‘He’d be thrilled’: Community helps Cortland widow harvest hundreds of acres of soybeans

Bad situations happen, but great blessings can come out of them. 

Those were the words Teresa Meints used to describe the scene on her Cortland farm Wednesday, as a veritable cavalry of farmers riding on combines and tractors helped harvest her soybean crop. 

It was a blessing Meints could never have expected, and one that came months after one of the worst situations in her life. 

Meints’ husband, Rick, died in April from complications related to a back surgery. For more than three decades, they worked the land Rick had lived on for 60 years. Farming and family, she says, were his greatest passions in life. 

“He was an amazing husband and he was my best friend,” Meints said. “He was my rock.”

And while she faced harvest without her husband for the first time in 34 years, Meints was hardly alone. 

A dozen farmers , many of them life-long friends and neighbors, showed up Wednesday to go to work. 

Paul Meints, Rick’s brother, said the idea started among a few people – and word spread quickly.

“There’d been a couple of guys, Rick’s good friends, that helped line this all up,” he said. “And I think everybody they’d talked to showed up.”

It’s a kind of love and support that doesn’t happen everywhere, Teresa Meints says, and one that makes her realize how lucky she is to live in Nebraska. 

“Living without him has been really difficult, but seeing everybody here, it’s a testament to him as far as a person and this whole community,” she said. “They’re just amazing.”

At the end of the day, the group harvested hundreds of acres of soybeans Wednesday. It’s an act of community kindness that Meints says would have her husband smiling.

“I know he’s looking down and he’d be thrilled because farming was his life and, that’s what he loved and seeing everybody willing to help,” she said. “I know he’d be thrilled.”