Brooks: Volunteers help with harvest for a Minnesota farm family in need

If you’re an American farmer, you might not be able to count on good weather, or good markets, or your old tractor’s aging engine.

What farmers can count on is other farmers.

Fourteen hundred miles from home, Keith Lindig braced against the raw November wind in a cornfield outside Buffalo, Minn., where he was helping a complete stranger bring in the harvest on Sunday.

“I listened to a church sermon years ago when I was a kid and it stuck with me: ‘There’s no better gift than the gift of giving,’” said Lindig, the fifth generation to work his family’s 151-year-old farm near Stonewall, Texas.

He’s giving two weeks of his time to Farm Rescue, a 20-year-old nonprofit that helps farm families in crisis across the Midwest. Last weekend, Lindig was one of a small group of volunteers who converged on Buffalo to harvest 200 acres of corn for a farmer recovering from a stroke.

“Everybody needs help sometime in their life,” said Kenneth Chyle, a retiree from Kentucky, guiding a massive combine down the corn rows. He’s been traveling with Farm Rescue since mid-September, helping out at farms in North Dakota and Minnesota.

“Farmers are a stubborn breed,” he said.

When the volunteers arrived in Buffalo on Saturday, they had a single trailer and driver available to haul the harvest to the ethanol plant in Atwater — a two-hour round trip that would have dragged the harvest out for days. By the next day, neighbors and relatives had donated six more trailers to help shuttle the corn.

“There’s good people in the world, you just have to find them,” Lindig said. “And the quickest way to find them is to get with an organization like this.”

This summer, Texas was hit with devastating floods, 30 miles from Lindig’s home. A heartbroken community needed help. Help arrived.

“We saw people from up here, down there,” he said. “Strangers helping strangers.”

Over the weekend in Buffalo, neighbors helped neighbors. Jerry Schwientek and his 17-year-old son Nicholas drove down from their century-old family farm in Elk River to help. YouTube star and fifth generation farmer Zach Johnson, known to his 1 million followers as the Millennial Farmer, drove over from Lowry.

“I’ve only ever wanted to be a farmer,” Nicholas said. “It’s all I could ever want.”

The family in Buffalo asked for privacy, but Farm Rescue’s YouTube channel hosts a series of videos shared by other families they’ve helped. Families shattered by illness, injury and disasters. Families that are still farming today because someone offered to help.

“We focus more on the chores,” said Luke Benedict, one of Farm Rescue’s senior field operations managers. Founded in 2005, Farm Rescue staff and volunteers have delivered hay to drought-stricken cattle ranchers, planted sugar beets, harvested soybeans, corn and oats.

And while neighbors and strangers shoulder some of the chores, farm families are able to focus on more personal tasks like chemotherapy appointments and the long drives to the nearest hospital. Often, the right help at the right time makes all the difference.

Farm Rescue estimates that more than 90% of the farmers who ask for their help stay in business after the emergency passes.

“One of the rising things we’ve seen is with mental health,” Benedict said. “It is an extremely stressful time right now in agriculture. Don’t let that hold you back from getting help.”

Click here for more information about Farm Rescue.

For help with the daily stress of farm life or to connect with state resources, visit the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s resource page, or call the Farm Stress Helpline at 833-600-2670.