And now, TIVO-ahead and now I am even blogging, mostly instead of building birdhouses or playing bridge. Anyway….

Recently, I went back home to central Kansas for a family reunion. My cousin Craig is a farmer and his main problem, he tells me—the “employment media expert”—is that no matter what he does, no matter where he advertises, he simply cannot find anyone who wants to move to smalltown Kansas to do farmwork. He pays well, $50,000 to $80,000/year, free health care and will even let the worker live in a house, for free no less. I wrote about it here.

Talk about the power of technology and the new media, and how it helps us all make connections. I am in Minnesota, Craig is in Nowhere, Kansas. As in, have you ever lived four full hours from an airport, Nowhere?

Thiago, a 24-year old Brazilian, reads my blog down in Miami, Florida. Thiago, who holds an MBA from IBMEC in Sao Paulo, recently lost his job and was looking. “I want something more basic,” he tells me, “I don’t like the Miami lifestyle.” Turns out Thiago’s grandfather is a corn farmer like Craig. Brazil-ethanol, corn-ethanol, remember? Thiago invites me to join his LinkedIn group, nice kid. This has the sounds of a truly international story and yes, he has his HB1.

And then I am emailed a very nice letter from a guy in Iowa who is ready to move his young family to Kansas, he has loads of experience, understands the farm life and wants to work for Craig, also. He has a hard luck story, which I always fall and feel for. This business can be so personal, it is almost overwhelming. It makes you want to take the jobseeker by the hand and lead him directly to the next job.

Then another young man from Florida emails me, mostly about his hard luck life (his girlfriend left him, his brother was killed) and how this is the opportunity he has been waiting for…can he please, please prove himself to Craig, no one will work harder he says. He has to get out of there. I believe him but he also needs an advance on gas money to get up there.

So there’s three personal stories out of more than a dozen I received. They all want to work, most of them with no farm experience, just hardworkers who are convinced this is THE opportunity for them.

For a while, I can’t get Craig on the phone. He does live in Kansas, after all, and you will recall that the main character in Wizard of Oz was not Dorothy of Kansas, but a Kansas tornado. Yep, you guessed it, his farm was hit by a tornado and then a night later, by a 45-minute, golfball-sized hailstorm. Nearly 1,000 acres of knee-high corn now look like my front yard, freshly mowed, talking about it he sounds just awful. Actually, shell-shocked is a better term.
So, finally, there are actually four hard luck stories. Is this a news story or what?

His biggest problem? Cost of fertilizer? “When I get the tank filled early in the morning with fertilizer, by the time I get back mid afternoon for my second load, the price has gone UP over $2,000,” he says. The price of fertilizer for those who don’t follow these things tripled in a single year. How about gas? It is not unusual for him to burn through 500 gallons of diesel fuel per day. You do the math. Each of his 16 pivot irrigation systems has a small generator capable of powering a small neighborhood and an un-guarded 1,000 gallon diesel tank that sits nearby, with about $5,000 worth of fuel. He is somewhat nervous that someone will steal his generators, basically made of copper “at $3 a pound,” and his diesel fuel. The Kansas state legislature is considering a bill that will add back the road tax portion on his farm diesel bill. With an ever decreasing number of farm aware legislators, chances are good he will be paying another 50 cents a gallon or so in taxes to help pay for roads his equipment never gets on.

But his biggest problem is that he can’t find help. He says farmers in his area have been trying and trying and trying. They just can’t find anyone to move to a small town where it is four hours to the nearest decent airport. He thinks he could hire two, maybe four people full time.

Must be the wages? “Can’t be that,” he says, “I will nearly pay whatever it takes…with overtime, they could make almost $80,000 a year.” On top of that, he will pay all the health care coverage and let people live in one of the houses he owns in his local small town, “just because I thought it would help me attract a family.” Beef is free too, and he doesn’t need to go to Costco to buy it for the lucky family, either.

Skill? “I can teach them easily,” he says. “My equipment is goof proof, it has to be.” By that, he means that an employee need not even know how to drive straight, the tractor is guided by a sophisticated guidance sytem hooked into three satellites. “If I overlap six inches on fertilizer or seeding,” he says, “it wastes nearly $10,000.” This is a big business, and Craig has it pretty much figured out. “I need someone who is willing to work 18-20 hour days during the big work periods, like at harvest, planting, fertilizing,” he says. Another person or two will help him get back into the seed business, a natural extension that is slightly more profitable.

His wife teaches first grade (“i just love teaching”) at the local school, where each student gets personal attention from not only the teacher but from the folks in town. One grade equals one classroom in small town Kansas, twenty kids per class; and “it’s like a town full of baby sitters watching out for everyone else’s kid,” she says.

I said I would help him find someone to help out. Know anyone?