This past spring, on a windy day in March, the field crops team and I drove out to a field where there was a soybean crop. The snow had just left, and the ground was still too soft to leave the farm road. We needed to make a plan. The flattened beans were a remarkable color of silvery grey: the stems and branches like messy strands of hair on the ground. The field had looked promising all year until the fall when relentless rain knocked the soybeans down and they rotted on the ground.