Neighbors Help In Troubled Times on KQCD-TV North Dakota's NBC News Leader

Neighbors Help In Troubled Times |

Video

Cliff Naylor

5/25/2009

This planting season was cut short by winter weather and then flooding.

Throw a medical emergency into the mix and the only way one farmer got his crop in the ground was with a lot of help from his friends.

When the cavalry came over the hill and to rescue Dwight`s Lachenmeier`s farm, they weren`t riding horses, they were driving tractors.

These farmers took a page out of the script from a classic John Wayne movie and banded together to responded to a cry for help when Dwight suffered a stroke the day before he was set to seed this year`s crop.

"One neighbor found out and stared telling the other ones and then they called and said not to worry, that they would put it in organically for us," says Shawn Lachenmeier, Dwight`s son.

After wet weather delayed planting this spring, Shawn and his dad couldn`t afford to postpone field work any longer.

"I just thought I better come over and help, I`ve known Dwight for a long time," says Donn Mahin, of Tappen. "It`s good to go out and help a neighbor."

Nine neighbors worked sunup to sundown to plant 1,100 acres of organic flax and wheat for Shawn and Dwight Lachenmeier.

"It brings a tear to his eye watching this here, it`s a good thing, Dad`s very appreciative," says Shawn.

Modern machinery helped these farmers accomplish weeks of work in just a few days.

"It`s not like it used to be when we ran around with a two or three bottom plow," says Mahin.

However the spirit of generosity that drove these good samaritans is just like it used to be, when farmers used horses and hand plows to put in a crop.

Dwight Lachenmeier is out of the hospital and he hopes to be back in the cab of a tractor in time to harvest the crop his neighbors put in for him.

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