Customer Reviews

Witness Of Combines

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A friend of mine recommended this book. I grew up on a farm in central Nebraska. When I finished reading this book, I called my mom and asked her if I had a brother named Kent that she never told me about. I started reading her excerpts from the book and we were both astounded by how closely it matched our own lives on the farm in Nebraska, including the blue-speckled canning pot and pressure cooker sitting on the stove all summer! I found particular delight in the essay on the work of "town kids" vs. "farm kids." I look back at all we did, but it never seemed like work. It was just our life, one I wouldn't trade for anything. Like the author, I've been through my father's death, the sale of the farm, and in the next few weeks my mother will be moving off the farm and into town. Loved this book!

If you, like me, grew up on a "real" farm in the Upper Midwest, this book will take you back to the sights, sounds, smells and memories of your childhood. You'll smile, nod your head in agreement, and sometimes even cry. You'll read paragraphs aloud to your wife who did not grow up on farm, and she'll say "that's nice" but not quite get it. If you did not grow up on a farm, and would like a better understanding of farm boys, this is a must read. I'll read it again.

_A Witness of Combines_ was difficult for me to read. Kent Meyers so perfectly captures what it was like for me to grow up on a north central Iowa farm, that it feels like he was one of the neighbors. The final chapter about returning home is unbearably vivid. I, too, am off the farm because of governmental policies and their effects on farming. If you want to know what it was like, and why we ought to try to preserve it, read this book.

If I ever write this well, I shall be well-pleased.

This book reminds me so much of my life growing up in a small town in South Dakota, i didn't live on a farm but worked on one and still work on one during the summers. I thouroghly enjoyed Kent's abliltity to describe certain events, sights and the other 4 sense's. A very good book i sat down and read it in a day no more than 12 hours total reading, it sucked me right in.

I have not lived on a farm, rather I am a fan of Kent Meyers' writing and have read all of his other books. I was interested to read this memoir of his life and struggles on his family farm growing up. Threads of his experiences were familiar to me because they have flowed into his stories and have enriched them.

The section of the book "Straightening the Hammermill" is one every father and son should read. What a powerful statement about the strength and ties of family and community and the knowledge passed between fathers and sons.

The world gained a writer but a family farm was lost. Meyers honored that passing.

Having grown up on a small farm and having Grandparents and other relatives with farms made this book a very interesting read for me. Kent captures the farm life and reflects on what you learn from having grown up on one. The ending reminded me of going to Grandma and Grandpa's farm to see what the new owners had done to it. What surprised me was the author is just a year younger than me so we were both on farms at the same time but his was bigger and the only thing sustaining his family that had 9 children.

Kent Meyers inspires his students through his teaching and his writing. I grew up in Spearfish and attended BHSU; I hear Kent's voice quite clearly. This book took me back to my grandparent's farm and our "garden," cows, & chickens on Upper Valley Road. What a wonderful trip down memory lane!

Dear Kent,
I need to thank you - for writing The Witness of Combines. I know it's been a dozen years or so since you published it, but I've only just now 'discovered' it. It's such a deeply personal work, filled with wisdom, humor and an obvious love of family.
The details provided about the everyday life on a family farm back in the sixties and seventies are so valuable today, since those decades were really nearly the end of family farms as we knew them. Your anecdotes about chickens and how they progress so rapidly from those adorable and animate little yellow puff balls to pullets and chickens who produce not just eggs, but all that mess in the coop, which has to be cleaned periodically, and the stink and ammonia-like fumes that go right to your lungs as you scrape off the roosts, gagging, coughing and quietly cursing. I remembered it all, reading your memories, right up to the killing, plucking, cleaning and eating, when, as you said, no matter how many of those nasty fowl made up a big family meal, it was never 'chickens' we ate, but simply 'chicken.' Personally, after having such an intimate acquaintance with those filthy fowl, I remained for years a bit squeamish about eating them, preferring Mom's biscuits and gravy to the actual meat itself. Now I like chicken, but I'm fifty years removed the chicken coop cleaning by now.
I found it especially meaningful how you managed to make pulling weeds into an uplifting experience, albeit years later, equating the cockleburs with the constellations and connecting it all to celestial bodies and studying the skies. Sounds unlikely, I know, but it works wonderfully. Almost made me want to learn more about the stars, to go along with all those myths and legends I studied in college and beyond - and all those weeds I once hoed so resentfully in our acres of cucumbers, or, as my brothers and I called it all, the "pickle patch."
And the sibling tensions expressed in "Stuck" are pitch perfect, as are the small adventures and joys of same described in "Night Grove" and "How Joel and I Almost Became Mountain Men." All of which made me chuckle in rueful recognition.
I think, however, what will remain with me the longest from this collection is the way you remember your parents, particularly your father, who you knew for such a cruelly short time. He lives on in the values he instilled in you, and he gave you the strength to keep things going on the farm for a short time and then to make a good life for yourself. And if you are anything like me, I'll bet you still 'talk' with your dad nearly every day. Fathers. Even when they seem distant or remote, they matter - are so important. This book is such a wonderful tribute to your dad, and also to your mother.
Although I say I can relate to much of what you've written in The Witness of Combines, my own childhood farming experiences were on a much smaller scale, helping out on my grandfather's 'hobby farm' located adjacent to our home, part of which was even inside the city limits of our small town. But I still remember those damn chickens, and all those sweltering days spent planting, hoeing, weeding and then repeatedly picking all those damn pickles. And I also remember the satisfaction I felt after long days of haying with my brothers and Grandpa, and how we'd all pile into the car after dark and head out to a nearby lake to swim and wash away the sweat, dirt and chaff. It's all of a piece now, those memories - the misery and the joys. But like you, the advice and counsel and example of my dad and grandfather have stuck with me. Work first; then you can play.
God, I loved this book! I savored it. I found myself, marking my place with a finger, closing it and stroking the glossy cover with my thumb and fingers, trying perhaps to 'feel' more physically the things I was reading - and remembering. I didn't want it to end.
But all good books do end. I hope I will find time to return to this one on occasion. In the meantime I will shelve it with some other similar books which I treasure. Here's a short list of a few of them -

Eighty Acres: Elegy for a Family Farm, by Ronald Jager
Pulling Down the Barn, by Anne-Marie Oomen
From the Land and Back, by Curtis Stadtfeld
The Last Farmer, by Howard Kohn.

These are all farm memoirs from Michigan, and to these I'll boldly add my own, Reed City Boy, although I fear it doesn't really compare. Then there are these other country classics -

We Have All Gone Away, by Curtis Harnack (Iowa)
The Portable Prairie, by M.J. Andersen (South Dakota)
The Horizontal World, by Debra Marquart (North Dakota)
How It Looks Going Back, by Doris Knowles Pulis (Montana)

All of these books are memoirs. I also have a couple of fictional favorites in Mildred Walker's Winter Wheat and Don Kurtz's South of the Big Four.

Of course there are many more, Kent, but I just wanted you to know The Witness of Combines will be in good company here on my shelves. Once again, thank you for writing it. Your father would be so proud. No, not 'would be' - he is.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

Meyers captures what it's like to be a farmkid--to have a haybarn as your playground and to work side by side with your parents in a way today's kids will never know. (I especially love his reference to the sound that your boots make as you pull them out of the barnyard muck.) He captures a farm family's heartaches and proud moments in simple, true style. I gave this book to my father, a Minnesota farmer, because it spoke volumes about what my parents instilled in me by raising me on a farm and the struggles we faced to make ends meet. He loved it! It's not a book for just former farm kids though. Beautifully written. One of my top ten books.

Anyone wishing to really know what farming was and is about should read this book. Great little stories, wonderful memories to those of us who grew up on a farm, and tear-jerking memories of farm sales. We had three children instead of nine, but many experiences were the same.