Simpler Times

by Jerry D. Young

  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 needed; 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 groups’.”

  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 posts 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 rototiller. 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 irrigation 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 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, a concrete slab was poured 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 room 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’s 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 electr
icians 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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  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.