Two years ago, when my father-in-law got in trouble with a knee replacement, we found ourselves making frequent trips to visit him. We had closed on this agricultural property by then but hadn’t yet made any concrete plans for the future. You can imagine how we suddenly paid very close attention to all the farms we passed en route through Iowa and Illinois. We wondered about furrows, and the uniform distance between them. We noticed flags on the sides of some Harvestores, but not others. We took note of fencing and pole barns. But mostly, we stared at the miles of farmland underwater.