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SASHA ASLANIAN: I decided to tag along with Paul because this story was too good to miss for radio. We barrel along I-94 to a farm at the state's geographic dead center and I interview Paul.

PAUL TOSTO: I spent a lot of time just trying to get people to tell me their story about life in the economy. Obviously, it hasn't been going great for a lot of people. I'm trying to just sort of strip journalism back down to its, you know, sitting around a campfire and tell me your story.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Kim Otterson tossed out her story around Paul's digital campfire. Otterson works with horses, shoeing them and trimming their hooves. She sent him an email describing how the price of horses has crashed in recent years and what that's meant for owners and for the animals. Paul liked what she wrote and asked her to email a photo.

PAUL TOSTO: And she emailed back with apologies she didn't have a picture right now, that she was in the process of moving. And then that's when she talked about moving in with Jess and that it was an unusual arrangement.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Unusual is right. We get close to the farm. Paul's car gets stuck in deep snow when we try to do a U-turn, and we walk the last mile to the farm. Hi.

KIM OTTERSON: Hello.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Hi

PAUL TOSTO: Hey. I'm Paul.

KIM OTTERSON: I'm Kim.

PAUL TOSTO: Hey, Kim.

KIM OTTERSON: Nice to meet. You come on in.

SASHA ASLANIAN: We settle into the living room in Jess Benson's farmhouse. Kim Otterson is blond, rugged, and 54. Jess Benson is fair, brunette, and 36. Winnie the Bulldog flops down in the corner of the room and Kim begins the story.

KIM OTTERSON: My name is Kim Otterson, and at the moment, I'm living in Morrison County, Minnesota with my ex-husband's widow. [CHUCKLES] The picture up there, the guy with the mule, that's Glen.

PAUL TOSTO: Oh, OK. Wow.

KIM OTTERSON: And so that would be my ex-husband and her deceased husband.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Glen Benson died from heart failure last May at the age of 58. Glen had been married three times. He had three kids with his first wife. Then he was married to Kim for 12 years, no kids. They divorced in 2004. In 2006, he married Jess. When he died three years later, he left Jess with a farm to run.

JESS BENSON: I was not a farm kid at all. So that's been one of my challenges, is learning the farm now without him here, all the stuff he did.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Benson struggled to keep the farm going and to work her 40-hour-a-week customer service job she telecommutes to in the Twin Cities. A mutual friend suggested maybe the two women could help each other out for a while. Kim was just moving back to Minnesota and could take her time finding the right farm to buy and not burn up the money she'd saved for a down payment on rent and boarding her horses. Jess would get an experienced farmhand who knew the Benson farm better than anybody. Kim and Jess had met once through some mutual horse friends.

At the time, Jim was married to Glen but they were nearing the end. When Kim talks about her ex-husband and their life together, she's gentle.

KIM OTTERSON: I loved Glen. I mean, I did. When we got married, you'd see the little old farmer couples going down the road, and I thought someday, that's going to be us. It didn't work out that way.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Kim and Glen managed to maintain a friendship after the divorce. Jess said she knew Kim was a good person. So the idea of her husband's ex-wife moving in to help her run the farm really wasn't that strange.

JESS BENSON: In a way, to me, she was kind of family, like a cousin that I don't real well or something.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Kim moved in after Thanksgiving, and the women forged an easy partnership. Kim admits, at first, it was tough to move back to the only farm she'd ever owned. It's her connection to the land that brings out her emotions.

KIM OTTERSON: I'd come down this gravel road from the East and there was never a time I didn't come past that hill and look out over those fields and think, wow, what a neat place.

JESS BENSON: There's 140 acres here. And this, where you can see the corn was in the field there, that's the 40 acres of field from the corn out to the road there. The rest is, you know, this hill of some trees and some pasture. And then we have a lot of state land on this side.

KIM OTTERSON: That was one of the things we liked about the place when Glen and I bought it, is that the state land on two sides of us. No condominiums.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Jess wants to hold the farm together and not sell off any chunks. She burned through most of her savings after Glen died, so she's trying to sell off many of the horses. The drop in horse prices couldn't have come at a worse time for her.

JESS BENSON: These are the mares, and that's my one paint mare up there that Glen would always tease me about. She's for sale. I can't keep them all.

SASHA ASLANIAN: A stallion named Jackson demonstrates just how much values have crashed. In about 2002, Kim and Glen got a bank loan and paid $40,000 for the well-pedigreed stallion. Now Jess hopes she can get six grand for him. Kim remembers when things were different.

KIM OTTERSON: I can remember sitting at the horse sale up in Verndale watching a bunch of mares that I would say-- I'd describe them as having generic pedigrees selling for $5,000 a piece. And I can remember sitting there with Glen saying, you know what? We need to go home and load everybody in the trailer and bring them up here and get rid of them because this is ridiculous. But we didn't do that, of course. But at that time, people thought, I think, that it looked like easy money.

SASHA ASLANIAN: But speculators drove the prices too high, just like in real estate, and the bubble burst. Now Kim says there's a glut of horses. Kim hopes Jess can make it. She wants the farm to stay in the hands of someone who loves it as much as she does. For Paul Tosto, the women's creative solution in a disjointed economy represents how agile we have to be to survive this recession.

PAUL TOSTO: Things are working out. And at what point will you be able to say to yourself, you know, I've got a handle on this?

JESS BENSON: I don't know. I think my handle on things is better, but I know I still have a long ways to go. I'm not in a hurry for her to leave--

KIM OTTERSON: [CHUCKLES]

JESS BENSON: --you know?

KIM OTTERSON: One of the really great things about this area is the people. And it's still-- I think maybe in some parts of the country, as farms have gotten bigger, farmers have gotten more isolated. But here, it's still like it's always been where if the neighbor needs help, you go help the neighbor. And she's got some really great neighbors here. And part of the learning process is figuring out who you can call. And when they offer to help, and I'm sure a bunch of them stopped at the funeral and said, Jess, if you need anything, give me a call, every one of them meant it.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Kim wants to buy her own farm this summer. So the arrangement with Jess, she says, is temporary. The economy and Glen's death just happened to bring them together for a time. It's an unusual arrangement, an ex-wife moving in to help the widow run a farm, but Kim says it's helped both of them.

KIM OTTERSON: Not everybody's going to think it's OK, and that's fine. But I think if people approach things with an open mind and an open heart, they tend to work.

SASHA ASLANIAN: We pack up to leave and Kim gives us a ride up the road in her pickup truck to where Paul's car is stuck in the snow. She hops out in her canvas overalls, ties a rope to the trailer hitch, and backs us up with her truck. Then she passes us on the road with a wave. With Paul Tosto, I'm Sasha Aslanian, Minnesota Public Radio News, Randall.