Overview

Rich Coulee, Illinois, March 2027. Bill Kowalski stands in his barn, staring at a tractor he owns but can no longer operate. The machine isn't broken-the software has simply decided it's time for ""mandatory service,"" requiring a certified technician and $3,200 to reset a computer. After five generations of family farming, Bill faces a choice: accept corporate control of his land, or resist. His 87-year-old mother calls her church lady friends to help her mount a resistance and save the family farm. Across Smallpox Creek, that separates the Kowalski farm from the Eastside Township, Hugh Lubbert and his husband Eugene Thomas are making their own impossible choice. Hugh spent forty-four years living a lie as a closeted Mormon, then twenty-three years building an authentic life with Eugene in this quiet farming community. Now, as authoritarianism tightens its grip on America, they're planning to flee to the one place Hugh thought would be an impossible alternative: Uruguay, where fifty years ago he served a Mormon mission and fell in love with a young man named Beni. When Bill's eighty-seven-year-old mother Ruth warns that the Farm Bill of 2026 will turn farmers into ""sharecroppers on their own land,"" she's speaking from experience. She's watched corporate agriculture swallow family farms, seen grain elevators consolidated into ""efficiency centers,"" and witnessed her neighbors trapped by debt disguised as assistance. The leaked documents Hugh's been forwarding to her suggest something darker: a systematic plan to transfer land management from families to corporations, using technology as the weapon. But resistance has deep roots in Rich Coulee. When archaeologists discover an 800-year-old Ho-Chunk burial mound on Hugh and Eugene's property-sacred ground at the confluence of Smallpox Creek and the Good Hope River-it becomes a rallying point. This land has always belonged to someone else's story, long before the colonizers had arrived. The question is: who gets to tell the land's story next? As a local tech start-up develops ""liberation software"" to free tractors from corporate control, and Ruth's viral resistance video transforms the town and its ""church ladies"" into a symbol of agricultural resistance, the government responds with escalating violence. Immigration raids tear apart Rich Coulee's migrant worker community, and the tech startup headquarters in town-hub of the resistance movement-is firebombed. Eugene disappears into an extrajudicial detention facility in Ghana, one of America's new offshore prisons for political dissidents. Hugh must choose between staying to fight for his adopted home or fleeing to save his life. Eugene must survive long enough to be rescued. Bill must decide whether five generations of legacy is worth losing everything to preserve. And in Uruguay, Benito waits beside a cold spring called Pozo Aguaverde, holding space for a reunion fifty years in the making. Soybeans is a literary thriller that weaves together corporate agriculture, government authoritarianism, queer liberation, and indigenous rights into a sweeping narrative about what we're willing to sacrifice-and what we refuse to surrender. Spanning timelines from 1250 CE to 2027, from the Mormon exodus west to modern refugee crises, from slaves in the South who bought their own freedom before the Civil War to a 20th century lynching, this is a story about sacred ground, impossible choices, and the radical act of building authentic community in a world designed to prevent it. As the first book of the Driftless Rivers Trilogy, Soybeans explores how resistance takes root, how love endures across decades and continents, and how sometimes the only way to honor your ancestors is to break the chains they carried.

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