The Farmer Who Sang at Dawn

Margaret Ellison walked her withered soybean fields outside Decatur, Illinois, in the summer of 2012. The worst drought in fifty years had turned her 200 acres to dust. The creek bed behind the barn lay cracked and white. Her husband Tom had died that March, and the crop insurance wouldn't cover half the loan payments. She had every reason to sit on the porch and let the screen door rust shut.…