LEFOR From 35,000 feet, all Bill Gross could see were wheat furrows plowed into the deep blue Pacific sea.

He's a pilot and a North Dakotan, and he thought the long flight hours away with thoughts of volunteer farming when he got old. He had this idea he'd buy a tractor and drive down gravel roads, just looking for someone who could use a little help.

He couldn't have known those furrows of his sea dreams would show up on the face of Matt Biel, 32, who just two months ago lost his right hand and lower forearm in a grain auger.

Biel, 32, still carries that stricken look on his face. The injury is fresh. The adjustment to a prosthetic hook is hard. To constantly reach for the radio dial or his daughter's hand with a hand that isn't there is even harder.

On Tuesday, Gross, with his visions of wheat furrows carved into the deep blue sea, came to give Biel a hand.

Gross is founder of Farm Rescue. He's 39. He decided he wouldn't wait until he was old to find someone who could use a little help.

Farm Rescue is built on his dreams, not only of farming, but repaying an old debt to two farmers who believed in him when he needed a hand and money to pay to learn how to be a pilot. It is more sophisticated than he first imagined, all legaled up with a nonprofit tax status, a board of directors that take and review applications, and a truck and tool trailer with the Farm Rescue logo.

All of that the injury, the dream and the need to give something back came together for the first time after a year of organizing in a blackened field west of Lefor, a used-to-be kind of place with a friendly bar on the Enchanted Highway.

Tuesday was about organizing the equipment and the plan. Today will be about planting, for however long it would take to put in about 900 acres of durum and spring wheat.

It's on the early side of planting time, even for western North Dakota, where the soil is gladly giving up its deep winter chill. But Biel is just the first of eight, maybe 10, farmers to be rescued this spring. Like him, the others were hurt or became ill with cancer, and they need a helping hand to pull them through.

For Biel, the moment his hand got caught in a grain auger is one he relives every day, but thankfully not as nightmares.

The auger got off center, and he reached to push it down. In seconds, he was mangled but lucky enough to be able to pull back and save everything from six inches or so above his wrist.

That counts as luck sometimes.

Biel said he was grateful for Gross' help and glad his application was accepted. It would be a tough spring, and what Farm Rescue, with its donated equipment, fuel and operators, could do in hours and a few days would take him much, much longer.

"Ineed this," he said. "I could have gotten by without it, but it takes a lot of stress off."

Gross would get some training from an RDO John Deere technician who drove up from Aberdeen, S.D., on Tuesday morning.

This equipment is big, complicated stuff, and nothing much like the equipment he grew up around at his parents' Hereford operation, near Cleveland.

The tractor seat is about 12 feet off the ground, quite a bit lower than the 40 feet above ground height cockpit of the Boeing 747 he flies for UPS to places like Asia, Hawaii and Australia.

Still, it's close enough to the ground to smell black dirt if he can get a window open in the climate-controlled tractor cab.

"Some people doubted we could get this done,"he said. "We're here to prove them wrong."

Gross is media savvy, but he wants to draw attention to Farm Rescue. Donations have come in from many places, but more are needed, whether it's of fuel, time or money.

He's spending all the vacation time he has to be in North Dakota this spring.

It's a shoestring operation, raising $25,000 this past year to get tooled up and out in the field. Insofar as is humanly possible and mainly because of equipment, fuel and manpower donations, nearly every penny goes to helping farmers.

To be eligible, a farmer has to have experienced some setback and could financially use the help. Gross said he doesn't want to get involved in financial rescue, especially for farmers verging on bankruptcy who are most likely beyond rescue anyway.

"We don't distribute funds,"Gross said. "We do the work, and sometimes that's better than cash."

For Biel, the offer of helping hands when he's just recovering from the trauma of losing his own right hand, the work will be a saving grace.

Gross said Farm Rescue is still looking for a few volunteers, especially someone who could be a front runner to the next farm on the list and get things prepared there.

Anything will help. Pennies, like dreams, can find their way into furrowed fields.