If the sun is shining today, it will have a direct bearing on Craig and Denise Mentzer, farm marshals for this year’s Farm-City Days.
With the corn safely stored away, their last worry of the season is soybeans.
Wednesday morning, moisture content was 16 percent. Optimum is 13-15. After Thursday’s prolonged rains the danger is that the pods may open.
They now need a long spate of sunny weather not only to dry out the beans but also the fields.
“With these big combines, they’ll chew up the fields if they’re the slightest bit wet,” Craig said.
If Mother Nature comes through, “I think this will be the best bean crop we’ve ever had. The prices look decent. I’m hoping for 50 bushels an acre.”
Craig quickly douses that optimism with skepticism, just for good luck. “Of course they could go from 50 bushels to 10 overnight if the weather turns bad. Two years ago they went from 35 bushels to 13 when a hailstorm came through. Your profit is at about 42 bushels right now.”
The Mentzers have learned to accept the vagaries of weather.
“It’s a lot easier with faith,” Craig said. “You’ll get tried really good. You can do everything right, and still end up not surviving.”
The Mentzers balance out the beans and corn with a “tad of wheat,” as well as raise Angus cattle on their farm northwest of town.
They are the third generation of Mentzers to farm in Allen County. Craig’s grandfather, Leslie and his wife, Vesta, came this way during the Depression in 1929.
Craig looks out across his porch and points across Texas Road to where his grandparents first set roots.
“They rented from an insurance company that had repossessed the land during the Great Depression. Then he decided to buy it. All the neighbors said he’d go broke. But they scratched out a living. With two mules, then some horses, they made a go of it,” he said.
Today, their daughter Lissa and her husband Corbin Manbeck live in their great-grandparent’s house that they have since restored. Lissa teaches fourth grade at Lincoln Elementary and Corbin works for Union Pacific Railroad.
For Craig and Denise farming was always in the cards.
They took up the family reins — and homestead — in 1980 when his parents, Bill and Marjorie Mentzer, moved into town where they continue to live. Bill farmed successfully until 1973 when he took on as an ag representative at Allen County State Bank.
