THE TALLEST structures in Pawnee County, Kansas are the grain elevators. They loom over the cows, the low-slung buildings and the occasional oil-pump jacks that litter western Kansas. In the basement of the county co-op, a collective that purchases locally grown sorghum, wheat, corn and soyabeans to sell to bigger buyers, several farmers sit around a table and wax lyrical about working in the fields. “The smell of dirt, the smell of rain, the sunrise and sunsets,” says Jerrod Smith, “it’s a pretty beautiful thing to do.”