
Glenn didn’t know what Brittany said to Tabitha, but Tabitha stayed quiet the rest of the meeting, only occasionally looking daggers at Glenn.
Tabitha was the first to leave, and Brittany the last.
“I want to thank you again,” Brittany said. She gestured at the plans and diagrams on the tables. “We really didn’t expect this. And I’m sorry about Tabitha. I really don’t know what her problem is, but I’ll try to get her to be a bit more civil.”
“One person isn’t going to spoil this,” Glenn replied. “Getting this done is my future.”
“I understand,” Brittany replied. With that she left.
Glenn gathered up his papers and headed back to his trailer.
The bank called the following day and Glenn went in to sign the loan papers he’d taken out on the farm and ranch. He called the earth shelter building outfit he selected from his internet research and put in an order. He faxed over drawings of the earth sheltered buildings he wanted built. He would have an estimate in a few days of the ones he wanted to start building first. The barn and the greenhouse support building.
He hired a labor temp to help him stake out the areas for the buildings and other construction projects on the plans. It took him and Jeremy two days to get it all done. “Wow!” Jeremy said as they were finishing up. “Going to be a big place. How many hands you going to need?”
“Several,” Glenn replied. “You interested?”
“If it’s full time,” Jeremy replied. “My girlfriend and I are barely making it doing temp jobs.”
“What skills does each of you have?”
“Well, we both do labor jobs. Helen doesn’t like inside work. She took welding in trade school and I took machining. Neither one of us has found work in our specialty.”
“Can’t guarantee all that much specialty work, but I need simple labor for now. Could put you both on after the temp service time is over.”
“I’ll talk to Helen.”
“Are you tied to town or could you move out here if I got you a trailer?”
“Actually, we’re living in my Dad’s fifth-wheel. We could bring it out. I’m just not sure Helen will want to, but I’ll ask her.”
“Okay.”
That evening Glenn called the three students involved in animal science and asked them to come out the following morning. All were agreeable.
Jeremy and Helen showed up promptly at eight, as did the three students. Between them they got the pastures and other animal spaces marked off for the fencing contractor to come in and start putting up the fences. Except the fencing guy fell and broke his leg the day before he was supposed to start. The parts showed up, but he didn’t.
Glenn decided it was a sign. He climbed into the Talisman and headed for St. Louis again, giving Jeremy and Helen the day off. Glenn had an equipment list of items he was planning on purchasing for the farm, just not this soon. But things needed to progress smoothly for everything to get done on the timetable he had laid out.
Instead of dedicated machines for every task that needed to be done on the farm and the ranch, Glenn had decided to get utility equipment that, with appropriate attachments, could do multiple tasks, with less money tied up overall. He’d read about their use in a fictional story he’d read on the internet and liked the idea.
He’d researched brands on the internet and decided on two brands of tool carriers that he thought would do most of the farm and ranch jobs. One company was Bobcat. They had several machines that would work, but Glenn opted for the Bobcat A300 skid steer/all wheel steer model and the Bobcat Toolcat 5600T Utility vehicle. A pair of each, plus a good assortment of attachments, Glenn thought, would handle all the small to medium sized jobs on the place.
For medium to large tasks, Glenn opted for Mercedes Benz Unimog U500 utility trucks. They were becoming more available, as were service and parts, through the American distributor, Freightliner. And there were plenty of attachments for them to cover most of what Glenn planned for the operation. That included the open field farming. Unimogs worked well as tractors.
He went ahead and placed the order at Bobcat for one A300 and one Toolcat 5600T. He wouldn’t need the others until the following year. He also asked for delivery of several attachments with the two machines, including a posthole digger.
Likewise, at the Freightliner dealer, he bought the one well equipped U500 they had in stock and ordered a second. The other four would be purchased as the demand for them came up.
Glenn got back to his trailer late that night, with assurances that the three pieces of equipment and attendant attachments would be delivered the following afternoon from the two dealers.
The morning of the delivery, Glenn went in to town and bought several shovels and a couple of tampers, along with a set of fence tools. The trucks with the equipment showed up just after two that afternoon. It took the rest of the afternoon for the delivery drivers to familiarize Glenn, Jeremy, and Helen with operating everything. Helen fell in love with the Toolcat and claimed it as her own.
With the weekend coming up, and the availability of several of the group members to contribute their labor, Glenn put Jeremy and Helen to digging post holes and laying out post for insertion by the larger crew the next day. The A300 with auger and the Toolcat hauling the posts in the rear bed was an ideal team.
Glenn went in to get the Unimog licensed and insured. With that done, he stopped at a petroleum wholesaler and ordered double wall fuel tanks for the farm, along with a load of fuel. A transfer tank with pump, mounted on the bed of the Unimog, would provide fuel until the tanks were installed.
Things went well that weekend. It wasn’t just the animal science people that came to help. People in several of the other disciplines showed up, too. Everyone was excited that they were actually working toward their project goals.
Glenn had wanted something visible on the property to show progress. The fencing worked. So did the equipment, particularly the Bobcats. People were looking for reasons to use them.
One of the attachments that had been in stock at the dealer for the Bobcats was a roto-tiller. The plant science people decided to start a basic garden, just because. Taking turns with the machine, after Jeremy showed them how, three of them tilled up a large space while two others went in for seed.
Glenn gave them money for the seeds, which wasn’t much, but also enough to get some basic gardening tools. The garden was in by the end of Sunday, as was most of the fencing.
The following week additional progress was made, though much of it wasn’t visible the way the garden and fencing was. While there were several irrigations wells on the three sections of property that were in good shape, Glenn had early on pulled the house well. It was very old and the old steel mesh point was leaking sand. That was on top of not producing much water.
A new six inch well was drilled near where the farm buildings would go, and a four inch well was installed for the new house. Both wells had basic solar powered pumps with a battery box installed for the construction phase. Permanent pumps and tanking systems would be installed later.
Both pumps could feed the huge Invisible Structures Rainstore3® water storage installation, as did the controlled runoff from all the buildings and grassy areas of the farm compound. The water could be used for irrigation as stored. In the unlikely event it was needed for human consumption it would be treated.
In addition to the new fresh water supply, sewage disposal was addressed. A large septic tank was installed for the house and an over engineered leach field put in for it. A similar system was placed to serve the farm and ranch buildings.
Whenever Jeremy and Helen weren’t helping with those installations, Glenn had them planting set after set of blackberries. And not the thornless kind, to the two’s slight misery. Neither one of them could see any pattern to the planting, but planted the sets where Glenn told them he wanted them.
That weekend several of the students came out again, to finish the fencing, and to lay out the planting grid for an orchard. The tree spade for the Bobcats had come in and the planting holes were dug for both a large permanent fruit and nut orchard, as well as a smaller experimental orchard that the plant science tree specialist would be handling.
The earth shelter building contractor showed up the following Monday with two crews to start the construction of the greenhouse support building and the barn. Glenn got the dirt contractor out again to begin stockpiling earth for the earth sheltering, creating a small lake in the process, near the irrigation well nearest the building site. There were county inspection people on the property several different days to make sure everything was permitted properly and going in to code.
The permitting process was keeping Glenn fairly busy. With the non-traditional construction, he had to get variances from the county to get the buildings built the way he wanted. The bank having been willing to lend the money had helped.
There was a steady stream of students from the group coming out to work in the garden and orchard, as the trees were put in, and to just check on the progress. Glenn had delivered a small open plan mobile home for them to use to clean up in, and have a place for lunches and what not. It was plumbed to the house well and septic systems, as were Glenn’s trailer and Jeremy and Helen’s fifth wheel.
With the new building in place Glenn and Jeremy and Helen were spared the constant traipsing in and out of their dwellings by the students needing to go to the bathroom.
The second Unimog, second A300, and second Toolcat were delivered. Those of the group that would be dealing with field crops were sent on a farm equipment hunt, with it in mind that the Unimogs would be the tractor. It was too late to get started with all the various crops the students would be working with, but they planted those that were okay to plant late spring.
Glenn installed a sophisticated weather reporting system in the group’s mobile home for the students to use in recording weather data.
The greenhouse support building was finished shortly after the greenhouse components arrived. The steel frames and poly-carbonate panels went up quickly in the twelve moderate sized, and four large greenhouses Glenn had purchased. When the greenhouses were furnished, another weekend party put the four that were for the project into operation, much to the delight of the plant science people.
When Glenn had the students begin planting in his commercial greenhouses, Tabitha threw something of a fit. Brittany got her out of Glenn’s way before she could make more of a scene than she already had.
It was only later that Tabitha heard that Glenn was having the students keep track of the work they did on his behalf. He would be paying them a wage for the work. When Brittany told Tabitha that she calmed down and managed to be civil to Glenn the rest of the time she was at the farm that weekend.
The next project the second building crew started, while the first crew was still working on the barn, was a long, south facing string of thirty-two feet wide by thirty-two feet long by sixteen feet high inside dimension rooms. They too, were earth sheltered, with a the south facing vertical wall two walls of concrete filled in between with a wall of thick insulation and earth.
Each room had a sixteen foot wide garage door in the south wall, next to a set of metal double entrance doors. There were several windows in the south wall, and a standard metal door and window allowing exit out the north side. There were six light tube skylights in each ceiling. Each room also had metal double entrance doors connecting to the rooms on either side. With twenty of the rooms the structure was almost seven hundred feet long. On top of the roof earth berming was poured a concrete slab with a four foot high perimeter wall.
Glenn got many questions about the rooms. Not a one of the group had requested anything like them. They weren’t really suitable for the work that many of the group would be doing. Glenn would only smile and say, “Time will tell. Right now they are just spares.”
The other question he began to hear was, “When will you start on our building?”
“Next.” It satisfied them. He’d been true to his word from the beginning.
And it was the next building project started when the string of rooms was completed. The barn was coming along nicely and, if kept on schedule, would be completed before winter.
The building housing the group’s workrooms, too, was earth sheltered, but it would be difficult to tell if one didn’t know. The walls and roof were built the same way the greenhouse support building was, and the south wall of the spare rooms structure. Walls of poured concrete, with a thick spray on layer of foam insulation on the inside of the outer wall and then the rest of the space between the insulation and inner wall filled with compacted earth. The outer wall would be brick façade. The flat roof, again like the spare room building and greenhouse building was thick concrete, topped with earth, a layer of foam board, and another layer of concrete. There was a four foot perimeter wall around it the roof line, too.
It was actually a very similar shape to the greenhouse complex. A central building with several wings. Greenhouses in the one case and rooms with windows in the other. It was two-story, with a veranda around the entire building at ground level and a balcony around the second story. What the members of the group didn’t realize, until the second story was started, was that the building would include housing as well as the first floor working spaces.
The housing consisted of bunk rooms which would share kitchen privileges and separate men’s and women’s locker rooms, individual bedrooms with bath; efficiency/studio apartments; and one-bedroom apartments. All the rooms and work areas were wired for digital and analog electronics, including high-speed internet access, and satellite TV.
When the barn was finished, the crew that had been working on it began helping with the new structure. Animal science students were turned loose to begin acquiring their animals, plus those that Glenn wanted.
Glenn brought in the plumbers and electricians to do their job, and then the interior finishers. The barn was finished, and then the work and housing building. The group had what they needed, and Glenn had the beginnings of his working farm.
Simpler Times - Chapter 3
Those in the group, which was growing due to the funding that Glenn was providing, that were willing to work for Glenn were allowed to live at the farm rent free, in the housing units. They were also given a share of the food the farm was starting to produce.
Jeremy and Helen moved into one of the one bedroom units of the housing and work building and gave Jeremy’s father back his fifth-wheel travel trailer.
Through the original students in the group, Glenn made contact with recent graduates that had business degrees. He found one willing to work with him in marketing the products the farm and ranch were producing, and would produce in the future.
At the moment the products included some very high quality greenhouse raised organic salad makings and a few vegetables, grown in the greenhouses. The future would bring higher yields, a wider variety, and organic meats. The animals were coming in as Glenn, on the advice of the animal science students, bought stock.
The farm would raise chickens for eggs and for meat; milk cows for milk and other dairy products; Black Angus cattle for meat and leather; American Bison for meat and leather; Ostrich for meat, feathers, and leather; swine for meat and leather; sheep for meat and wool, goats for meat and milk, rabbits for low fat meat and pelts; tilapia, trout, and catfish for food, worms for fish food and chicken food.
Additional animals would be Barb horses for riding and light harness work, and Clydesdales for medium and heavy harness. There was kennel in the barn for those that wanted to have their own dog on the property.
As winter settled in, so did the tenants of the farm. No construction was planned, though finishing and equipping the work areas continued, using the grant money the group had. Though the group had lost two grants due to the private funding, it picked up another large grant because of it.
With outgo slowing, and some income beginning, Glenn finalized some of the additional plans he had for the place and began ordering more long lead items for spring delivery for the projects he had in mind.
Glenn stayed out of the students work areas unless specifically invited, but he spent much of the winter in the other areas of the farm, learning what he could, from the hands-on things he was doing, as well as the reading and research he did every night on the internet.
With not that much for them to do, Glenn equipped one of the ‘spare’ rooms as a welding and machine shop for them. They would do what was needed around the farm for their base wintertime salary, but could take on outside jobs if they wanted for extra income. Glenn financed their purchase and conversion of an old ‘70’s model Chevy one-ton dually truck to a diesel powered welder’s truck so they could do off site jobs.
Quite a bit of equipment began showing up as winter waned. The other two Bobcats arrived, as did two more of the Unimog U500’s. The rest of the attachments for the Bobcats and Unimogs also arrived, including the field farming equipment. Six ROKON bikes converted to Hatz diesel engines were completed and delivered. They were primarily for use on the ranch property handling the herds.
Also delivered was the biodiesel production equipment, including an oil press. Ever since the tank farm had been put in, one of the students interested in alternative fuels had been going around town collecting waste oil from restaurants with deep fat fryers. As soon as the equipment was set up in one of the ‘spare’ rooms, the farm would be on its way to energy independence.
Another component of the planned energy independence also arrived in the form of a truck load of RWE Schott photo-voltaic panels with several Xantrex/Trace inverter systems. Another truck brought the Surrette deep cycle batteries for the systems. As soon as the weather broke, the electricians would begin the installations for each building.
Gregg decided to call the supplier that was supposed to be getting a set of generators for the farm. He hadn’t heard from him in a while. Sure enough, there was a hold up. It was going to be another three weeks before they could be shipped. There wasn’t anything Glenn could do about it. He’d just have to wait.
But he wasn’t idle while he waited for the generator. He got with Jeremy and Helen and put them on two projects. The first was to make a set of stills for the production of fuel alcohol. The second was to build a pair of methane generators to produce the fuel to run the stills and the biodiesel production.
Even Tabitha was calm and cool as her plant growth experiments went well in her workroom and one of the greenhouses. She had even taken advantage of the residency possibilities, though she paid a nominal sum rather than do any work for Glenn. Brenda, too, was living at the farm, working with three other people on her project. She helped in the greenhouses, for the most part, for the privilege of living at the farm.
The operation, despite the equipment that Glenn had, was very labor intensive. Fortunately, there were plenty of students needing affordable room and board. Glenn had plenty of students willing to lend a hand in return for residency at the farm.
Many of them had an interest in several of the aspects of Glenn’s approach to a self-sustaining farm and ranch operation. It wasn’t just the plant and animal research going on, that brought students out, but also the earth sheltering construction and off grid goal of the farm.
Though Glenn had not planned on a wind powered addition to the battery charging, two of the students whose interests lay in alternative power asked him to consider adding that option so they could study it further. He agreed and ordered an Air-X 400 watt, 48 volt dc unit and an Excel 48 volt dc, 7.5 kilowatt unit with the necessary materials needed to install and hook up the units to the solar power system that was going in rapidly.
Work was started on additional structures for the farm and ranch operation. In anticipation of the herds growing, weather shelters were constructed in several places on the section of ground set aside for grazing. Hay shelters were also constructed, as the farm would produce hay to carry the grazing animals for at least two years, plus enough to sell every year.
Silos were erected to hold the farm’s field crops. This was to allow the best profit for field crops, the crop being held until the best price could be obtained. In addition they acted as storage for grain fed animals, as did the concrete lined pits that held silage.
The four Unimogs, with three point hitches attached, with the recently delivered farm equipment, were used to get the fields planted. One of the crops was hemp. The group had managed to get a special use permit from the BATFE and Department of Agriculture to grow it for experimental use. There was enough acreage permitted to allow a significant amount of it to be processed for biodiesel. But the farm also planted other oil producing crops to ensure an adequate supply of biodiesel to for the entire operation.
The methane produced from plant and animal waste was providing enough gas to run the burners for the stills and for the biodiesel equipment. The alcohol was sold to a petroleum wholesaler for blending in gasoline. The farm kept its alcohol tanks full, only selling down one tank to half full at a time.
The students also planted several specialty crops for their research. The third full section of land was dedicated to cash crops for Glenn. The greenhouses, both the commercial production ones for Glenn, and those for the experiments for the group were going full bore.
Besides the breeding stock the ranch operation had acquired the previous fall, enough stock had been acquired for finishing over the winter to allow harvesting that spring. With the help of the marketing students, Glenn had made deals with restaurants in St. Louis, the Cape, and Memphis, to provide them with not only beef, chicken, and fish; but lamb, mutton, goat, rabbit, bison, and ostrich, as well. That was in addition to the organic vegetables and salad components. It would be another two years before the fruit and nut trees in the orchard began to bear commercially.
Two of the commercial green houses were dedicated to semi-tropical and tropical plants, including small trees. Much of the production of organic lemons, limes, bananas, kiwi, cocoa, spices, herbs, and coffee was used at the farm. What excess there was went to organic shops in St. Louis and Memphis. So did the farm produced eggs, milk, cheeses, and other specialty animal products. They were produced in two of the ‘spare’ rooms, now equipped to handle the processing of the farm’s products. Students did do some of the work, but the butchering and meat cutting was done by a butcher that Glenn had hired.
Work started on two additional large earth sheltered barns and the main earth sheltered house. The generators finally arrived and were wired into farm’s electrical system. The solar panels on each building were able to handle 100% of the normal draw during daylight hours and still put a charge to the batteries. The wind turbines added some battery charging capacity.
When electrical draws went over the norms, commercial power picked up the slack and recharged the batteries. If commercial power wasn’t available, the generator set kicked in. One generator would kick in if the solar panels and batteries weren’t handling the load. The one generator could handle the normal load, without the solar input. A second genset would kick in if higher than normal usage was needed, and the batteries were discharged. There was a third genset that would come on line if either of the first two was down for service. A fourth identical genset was available for use to replace one of the other three if one of them needed a rebuild.
The new house and barns were finished before fall and Glenn moved into the house. He sold the trailer.
The last two of the six Unimog U500’s came in and were available to help with the field crop harvest that fall. Between the small amount of hemp that was produced, the canola oil, and used deep fryer oil, the farm was able to produce all the fuel it needed, with enough left over to keep the tanks full and still sell off some excess.
Though the operation was often the butt of jokes because of the use of the Unimogs instead of conventional tractors, things were going well on the production farm. It was the same for the experimental crops those in the group were raising. Even the garden did exceptionally well. The farm was fulfilling all its contracts with the organic food distributors that served St. Louis and Memphis.
All-in-all, Glenn was quite pleased. He’d gone through the letter of credit he’d received from the bank with the property and operation for collateral, as well as half of his retirement funds. He still had half of the retirement and all of the money his uncle had left him. The farm and ranch was now bringing in significant income and Glenn began to invest again in his future retirement.
He went about it a bit differently than he had in the past, due, in part, to many of the things he’d learned on the internet. He transferred the remainder of his retirement paper assets to Treasury Bill investments, and began putting the new money into gold and silver as a hedge for the future.
It was going so well, that Glenn was becoming overwhelmed. He had quite a bit of help from the students on running the farm, but decided an experienced farm manager would be a good idea. It had been his original thought anyway. It was still a good idea. He put out the word and began to take resumes that fall for a manager to take over the next spring.
He talked to many applicants, including a couple of students that would be graduating with degrees in farm management, but had no working experience other than their work on their family farms. One had also worked at Glenn’s the past spring and summer.
Becoming one to really hedge his bets, Glenn decided to hire both an experienced farm manager and a green assistant manager. Glenn figured that between them, with his oversight, the farm and ranch could be run with the best of the old ideas and the best of the new.
He started the process to get two additional small earth sheltered homes built to house the manager and his family, and the assistant manager, who was currently single, but had a live-in boyfriend. For the meantime Glenn had two identical three bedroom manufactured housing units brought in and installed.
Fredrick Grebbs wasn’t too happy about working with not only an inexperienced assistant, but a female one, at that. But he agreed. And Alison McGrady was a difficult person not to like. Glenn thought it would work okay.
He had many talks with the two of them during the winter, getting across his short term goals and the long term goals he had in mind, and his thoughts on how to achieve them. It wasn’t long before Fred and Alison established a stable working relationship. Glenn was satisfied that things would go well.
He eased off his own labors at the farm and ranch and left the day to day running to Fred and Alison. Things did go well. That spring, despite bad weather, the crops went in on schedule. The greenhouses were producing well, and the herds were now large enough to begin some real harvesting. That included the bison and ostrich operations. They were not only doing better than Glenn expected, but the demand was higher, too.
The farm got good prices on the grains they’d stored and held for that very reason, keeping back enough for feed for the animals for two years and seed for two year’s plantings.
But Glenn was still restless and couldn’t explain why. He’d done what he wanted, to the best of his ability. He had food for the future. But suddenly he felt vulnerable. As vulnerable as he had before he got the farm. Why?
He began to access the steps he’d taken to get to where he was. Why had he decided to buy gold and silver as his retirement? That had been a sudden decision. It was as a hedge. Much like the farm itself. A hedge for bad times. Suddenly Glenn muttered to himself, “Holy cow! I’m a survivalist!”
Glenn began to go back and check some of the internet sources he’d used in planning the various elements of the farm. Sure enough, a few of them were actual survival sites, while many of his searches had pulled up survival related sites based on the words he used in the Yahoo search engine.
He began to research the survival movement just as he had organic farming. He found it a fascinating subject, starting with Civil Defense in the 40’s and WW II through the Cold War into the FEMA era. Then the actual Survivalist Movement with its roots in the late 50’s through the modern start in the 70’s and the media-made maniacal Survivalist, to the current movement that no longer used the word Survivalist.
It seemed he was a prepper. But in only two ways. Food and fuel. And even when it came to fuel, only the farm was relatively self-sufficient. The Talisman took gasoline, which they couldn’t make. And it would be extremely difficult to convert it to straight alcohol use. Better to get a new vehicle. “No,” Glenn muttered, “Not new. Something not too vulnerable to EMP, whatever that entails, and with a diesel engine so I can use the biodiesel.”
Glenn made that his next project. A diesel powered, EMP resistant vehicle. He did more research on the internet and the St. Louis newspapers. Then he went looking in St. Louis. In the end, he found a used 2000 ¾ ton four-wheel-drive Chevy Suburban with a blown engine. Just what he needed.
He ordered a crated GM 6.5L non-electronic diesel engine to replace the blown gasoline engine. To keep it as EMP resistant as possible, Glen opted for an old style generator rather than an alternator to supply the starting batteries and the deep discharge battery that was installed to run 12 volt equipment and the 110 volt inverter.
A St. Louis diesel mechanic would do the engine swap for him. Glenn looked at many different front and rear bumpers on the internet and in Off-road show rooms, but went with shop build models made by Jeremy and Helen. He did buy a commercial heavy-duty roof rack for the Suburban and mounted some pioneer tools and two spare tires on it. That gave him four spare tires with one each on the front bumper and rear bumper.
Though the Suburban had a forty-gallon fuel tank, it was for gasoline. Not only was that tank changed out, along with its associated fuel lines, to a forty-five gallon model, but a second tank was added. A fifty-six gallon in-frame tank.
He wasn’t planning to go rock scaling with the Suburban, it wasn’t really suited for it, but he liked some of the features on the vehicles that did. So an on-board welder alternator was added, as was an air pump. A second power steering pump was added to drive the front mount hydraulic winch, and the receiver mount hydraulic winch for use from the rear of the Suburban.
Getting the Suburban up and running kept Glenn occupied for a couple of months, though he did continue his research on prepping. Okay. He had food covered. Water, too. And transportation, especially when you considered the horses in addition to the Suburban. Oh. And shelter. His whole house was better shelter than most people’s basements.
But his further research had him concerned about hanging onto everything, if things got really bad. He didn’t see much that he could do if the government decided to take over his place. But what about brigands if there was a collapse of government. A place like his would be a prime target.
Glenn wasn’t much for firearms. Never had been. But the possibilities he was reading about in preparedness sites, especially the various forums, were giving him second thoughts. Glenn’s attempts to bring up the subject with several of the residents of the farm met with some hostility. So, as Fred and Alison ran things, Glenn began to research in depth an armory for the farm.
There were plenty of opinions on what was best, for a variety of scenarios. Glenn was becoming one that liked to cover all the bases. He picked up a variety of firearms, several of each, one or two at a time over several months. He kept the weapons acquisitions a secret.
He took a local hunting class, and a couple of other weapons handling classes in St. Louis, and then got a concealed weapon carry permit. Glenn went armed from then on, everywhere it was legal to do so.
Preparing for the worst became something of a hobby, since he now had a reliable income stream, and time on his hands. Glenn began to watch the news with a new eye, considering almost every news and weather story as to how it might affect him and his future.
One of the first things he did was to switch his gold and silver holdings from dealer storage vaults to his own vault in the house. The second thing was to double his buying program of the precious metals. It was no longer just his hedged retirement fund, along with the farm and ranch, it was a hedge against disaster. He also converted his T-bills to gold and silver.
As he accumulated the firearms, Glenn began to wonder what would happen in he did lose the farm and ranch, anyway. He began to plan a small retreat some distance away from the farm and ranch. There was plenty of land available, with the market the way it was. Glenn thought about setting up a second farm. A much smaller one. But he decided the place would be a simple hole-up retreat. A place to stay and recoup if he ever needed to do so.
It was relatively simple, and not all that expensive, to acquire a small piece of property several miles from the farm and ranch. It was hilly and of very little use for farming. Nor was it prime real estate for development. It was ideal for what Glenn wanted. He wanted as few people as possible to know about it.
Glenn decided to make it a one-man project. Everything was going well at the Farm. They could spare one of the Unimogs. For the first stage of the project, Glenn had the backhoe attachment mounted on the back of one of the U500’s. Glenn disappeared for three days with it.
He had his camping gear and camped out at the site for those days. It took him two full days to dig out the area where the retreat shelter would be. When he went back to the farm he had the backhoe dismounted and a dump bed mounted on the truck and the pallet forks mounted to the front lift arms. An equipment trailer was attached and Glenn headed for St. Louis.
The truck wouldn’t make it up to the site with the trailer. The truck alone had barely made it. Glenn securely blocked the trailer and unhooked it. He began to unload the trailer with the forks on the front of the Unimog, taking each pallet up and placing it where he needed it.
With the materials he needed in place, Glenn went back to the farm. One of the A300’s was loaded onto the trailer, along with several attachments and Glenn again disappeared for several days. After unloading and transferring the A300 and attachments to the building site, Glenn unhooked the trailer and went to the nearby gravel pit.
He made several trips to and from the local gravel pit to haul in aggregate with which to make concrete using the Portland cement he’d picked up in St. Louis. After moving the sand and gravel, Glenn took the Unimog into Cape Girardeau. It didn’t take long to buy and install a five-hundred-gallon plastic water tank on the bed of the Unimog. Glen also bought a pump and hoses with which to transfer the water. The farm store agreed to let Glenn fill it for a small fee.
Glenn took the load of water back to the building site. It was back breaking work mixing and pouring the concrete Glenn made up in the Bobcat cement mixer for the footings and floor of the shelter, using the trucked in water, aggregate, and cement.
He took a break when the floor was finished and just relaxed for several days while the concrete set up enough to add the walls. Glenn had thought the concrete work was bad. Laying the cinder blocks in the hole in the ground was worse. But he worked steadily, mixing up small batches of mortar as he worked around the perimeter of the building, laying the H-form blocks among the vertical rebar and adding horizontal rebar every course of blocks.
After a few rows were laid, Glenn mixed up another batch of concrete and filled the blocks. It took a solid week to compete the walls and columns that would support the roof. Glenn backfilled against the walls, after bringing the waterproof barrier up the outside walls that he had put down before he poured the footings and floor. He took another break then, taking the equipment back to the farm for security.
Glenn checked on the operation of the farm and ranch. Everything was going well. So, after two weeks of rest, Glenn took the Unimog again, with a flat bed mounted on it and the forks installed, and headed into St. Louis again to pick up the components he needed to make the roof supports for the concrete roof. It took him another week to place the timbers using an extension boom on one of the forks of the Unimog, and apply the cross timbers and galvanized metal.
When the rebar was in place above the metal he went after the A300 and cement mixer again. The roof pour took two days of steady work, with Glenn only taking twenty or thirty minute cat naps between pours, the same way he had when he’d poured the floor, to keep a good bond at the joints of the pours of the concrete.
He rested for a couple of days and then began the finish work. That consisted of laying a thirty-inch diameter galvanized culvert from the hole he’d framed in one wall of the shelter to a point forty feet away that would be used as an emergency exit/entrance.
Glenn also finished the regular entrance and the interior of the shelter. It took a couple of trips with the Unimog to move the stuff he’d bought to equip and supply the shelter. When everything was inside and secure, he went to a wrecking yard in St. Louis and bought five wrecked Cadillacs.
He paid to have the front seats cut out, large holes cut into the floor pans of all five cars, and their wheels removed. Glenn hauled them to the site and placed one over the main entrance/exit and one over the emergency exit/entrance. One of the cars was set over the buried water tank. The other two he placed randomly and added a few old appliances and other junk here and there.
Glenn broadcast grass and flower seed over the areas he had disturbed. In a few months the place would look like a wilderness dumping ground. Satisfied he had a secure place to which he could bug out if he needed, Glenn smiled and headed home, ready to take on the next project he’d been thinking about during the idle hours of the retreat building.
Copyright 2006