We Learn and We Evolve

 The high point of this past week for me was attending a Field Day at Cold Spring Pond and Cabin, a part of our family’s farm. The program featured things like pollinator strips, water buffers, and riparian zones along stream beds to filter out nitrates and other chemicals from the water running from the fields. My cousin Ken and his son Thomas talked about the evolution of this family farm as well as farming in general over the decades. And it has brought back to me the memories of my childhood growing up on a large Iowa farm. My grandmother Fawcett raised her two sons pretty much alone, her husband having died while both boys were very young. Although the boys' father had been a farmer, Grandma brought them up in a little house in the nearby town of West Branch, leaving the farm in other hands until her boys were old enough to take over. Both brothers went to Iowa State University, studying farming science. And then started working the land on our acreage. There were two homesteads, and my Uncle Floyd brought his new wife to live with him on one. My father lived with my grandmother at the other homestead in a beautiful classic farmhouse until my father too found a wife, and Grandma moved back to town to leave the house to the new couple. It was a sizable acreage that the two brothers inherited, easily enough to be a full-time job for both of them. And once out of college, they set about learning how to be farmers.

When they began farming, around 1940, cultivation was still mostly done with horses. So Dad and Uncle plowed the fields with a team of horses. For a long time, I wondered why the "pony" I had at the top of my birthday wish list never produced results. But then I found out about how very hard it had been in those early days to work with horses. Enough was enough, apparently! When the brothers got their first tractor, they were thrilled and so proud. And those tractors changed farming forever.

I was the first born child to my mom and dad. I think my mom was still adjusting to farm life, and I wasn't exactly welcomed with open arms. Besides, I was a girl, not what she wanted. But once I was old enough to go outside on my own, my life became a big adventure. Our two families (my uncle's and my father's) were just across the section from each other, and my best friend was my cousin John. We made rafts to float down the Wapsinonoc Creek, built a treehouse right above the water where we could swing out into the blue and back, went fishing, rode our bikes around the gravel roads, went sledding down the big hills, tasted new corn in the fields, rode around on the hay wagon, everything that a farm offers to a child. It was one big adventure. And then we grew up and moved away, like what happens to most of us after childhood.

The family farm evolved over time. When I was a child, there were cattle and pigs in the barnyard, and a milk cow that my father milked twice a day. We even had sheep for a short amount of time. And the crops were more varied back then, not just corn and soybeans. There was a particular part of the farm acreage (we called it the "hundred acres") that was quite hilly and had a spring in the valley which had once been part of a cheese-making business. About thirty or forty years ago, the family decided to create a pond above the spring, and then built a lovely cabin with (eventually) a spacious screened porch. Over the years, we added a pergola, a fire circle, a swimming beach, dock and diving board and even a tipi. I can't take much credit for all of this development, for I was living in North Carolina at the time, but my daughter April got in on a little of the construction. Now Cold Spring Pond and Cabin is the site for many meetings, reunions, and classes. It’s a beautiful place!

The Field Day this week was sponsored by Practical Farmers of Iowa, Farming for Public Health, and Heartland Co-op. We had a beautiful day for the gathering, a reprieve from the hot days earlier. My cousin Ken, with his son Thomas, held the first part of the presentation on the screened porch with the aid of photos seen on a big screen at the far end. There must have been 60-80 people there, most of them farmers or folks from the sponsoring organizations. It was a friendly crowd, probably many of them having been farmers or farmers’ wives for most of their adult lives. The theme of the day was “Conservation in Action on a Multigenerational Family Farm and included hearing and seeing Riparian Buffers, Saturated Buffers, Grade Stabilization Pond in an Old Gully, Prairie Restoration and Buffer Strips, Tree Planting of 10,000 trees and Required Maintenance, and Corn planted after a Rye Cover Crop, and the Fawcett’s current cover crop program.

Cousin Ken started his part by explaining how farming has changed over the decades. He showed pictures of the early tractors in the fields plowing, and pictures of the erosion that used to occur when rain fell on bare soil. The best part of the presentation was Ken’s attitude: no blame toward folks who haven’t changed their farming practices the way it would be best for the world. He just explained how we evolve in our lives. We use one strategy that we think is the right one. And then later we learn that there is a better way, and we change to that. And then later we yet again learn of a better way, and are sometimes able to flow with the new information. My father and my uncle used the farming practices they learned in college and thought they were doing the right thing. But things change over time. Some changes are not so great. Because the money for farmers was higher when growing corn and soybeans, farmers started only growing those two crops. For similar reasons, they planted every acre in row crops, with soil and chemicals eroding into streams. But now it is clear that to protect the land, and us, different strategies need to be used, and fortunately there are organizations that pay farmers for things like putting in pollinator strips or saturation buffers. 

At the end of the presentation on the porch, we all crammed onto three long wagons pulled by three tractors (driven by Ken and his grandchildren!) and we rode all over the hundred acres, through gorgeous pollinator strips of native plants in full bloom, along stream beds planted with thousands of trees, and near the different kinds of saturated buffers which take most of the nitrate out of the soil before flowing off the property. And then back at the cabin, everyone shared a meal and conversation. It was such a model of sharing with no blame, with no political component, just friendly farmers supporting each other.

Since I grew up on an Iowa farm, and live in farming country now, I know that many farmers really really resent the “liberals” who try to tell them what to do, tell them that their farming ways are wrong. It definitely would not work for ME to be holding a field day for farmers at our cohousing community (a community devoted to ecological caring for the land). But Ken is a Republican, like most farmers. Farmers have generally been Republicans at least in Iowa for generations. So Ken can share these ecological and sustainable practices with his fellow farmers because he comes from their patch. (Not a doggone liberal Democrat!) And that makes all the difference.