Miracle leads to ‘best harvest ever’ in Logan County

By PHYLLIS COULTER

FarmWeek

On a sunny, cold October day, Chris Martin drove the combine on the family farm near Mt. Pulaski with the biggest smile on his face.

“My favorite thing to do in the world is to be in the combine,” Martin said.

The monitor showed 302 bushels per acre. The smile wasn’t just because of the “best yield ever” on the Logan County farm, but because Martin was combining at all.

When this cornfield was planted, he was lying unconscious in a hospital bed with a brain injury after a serious car accident.

While Martin calls it “unbelievable” to be harvesting his family’s best yields yet, his father calls it “a miracle.”

On April 19, Martin finished planting soybeans. In the wee hours of the next day, he was in a car crash on his way home. For two weeks, Chris Martin was unconscious in the hospital with his mom and dad, Cheryl and Tom Martin, at his side.

“We were there day and night. We didn’t want him to wake up alone,” Tom Martin said.

His wife and their faith in God helped Tom Martin get through those difficult days. “Without that, I don’t know how people survive,” he said.

 

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Jim Birge, the Sangamon County Farm Bureau manager, told Tom Martin about Farm Rescue, a nonprofit organization that helps farmers and ranchers affected by a major illness, injury or natural disaster by providing necessary equipment and a volunteer workforce.

“Our friends, family and neighbors planted for us,” Tom Martin said. They didn’t need the help of the volunteer organization — then. However, to harvest 3,000 acres this fall was a bigger worry. Martin’s son, still recovering, was unable to drive the semitrailer this year and their usual driver wasn’t available.

So, Tom Martin hired a couple of young men to help drive grain carts and called Farm Rescue.

All the way from Pennsylvania, Roy Schreffler, a volunteer who has helped Farm Rescue for 11 years, arrived on Oct. 14, and was soon behind the wheel of Martin’s truck on the way to the elevator. He helped for 10 days.

“I saw it on RFD TV,” Schreffler said of learning about Farm Rescue. He takes time off from his EMT hospital job and from his own grain farm to help.

The first year Schreffler helped a North Dakota farmer who had suffered an aneurysm. “We kept in touch.” Last year, 10 years to the day, Schreffler returned to help the same farmer with harvest. This time as a friend, since the farmer and his farm had fully recovered.

“In our world, how many industries help each other like this?” Chris Martin said, expressing his appreciation for the giving nature of the farm community.

When Tom Martin sees his son in the combine, he thinks back to sitting in the hospital room when Chris Martin was connected to a ventilator and feeding tube and was unresponsive. Martin was there when his son’s eyes opened, which was followed by a few more weeks of recovery at Memorial Hospital in Springfield and then six weeks of rehab in Chicago.

“After two months of laying in the hospital on my back, I lost some of my strength,” Chris Martin said. “It’s still harder getting up into the combine.”

“My ability to multi-task has gone down,” Chris Martin said, noting that his dad has been a big help coordinating harvest and has been there through the recovery, “every day.”

Tom Martin has a strong history of volunteering. He was on the board that developed the Market on the Hill, a grocery co-op, and a founder of central Illinois FarmFED Cooperative to support farmers and feed the community. He has also been active on the Illinois Corn Marketing Board, U.S. Grains Council and the Looking for Lincoln project.

Tom Martin, also a pioneer in conservation practices, appreciates Farm Rescue’s help so he can plant cover crops while others helped his son with harvest.

“This was the year I was going to turn the rest over to Chris,” Tom Martin said. The 68-year-old has slowly been handing over the reins to his son. Chris Martin, now 32, started farming full-time right out of high school and was ready.

“That was the plan. I think it will still happen,” Chris Martin said of the transition, which was almost upended by the accident.

This story was distributed through a cooperative project between Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois Press Association. For more food and farming news, visit FarmWeekNow.com.

 

**Editor’s Note: If you find the story here of value, consider clicking one of the Google ads embedded in the story. It costs you nothing but Google will give the website owner a few cents. This is a way to help support local news at no cost to the reader.