December 8, 2022
In mid-October, I set out for the 600-mile drive from Birmingham, Ala., to central Illinois to catch a few days of harvest. But 30 miles before I reached Clinton, I learned that this wouldn’t be any ordinary farm visit.
My phone rang, cutting into a Springsteen song as I drove past half-harvested fields on Interstate 72. I smiled, thinking that Dad would have shaken his head to see the Robinson name appear on the head unit and me push a button on the steering wheel to answer. Mom and I had failed to persuade him to scale up his 2016 Silverado to include the basics like automatic windows and mirror adjustment knobs.
“Hi, Cindy, this is Chris,” our farm operator Fritz Robinson’s wife greeted me.
My smile evaporated as Chris shared some sobering news. Fritz’s cancer had recurred, and he’d be retiring from farming. She wondered how I’d feel about their son Brian stepping into the job.
“You don’t need to worry about this year’s crop,” she assured me. “The boys and I are finishing up.”
Farming families
The Ryan family’s history with the Robinsons goes back several decades.
In 1980, Fritz took over farming a tract that backed up to one of our fields to the west of my family’s farmhouse. Shortly after Fritz started working his ground, he and Dad crossed paths.
“I saw your dad sitting on his old Minneapolis tractor,” Fritz recalled. “He looked stuck, so I headed his way.”