I just watched the movie again, and after wiping my eyes which were watering because of all the pollen in the air, it occurred to me that the premise of the movie doesn’t make any sense. Not the ghosts of ballplayers past part of the story, but the element that was used to create dramatic tension: Ray losing the farm because he plowed under some of his crops to build a baseball field. It seems to me that this couldn’t be true, a baseball diamond covers maybe 2 acres at the most, call it 3 with bleachers and the parking area (which is nowhere near big enough to accommodate all of those cars shown coming at the end). If this is a typical Iowa corn farm, which I believe would cover dozens if not hundreds of acres, would losing 3 be enough to bankrupt the farmer? I honestly don’t know, and if I’m mistaken and most corn farms are 5-6 acre affairs then obviously I am, but hell, corn farms here in Maryland are much bigger than that. Any farmers around that can shed some light on this?
The size of the typical land grant parceled out to homesteaders was a quarter-section of land - a section being a square mile, or 640 acres. Today, that’s still the size of a typical small farm where a single owning family runs the farm generally without hired help. So a small farm would typically be a total of 160 acres. How much of that is corn on a typical midwest farm, I don’t know.
The farm I grew up on is about 350 acres total spread out over different parcels, not all in one lump. Never thought about looking at exact measurements but I’d guess that maybe 25% of that is pasture and buildings. Half of the other 75% was alfalfa or meadowgrass - 37.5%. We’d put down 40 acres of oats, and the remainder was corn. I’m going to let someone who functional at math figure out the numbers cos it’s past 5a here and I’d utterly fail.
From what I remember of the flick, however, the only thing the guy grew was corn - I don’t remember seeing any cattle or goats or hay baling going on, at least - so 3-5 acres wouldn’t cause bankruptcy. The whole “gonna lose the farm” bit was starting even before the field, though, before he even started spending the bucks on gravel, sod, and floodlights.
I think this is the key. He was already having trouble paying the mortgage before he built the diamond; sacrificing a few acres of corn plus spending all his money building the field (those giant arc lights can’t be cheap) would have easily pushed him over the edge.
I thought of that, but his wife says at one point “We spent all our savings on the field”, which does take away their safety net, and at the end his weaselly BIL contends “You’ve got no crop, Ray!”, the clear implication is that the acres he took out of production are what’s breaking him.
The actual field is just outside the town of Dyersville, IA (about 25 miles west of Dubuque). I have several relatives in the area, so I’ve been there several times. The field, as built for the movie, actually straddled two separate farms; most of the field is on one farm, and a tiny bit (IIRC, third base & left field) are on the other farm.
After production wrapped up on the film, the second farmer (the one who owned the smaller part of the field) plowed up his portion & planted corn there, figuring that there’d be no tourist traffic. Of course he was wrong – when he saw how much money the first farmer was raking in, he promptly rebuilt his portion of the field & set up his own souvenir shop. IIRC, the competition between the two farmers went on for several years, but was resolved a while back.
The field still stands today – it still brings in the tourists, and just to make sure it continues to do so, they occasionally host promotional events (exhibition games and the like) to keep themselves in the news.
I’m not sure if it is the acres taken out of production.
The amount of time spent on building the field and watching the ghost games meant time *not * spend doing whatever it is an honest tiller of the soil should be doing to ensure a crop.
Map link for those interested (Google’s resolution is shite in the area).
I agree. He had to crop to sell because he just spent the last year building a baseball field and driving around with James Earl Jones.
What did the ghost players walk off into then? As I said, I’m no farmer, but the field looked like it was surrounded by a pretty lush crop of corn.