These corporate buyers bought up small family plots and grouped them into huge agricultural tracts.

They brought limitless corporate cash to local sales.

To him, this eighty-acre parcel was just a cell in a spreadsheet on a glowing screen.

To me, it was June’s old glass serving plate and the worn linoleum floor in the white farmhouse kitchen.

Every time Denny called out a new number, my throat tightened.

Our savings account held exactly seventy-one thousand four hundred dollars of our own money.

The rest belonged to Tom Barrett and his lending committee.