Farm Rescue volunteers help Kensal farmer plant soybeans
Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Jeff Bata, left, and Kelly Smeltzer are central North Dakota farmers who recently suffered debilitating accidents and are grateful for the help of Farm Rescue in planting their crops this spring. (John M. Steiner / The Sun)

By Jackie Hyra The Jamestown Sun

NEAR KENSAL, N.D.

Farm Rescue rolled into the town of Kensal Friday to help Jeff Bata plant 600 acres of soybeans and give the temporarily disabled farmer some much-needed peace of mind.

“It’s hard to describe watching them come in,” Bata said. “It’s pretty emotional when you see someone drive all that way to help that you don’t even know.”

Bata was repairing machinery in his shop in October when the bottom of the punch he was using chipped off and went through the retina of his left eye. Since then he’s had two operations and is scheduled for a third in June to stabilize the retina. He will spend two weeks lying on his stomach for 45 minutes every hour following the next operation. This winter, if all goes well, he will have a corneal transplant. Until then, the loss of vision in his left eye has left him with impaired depth perception and strained his right eye, which waters excessively and goes in and out of focus.

Bata hopes he will be able to harvest his own crop, but having the Farm Rescue volunteers assist in the planting has helped ensure he will have a crop to harvest.

The Farm Rescue volunteers will leave the Kensal area this week and head to Cando, where they will plant wheat for Kelly Smeltzer. Smeltzer lost the use of his left arm and suffered back injuries in June when a tree fell on his tent during a camping trip. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., grafted a nerve from his leg to his arm in January. He is beginning to have slight movement, and he is hopeful that he will regain use of his arm. But for now, farm work would have been impossible without the help of volunteers like the Farm Rescue crew.

“It’s a life saver. I’m just not able to do much by myself. Maybe by next spring I’ll be able to do more by myself,” he said.

Bill Gross, founder of Farm Rescue, wasn’t sure the crew would have the resources to help all the farmers on their list this year. They were committed to helping eight farmers and hoped to also help Bata and Smeltzer, but funds were running low. Farmers Union Oil Co. of Jamestown and Cenex of Cando came to the rescue and donated enough fuel to keep the machinery running in Kensal and Cando. Individual donations also helped out.

Gross said the Farm Rescue volunteers spend funds as efficiently as possible sleeping and eating with farm families but they are still a couple thousand dollars short of what they need to keep going. They are committed to helping two more farm families: a Willow City farmer who severed an arm in a baler accident and a young farmer from Wahpeton who suffered a broken back in a farm accident and is now in a wheelchair. Gross said those commitments will be honored, and Farm Rescue would like to do even more.

“If we have available funding, we’ll try to do harvesting assistance too,” Gross said.

Individuals can learn more about Farm Rescue or how to make a tax-free donation on the Internet at farmrescue.org.

“If they think the Farm Rescue Program is worthwhile, we encourage people to show support,” Gross said.

Reprinted with permission of the Jamestown Sun. May 09. 2006