There is always a middle road. Depending on what part of the plains you call home, it may be sharp scoria, dusty limestone, gummy gumbo or spongy sand, but it is there. This is the road to take when exploitive interests (which all too often reside not in distant boardrooms but in our own hearts) seek to degrade the place where we live; the road to take when hapless idealists project their fantasies onto our country. Get on this road, and stay out of the bar ditches.

If you own land on the Great Plains of North America, here’s a book you want to read: "Section 27: A Century on a Family Farm" by Mil Penner (University Press of Kansas). Mil is on the right road. It happens to be a section road in the middle of Kansas.

The Section 27 of his title has been the home of Mennonite farmers since the immigrant generation of the 1870s. Much of the book has to do with matters Mennonite, and Mennonites are prairie folk without peer. The great concentrations of Mennonites are in Kansas and Manitoba, but they inhabit the entire breadth of the plains, including my own neighborhood of western Cass County, North Dakota.

Penner treats his family folkways with affection. Eating zwieback (double-decker buns) for faspa (afternoon lunch), attending pancake shivarees, and eating headcheese on butchering day are experiences that stir remembrance because they invoke the senses along with sentiment.

The folkways of Mennonite life inhabit Section 27 alongside the common foibles of farm boyhood--harassing the vo-ag teacher, shooting things, driving dangerously, dating awkwardly. The remarkable thing about Mil Penner is that he is capable of standing outside the culture he loves and thinking critically about how he, and all the rest of us, live on the land. He situates himself in relation both to his particular culture and to his particular part of the plains.

Section 27 is not particularly good land (in a commercial sense). It has gumbo soils and marshes. Venerable Mennonite tradition going back to northern Europe calls for improvement of such land. The Penners viewed their Lake Pasture as an opportunity for land development while more expansive neighbors viewed the entire regional landscape of wetlands and sinkholes.

Drainage and channelization wrought both productivity and destruction.

"I took up the ancestral calling to develop and drain," Mil writes, "subjecting land in McPherson, Reno, and Harvey counties to bulldozers and earth movers, practicing soil conservation and developing the land to its maximum agricultural potential." Notice how conservation and development are linked in that sentence. Later he writes, "The distinction between soil conservation and land development began to blur in my mind."

Mil built the first custom spraying rig in his part of the country. He contracted for leveling and earth moving. He sold center pivots. He plowed the remnant of prairie on the farm. "When I broke the last sod on Section 27 in 1959, I wasn’t concerned with the ecological impact of plowing original grassland," he reflects, "and I doubt that Great-grandpa David ever thought about it either."

Now he is thinking about it. As a boy he played with a toy bulldozer in a sandpile. As a man, he says, the bulldozer became his "idol." Now western kingbirds have returned to the mulberry hedges of Section 27. Deer fawn in the timber that lines drainage ditches. Nearby a center pivot makes misty rainbows.

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