By Lisa Levitt Ryckman
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

LAST CHANCE -- Look for Amanda Baker in the middle of nowhere, a place she knows so well and loves so much.

Amanda Baker drives her family's tractor in a field near her home. Amanda wants to be a farmer like her father. "I've known that all my life," she says. "I enjoy being out here."

A rolling patchwork quilt of red-gold grass, black loam, stripes of green seedlings. This is Amanda's land.

Two years ago, Amanda won a state competition that asked her to identify and describe 50 different plants put in front of her. Then she had to look at a piece of land: What grew there? What should grow there? If this land belonged to her, how would she nuture it?

Amanda knew the answers because she is the youngest daughter of a farmer's son who became a farmer himself.

And she will be a farmer, too.

"I've known that all my life," Amanda says.

For this 17-year-old, whose earliest memories are of chasing cows and riding on tractors, the booming metropolis of Brush, population 4,000, is city enough for her. Forty miles due north on Colorado 71 -- that's about as far away as Amanda ever wants to be from here.

"I don't think I could imagine leaving this place, because I just feel so close to it out here," she says. "And I enjoy being out here.

"It's not like we're forced to be out here or anything. I think it would just be too different to move away and go do something else that you really don't like and yet you get paid for it.

"We've learned how to do with what we have. We might not have all the fancy vehicles and stuff, but we do have enough to get by."

She has been to Washington, D.C., for a Future Farmers of America leadership conference, where all the kids wear signature white shirts and corduroy jackets. She's felt happy looking out on that sea of navy blue blazers and knowing that there are thousands of future farmers in America, even if there aren't that many in her own tiny, well-plowed corner.

Even if other kids think she's a hick because she's a country kid who loves being a country kid.

"There are kids who live on the farm, but they don't really know what goes on, because they don't have any interest in it," she says. "There are some kids here who don't live on a farm at all. They live in Brush and just come out here for school."

Four miles east and three miles north of the Last Chance Dairy King sits Woodlin School, the school Amanda has attended since kindergarten and the one she will graduate from in the class of 2000. The 140-student school prides itself on its high-powered science and agriculture courses, custom-made for a kid like Amanda.

She studies crop science and agricultural mechanics. She plays volleyball and basketball. She wears jeans and boots, like the farm kid she is.

"People always say stuff about the way I dress, but it doesn't affect me at all," she says. "Even when I go into town, people look at you weird. It doesn't bother me at all, because that's the way I want to be."

The lessons of the land are life lessons: Do it all, but make sure there's time to get it all done.

"If you work hard, you should be able to see something in the future that you'll get from working hard," Amanda says. "I have a lot of stuff to do, and I've learned how to manage my time. Other kids in the school who really don't have all the activities I do, they're the ones who are always complaining about not having enough time."

Life is full out here, and people are connected by necessity. Amanda knows everyone she sees. Everyone knows everyone else's business. Families are close; it's a priority.

Amanda's mother has a college degree in speech therapy that she has never used. She has worked as the cook at Woodlin School ever since Amanda started there 13 years ago, just so she could be near her youngest daughter all day.

"I think the families that are out here, I think they're kind of different from the families in the towns. I think it's just that the families here like to be around each other," Amanda says. "When both parents are always out working, they never see their kids that much. Out here, kids work with their parents."

Amanda's dad knew early on that his two sons wouldn't be working on the family farm anytime soon. One became a contractor, the other a nurse. Amanda was the one who was always ready to help, the one who enjoyed baling hay and working with cattle and fixing trucks.

"I guess it's just been rooted in her," Steve Baker says. "She was out there swathing when she was too little to drive. We do welding, plumbing, electrical work. We do trenching, she helps me build fence. We doctor cattle."

And Amanda's taught her dad about computers and how to put the farm's books into their system.

"You have to know how to do a lot of different things, not just one thing," she says. "I don't think people realize how much the farmer actually knows, either. I think people think, oh, they didn't go to college or anything -- even though some of them do. They think farming is a nonthinking job."

Amanda knows better. She can talk with authority about soil types and growing seasons, drive a swather and a baler, analyze the health of a thousand acres.

"You have to put back into the land,"Amanda says. "You can't just always take and take. You have to give."

Last year, Amanda's Future Farmers chapter planted 2,000 juniper trees and plum bushes on other people's land to help prevent erosion. The Conservation District pays for the trees, and the future farmers put them in the ground. The landowners just have to make sure the trees stay alive.

It's an investment in the future of the land. Amanda's future.

"I know there are a lot of family farms that are shutting down, which is really hard," she says. "I think farmers probably work the most of anyone, yet they don't get paid for what they do. Which is really a hard thing to accept. I think it's just something they've learned -- that they're not going to get paid as much as someone who has more of a business job. I don't think that's right."

During harvest week every summer, Amanda's dad drives his tractor through the night, catching naps when he can. There is hay to be baled in the morning, when it is moist enough, and wheat to be cut in the afternoon, when it is dry enough. And equipment to be fixed all the time, because it always breaks down.

Amanda is out there helping him, just as she always has.

"I just don't think people realize how much time and effort has gone into producing that crop," she says.

A straight-A student with a flair for science, Amanda has put off the college application process because it makes the inevitable more real.

"I don't know that I want to go," she says. "I know I will. But it's just the thing of leaving, I guess."

But she will go to college -- 80 miles away, to Northeastern Junior College in Sterling, or 120 miles away, to Colorado State University in Fort Collins -- and come home every weekend. Until she can finally come home to stay.

"I know a lot of other people who say it's just boring to drive out here cause it's all so plain," Amanda says. "But I think it's beautiful. You can see forever."

December 26, 1999

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