Today is my first time ever being in Iowa or in the rural Midwest.  I had previously been to Colorado and Illinois, but it was only to their largest cities of Denver and Chicago.  It wasn’t a bad trip, however, getting from Des Moines to the house in Radcliffe.  First, we stopped at Gateway Market and Café, an organic/natural foods store not too dissimilar from Whole Foods.  Then, we traveled through Ames to stop at Walmart for some last-minute toiletry shopping.  At first, I couldn’t really tell a difference between Des Moines and any other capital city.  However, as we rode along to the suburbs and beyond, the landscape quickly changed from nice green fields to flat farmlands, just in the amount of time it takes to pass a single line of trees.

Finally, we got to the Neubauer farm.  After settling in, the group got to meet both Denny Neubauer, the brother of our professor, and Dalona Fiscus, a Neubauer neighbor and our cook for our time here.  I was first struck by how open and hospitable everyone seemed to be.  They seem just so willing to help each other out and welcome each other into their homes as often as possible.  This is also true for farmers that I have met back in South Carolina as well.  My theory is that the residents of small farming communities are all pretty much invested in the same outcomes, knowing exactly what goes into and should be expected from farming, and are also familiar to each other’s histories and hardships.  Odds are, if one farmer is experiencing something bad, then the neighbors are feeling the same thing.

Tomorrow, we will be doing a tour of a variety of different farming matters, including safety.  However, we will also be learning more about Henry A. Wallace, the former secretary of agriculture, secretary of commerce, and vice president under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 presidential election.  We watched a biographical documentary on him tonight, but I will go further into the subject in the next blog entry.

So far, I like what I am seeing, and I look forward to whatever comes next!