Prairie Fire

The winter is unseasonably warm in central Asia. The Himalayan snowpack is diminished by a quarter. The spring run-off is down and the summer rains late. Water shortages stress grain crops across the center of the continent and into China. Concerns for the Asian harvest ripple through the world markets like a twenty-dollar spike in the price of light sweet crude. In America's heartland, ex-Army Colonel Nathaniel Cromwell and his eighteen year-old son farm eight hundred acres of corn and wheat. This year, as he has the last five, Cromwell sold ninety percent of his summer harvest cash advance in January to finance planting in the spring. Now in June, as the price of wheat breaks twelve dollars a bushel, Cromwell curses the day he must harvest his fields at four-twenty-six, because it will be the grain dealers and speculators, not the farmers, who will reap the profits of Asia's grain shortage. Cromwell awakens on the twenty-second of June to broad daylight at two a.m. A wall of fire stretches across the western horizon. His neighbor Tom Foster has torched twelve hundred acres of wheat in protest of the market mechanisms. It is the third field burning in two weeks. But this one is different. Foster stays in his fields after setting them aflame. Three days later, at Foster's funeral, the President of the National Grange approaches Cromwell. The farmers are trying to organize a strike. They need someone to provide leadership. Awarded a Medal of Honor in 2002 and dishonorably discharged in 2004 for speaking out against US military operations in the Central Asia, Cromwell is a man with national recognition to the masses and a rebel hero's spark among the farmers. He accepts the Grange's request to run the strike. A week later, with no warning, the Non-partisan Farmer's Alliance burns a million acres of ripe winter wheat. That evening on nationwide TV, Cromwell tells the grain industry, the government, and the shocked TV audience that the alliance will methodically burn their crops from Ohio to Oregon if there isn't an immediate restructuring of the grain market. The grain industry and the Secretary of Agriculture condemn the burning. The Director of Homeland Security labels the striking farmers domestic terrorists. A federal warrant is put out for Cromwell's arrest.