Fertile Imagination
When he’s not farming, odds are Hyrum Laney can be found in front of a computer, writing the latest chapter in his Die-Hard Patriots series of political thrillers
Story by Ella Morgan Photos by Thomas Boyd
On a 160-acre farmstead in the heart of Douglas County, there are no rules or outlines for Hyrum Laney. He spends most of his days tending to his farm. But at the same time he’s thinking about Cal Stockton.
Besides being a farmer, Laney is also a novelist and the author of three political thrillers in his Die-Hard Patriots fiction series. Stockton is his main character. Stockton’s fictional exploits and missions drive the book series and, as Laney works around his land, he’s also tinkering with ideas for the next twist in the multi-book saga.
Since his college days, Laney had considered writing, but he had determined years earlier that agriculture was the life meant for him. He wasn’t raised a farmer, but at age 15 he was fully invested in the world of permaculture. By the late 1980s, he and his wife had purchased their 10 acres.
“As a young beginning farmer you might think my biggest challenge was lack of knowledge since I wasn’t raised on a farm,” Laney says. “But it wasn’t.”
Instead, he said, the challenges beginning farmers face include “extremely hard, physical work, which can be very stressful, especially during harvest and planting seasons. In addition, farming is expensive. Unbelievably expensive.”
Since his college days, Laney considered writing, but he had determined years earlier that agriculture was the life meant for him
It’s bad enough losing a crop, not to mention money, to an infestation of mayfly larva, but coping with unpredictable weather often proves even more difficult.
“It has a way of being wet when you need it to be dry and dry when you need rain,” Laney says.
Like many other farmers, Laney struggled through long, cold and depressing winters, failed crops and plummeting markets.
“Farming is good when it’s good, but when it goes bad farmers lose more than their land and their home. They lose their way of life, their identity and their self-esteem.”
At the same time, Laney adds, “the country loses another farmer, someone who has an intimate knowledge of the land, someone who knows how to nurture and produce a food crop."
Parallel to Laney’s hardship and the hope for better years in his fields, is another potential problem he sees — the rapid decline of family farming in the United States. For 25 years, Laney has been trying to figure out what has been happening to U.S. farmers and the industry.
Farm debt has risen to $416 billion since the 1990s, Laney says, and the number of farmers working in the U.S. has dramatically declined. To help improve farmers’ prospects, Laney has sought changes in government policies and looked for other ways to highlight the importance of food reserves and the state of farming in the United States.
Then, in 2000, he took up writing as a hobby, more as a creative outlet than a vehicle for sharing information about American farming. “I knew any book based on agricultural policy was likely to induce a deep sleep, if not a coma,” Laney says.
Instead, he invented Cal Stockton. It took Laney more than a decade to finish Time Bomb Ticking, the first book in what would become a series. After several edits, revisions and rewrites, he published to Amazon in December 2012.
Energized by seeing a decade’s worth of work finally come to light, Laney wasted little time before starting on the second book in his series, Presidential Deceit. Meanwhile the Time Bomb Ticking e-book was racking up an impressive 7,000 sales in just its first year.
Laney followed up Presidential Deceit with A Debt To Die For his third book in the series, and he’ll publish his fourth installment later this year.
“Martha’s Maids is the title of book four. It’s about half done and it’s gonna be good,” Laney promises.”
All of the books in Hyrum Laney’s Die-Hard Patriots series are available on Amazon.
