When I was a kid, my dad and uncle farmed a farm owned by my great-aunt Molly. Everything we farmed was in the rolling hills of eastern Nebraska except this particular farm, which my grandpa began farming in the early 1960s. It was in the bottoms about a mile from the Elkhorn River, a major river in our area.

In normal years, this farm produced wonderful crops. If I remember correctly, one year the soybeans there yielded somewhere in the 70-bushels-per-acre range. We were (I guess we still are) happy when our clay hills made 50 bushels an acre. Seventy ...