We drove through Omaha and out into the heart of Nebraska. The land flattened out like a stretched canvas. Uninterrupted, immense, almost surreal in its sameness. For hours, it was just farmland. Pale earth. Long stretches of highway flanked by grids. You can see it on the map. A perfect patchwork, engineered by survey lines and irrigation routes, stitched together with country roads and the occasional thin river vein.
Big silver silos rise out of the land like lighthouses. Around them, clumps of buildings: barns, long metal sheds, trailers tucked between fencing and grain piles. Every so often, a tree. Often dead. Stripped gray and skeletal against the open sky.
At first, there weren’t any animals. Just fields and fences. But later, we passed massive herds of black cows and their calves scattered like punctuation across the yellowing grass. They grazed in silence, so many of them that they looked like shadows from far away. Still, I couldn’t see any tractors running. No combines cutting through the grain. No people in the fields. It all felt strangely still.
I can’t fathom the size of these farms or how much effort and risk they hold. What does it take to keep one alive? Especially in a place where rainfall is so scarce, and the ground looks tired. I wondered what crops were growing. Corn? Soybeans? Wheat? Sometimes it’s hard to tell when everything is either harvested or hasn’t yet sprouted. Many of these farms, I’ve read, rely on government subsidies. Welfare farming, some people call it.
That term, “welfare farming”, feels like a contradiction. You picture rugged independence when you think of farmers. Self-sufficient. Bootstrapped. But in reality, modern agriculture is deeply entangled with federal programs. Some farmers receive payments not to plant crops on certain land to prevent overproduction or protect the soil. Others get payouts when market prices fall below a set threshold. There are subsidies for crop insurance, for disaster recovery, for soil conservation. And while it keeps many operations afloat, especially in tough years, it also creates strange incentives. You might get paid more for growing corn for ethanol than for food. Or for producing soy for export instead of diverse crops for local use.
In that way, it’s less like the old-fashioned family farm of lore and more like a complex web of policy, weather patterns, and market economics. It’s not just planting seeds and watching them grow. It’s spreadsheets. It’s betting on prices months in advance. It’s being at the mercy of droughts and floods and trade wars with countries you’ll never visit.
I wonder how many farmers feel trapped by the land. How many are carrying on a legacy they didn’t choose. There’s a heaviness to it. You inherit not just the property but the debt, the machinery, the expectation to stay and keep things going even when margins are razor thin and the climate is turning more hostile every year.
And yet, I admire it. The persistence. The faith it takes to put something in the ground and believe it will become more. The physical labor. The intimacy with the weather. Farming might be bolstered by policy, but it’s still rooted in the old story of humans and land. Trying to make something grow.
The farming industry is something I think we take for granted until we see it. It’s invisible to most people, but it feeds all of us. These miles and miles of monoculture. The bones of the economy. And the soul, too, in a way, at least the way we like to mythologize it. “Heartland,” we call it. “America’s breadbasket.” But from the road, it feels more like an endurance game. Like a place where time and weather rule, and you just try to hang on.
Driving through these long stretches of Nebraska, it’s easy to dismiss it as “boring,” but that boredom is doing a lot of work. It’s feeding us. It’s propping up whole systems. It’s quietly surviving in the background while the rest of the world moves on.
We stopped in Lincoln for another minor bus repair. This time, leaking pipes. Home Depot, again. Charlie got to work in the parking lot. I wandered into a nearby Taco Bell and brought back lunch. It’s amazing how normalized this kind of life has become for us. Quick fixes, parking lot projects, food stops between fittings.
I looked around Lincoln and tried to imagine living here. I know people do, and not just a few– hundreds of thousands. It’s hard for me to imagine choosing it, though. So little access to wildness. The land is used, divided, purposed. There’s not much in the way of hiking trails or hidden coves or old forests. But I’ve heard Lincoln and Omaha are relatively progressive, little blue dots surrounded by red, with a decent job market, affordable housing, a certain stability. If you’re not a nature person, maybe it’s just like any other mid-sized American city.
Still, I wonder how many people moved here for work or family and just… stayed. Got pulled into the rhythms of routine. Job, bills, kids, yard. Commutes on straight roads. Soccer practice. Retirement savings. Repeat. I don’t say that judgmentally. It’s just easy to get caught in something without ever really choosing it. Like waking up and realizing the river you’re in has carried you miles downstream without ever asking where you wanted to go.
Then, finally—Colorado.
That welcome sign has never looked better.
The landscape changed almost instantly. Nebraska’s flat grid gave way to softly rolling grasslands. The sun was starting to drop, casting a honeyed light across endless fields of golden grass. There were no trees. Just movement. Wind swaying the whole earth like water. It was so quiet. So open. The air felt different. Less dusty. More alive.
But then rain started to fall, gentle at first. The road narrowed into a long stretch of construction. Bumpy and uneven. We slowed down and eventually pulled off at a Colorado rest stop. Another place to pause. Another piece of borrowed space. The rain tapped softly on the roof while trucks pulled in beside us, engines humming into sleep. The rest stops are starting to feel like bookmarks in this journey. Moments of stillness where the landscape stops whirring and just… exists.
Tomorrow, we keep pushing west. But tonight, we’re here. Grateful, road-weary, and watching the lights flicker on across the prairie.
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