After I Stopped Buying Their Corn, the Farmers Panicked Chapter 06

After I Stopped Buying Their Corn, the Farmers Panicked Chapter 06

Hearing all that, I didn’t know what to say. 

Some people you can never reach–because they’re living 

inside the hero story they’ve written for themselves. 

Watching the shop bleed out in front of him, Noah Reed finally remembered there was such a thing as online sales. Through 

gritted teeth, he took more than half of his last bit of capital 

and ordered a custom batch of fancy boxes printed with “Local 

Farm Dream” and “Farm–Fresh Direct.” Then he signed up 

with a local delivery platform to start a delivery service. 

“This is our last chance!” he shouted in his new video. “We’re 

going to put our most affordable corn in front of every household in this city! Support us!” 

The boxes were genuinely beautiful–more refined than the 

corn inside them. 

The minute the delivery service went live, he spent heavily- deep discounts, coupons, new–customer deals stacking on top of each other. Once the discounts were applied, a 

one–dollar–fifty pound of corn was being delivered for less than eighty cents, and he was still paying for the packaging and shipping out of his own pocket. 

Even some of the farmers who’d backed him at the start started wavering. Was this still selling corn? This was just bleeding money into the ground. 

A few of the farmer representatives who’d chipped in went to Noah Reed and pleaded with him to stop the promotions before they wiped out everything they had left. 

“What would you know!” Noah roared back, eyes red. “This is how you grab customers! This is how sales works! If you don’t spend in the front end, there are no customers in the back end! Once we build the name, once we pull the customers in, you think we won’t make money?” 

He was convinced that if the discounts were deep enough, people would come. And if people came, the sales channel 

would build itself. 

On his insistence, the delivery service barely limped along for half a month. It pulled in some bargain hunters, sure, but the expensive packaging and the heavy spoilage meant every single order deepened the hole. The customers drawn in by the cheap prices used their discounts, decided the corn tasted average, and never came back. 

The “name explosion” and “loyal customer base” he’d been chasing never showed up. 

The money in his account melted away fast, like ice in the sun. 

End of month, when the delivery platform settled accounts, his total sales didn’t even cover platform fees and driver charges. Right behind that came the rent notice for the store. He didn’t have another cent to put down. The shop had to close. 

And right at that moment, the rainy season set in. 

The sky went gray, and a fine, steady rain started falling- days of it, with no sign of letting up. 

I stood under the ranch awning and watched the rain, and I knew Reed Co–op’s real trouble was only just beginning. Their corn couldn’t survive this kind of weather. The soil saturated 

through, the ears soaked up too much moisture, the husks damp–it was the perfect setup for mold and rot. 

Sure enough, when Martin Parker came by with a delivery, he brought it up, worried. 

“Heard the corn in their fields has started molding. Losses are 

bad. Noah’s store is shut, and now they can’t save the harvest 

either.” 

I nodded without saying anything. They’d chosen that road. 

They’d have to walk the rest of it themselves. 

The rain stopped and started, on and off, for half a month altogether. The air was thick with damp earth and wet wood. 

That morning, the rain had eased a little, but the sky was still 

dark. I was about to head over to Martin’s co–op to pick up a 

new load when the ranch gate started getting pounded—hard, 

urgent, scrambled. 

“Open the gate! Blake! Get out here!” 

“You went back on your word! Come out here!”