After I Stopped Buying Their Corn, the Farmers Panicked Chapter 04

After I Stopped Buying Their Corn, the Farmers Panicked Chapter 04

When I got home, the livestream ban had already been lifted, I 

started a new broadcast. 

The heat had cooled. The drifting viewers from the local 

trending page had moved on, and the IDs left in the room were mostly familiar ones. The comments were no longer a flood- just the normal pace. 

“Boss is back! Glad you’re okay!” 

“Always believed you. I knew something was off about that 

video.” 

“Should never have softened up and bought their corn in the first place. It’s hard being a decent person.” 

Looking at those familiar names and steady support, the days of bitterness and cold eased a little. Some people were still willing to believe the truth. 

After that, I took some real time off. 

One afternoon, I was on the couch flipping through local shorts when a newly posted review video popped up. The title 

was hard to miss: 

[Local Farm Association Goes Independent! Corn Store Grand Opening!] 

In the clip, Noah Reed stood proudly in front of a newly renovated produce shop, with his co–op’s corn piled up like a small mountain behind him. The farmers all looked thrilled, as if they could already see the fortune coming their way. 

He talked straight into the camera: “We’re breaking the 

middlemen’s grip on the market! We’re passing the savings to consumers, and we’re making sure farmers‘ hard work earns the reward it deserves! Our corn is top quality, and right now 

it’s just one dollar fifty a pound!” 

A lot of people in the comments cheered him on, calling him “the farmers‘ savior” and “the man taking on price–gouging.” 

I closed the video and just smiled. The idea sounded good. 

Reality would slap him awake soon enough. 

In the days that followed, I worked with Martin Parker’s co–op 

exactly as planned. Their corn quality was steady, 

transportation went smoothly. The variety was nothing 

special, but they were reliable and stuck to the contract. The ranch ran like clockwork–actually a little more efficiently, with the Reed co–op trouble out of my hair. 

Every so often, I’d hear updates about Noah Reed through 

Martin. 

Their “dream produce shop” really did catch on at the start. Slogans like “farmer–run co–op” and “no middlemen” drew a 

wave of sympathetic local customers. Noah even filmed a few 

follow–up videos mocking me as “the crooked middleman the market finally pushed out.” He sounded smug. 

But not long after, things started going wrong. 

In less than a month, the first problem surfaced: the corn itself. Their old–variety corn couldn’t match the better common varieties on the market–not in taste, not in sweetness, not in looks. Once the novelty wore off, hardly anyone came back to buy. 

Then came storage and waste. They had no professional 

storage or preservation, so a large share of the corn spoiled. 

Noah Reed didn’t understand pricing either. He kept lurching 

back and forth–one day jacking prices up to “protect the value,” the next slashing them for “clearance.” It was chaos. 

Most importantly, they ignored what mattered most: sales 

channels and steady customers. One new shop trying to 

absorb the entire output of a whole co–op by itself simply 

wasn’t realistic. 

Before long, the store stopped moving inventory, and the corn 

started losing freshness. But even then, Noah Reed wouldn’t 

admit he was wrong.