BARBARA McCLINTOCK and the BADLANDS

[Timothy Mulligan]

I managed my first crop in 1989. McClintock was still going strong. We would always reserve a range for her to grow her plants. In her day she had acres and did everything herself but now she had just a few rows.
And so that first year I got out on the tractor and I plowed and I kind of messed up because I was doing it wrong and the field came pretty crooked. It is called fitting the field and that means when you turn the soil over and all the debris that's on the top, you need to turn it over and cover it, you then run another machine over it to level it out and break up the furrows. After its leveled you pick all the rocks out. Uplands farm is the terminal end of a glacier moraine so all the crap and boulders in Canada and the Hudson got pushed down to Uplands farm. We have some unbelievably rocky soil. Anyway, the field was not as fit as it needed to be but I thought it was fairly done. So one day, Steve Briggs from Pioneer, Rich Sautkulis from Brookhaven and Dr. McClintock all met up here at the farm. I dragged everyone out in the pickup to the field. Here I was standing there all full of myself thinking I did something great and McClintock takes one look at the field and says "This will never do."

When you turn the soil over you create furrows and you are supposed to level them out in the field and I was not doing this correctly with my equipment. As a researcher doing crosses, you walk constantly, maybe there are twenty plants in a row and you have 200 rows to cross, so to make it easier the field has to be flat with no stones. So here I am turning this thing out that I guess was pretty terrible and she said, "You know you have to do a better job." She talked and told me how to drive the tractor and she gave me my marching orders. I turned out a much better field that next time. They were kidding me about this because she had short legs and she always liked her field to be flat and immaculate.