Dave Obbink farms near Cedar Grove, in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. In October 2021 he got Covid and went to the hospital for four days, with most of his crops still standing in the fields. His neighbors harvested his crops while he was gone.
Word got around fast. “Everybody knows Dave,” Jeff DeRuyter, another farmer in the area, told CBS 58. “Dave’s a constant in the community and we heard that he was sick and needed some help.”
Seventeen farmers put their own harvest on hold and went to bring in his soybeans and corn. Obbink still does not know who put it together. “Nobody will say they got it together, because they would never take credit for anything,” he said.
He made it home from the hospital in time to watch the corn come off. This is how he described what he saw from the house.
There’s another combine. There’s a red one. There’s a green one, and all of a sudden there’s six combines.
They took about 200 acres off in a day. Bob Caljouw, a retired farmer who pitched in, put it at roughly 44,000 bushels of corn, and counted about sixty-eight different people hauling to the dryer. Obbink listed six or seven combines, plus semis, grain carts and wagons.
DeRuyter said it was the quickest he had ever seen that many acres come off. Cars slowed down and stopped on the side of the road just to watch for a little while.
Obbink watched from the arm of the couch. He said the tears were just running down his face, and that he could not believe these guys would do this. He told CBS 58 he was slowly recovering, and that he would be there to lend a hand the next time.
The harder half of it
Two things in this story stayed with us, and neither of them is the fact that his neighbors harvested his crops in a day. Both are Obbink’s own words.
The first is that he does not know who started it. Nobody would say. Sixty-eight people hauled corn for him and whoever organized it went out of their way not to be thanked, and the only reason anybody knows that is that the man on the receiving end told a reporter.
The second came when the farmers told him it was just what they do around here. He did not let it go by.
I know, but it’s easier to do it than to have it done for you.
That is the half of it that does not get said out loud. Helping is the easy side. Being the one who needs the help is the side that costs something, and it is why a lot of needs never get spoken at all. MeetaNeed exists for the gap in between: somebody has a need, somebody else has exactly the thing, and the only piece missing is the introduction. It is the same shape as the story that started all this, a borrowed dress and a forum, nineteen years ago.
In Cedar Grove nobody needed an introduction. DeRuyter had known Dave and everybody standing behind him his whole life, from a mile and a half down the road. The word got where it needed to go because the room was already there. Most people do not have that room. What we keep coming back to is not that farmers are good neighbors, it is how little had to happen once one person knew.
Where this story comes from
Originally reported by Natalie Shepherd for CBS 58 Milwaukee, in the series Natalie’s Everyday Heroes, published December 15, 2021. Retold here with the details as that report gives them.
