On Tuesday night, we went to see a new documentary that had just come out called Farmland. It was funded by agribusiness groups, and its purpose was to counter some of the more recent food documentaries which have questioned conventional food production practices. Farmland sought to help the public understand what farmers do, and it followed the stories of six farmers who were involved in different types of farming operations. While it was a well-made film and could have maybe been successful as an introduction to farming for the general public, I did not learn very much new information from it after being a part of the FARM class for two weeks.

The latest in the organic farms that we have been visiting on the trip was Blue Gate Farms, an all-vegetable farm where the owners, Jill and Sean, also kept chickens for their eggs and two alpacas for their fur, which Jill would use to create various products. Blue Gate Farms had the most chickens of any farm we had been to yet, as I think they had about 125 birds. Also, a huge difference between Blue Gate and Table Top farms, which we visited earlier in the trip, is that Jill and Sean from Blue Gate found that attending the Des Moines Farmer’s Market was very important to their business, while Luke and Sally from Table Top just found it to be a lot of effort but not really worth it. This exemplifies the variety of different options one has when deciding how to run a small-scale organic vegetable farm.

This morning we went to both the offices for the Iowa State Extension Program and the Hardin County USDA, which are in the same building. On the Iowa State Extension Program side of things, we learned about how there is a land-grant university in each state, and part of the mission of that university is to be a resource to the community. I might be interested in taking advantage of some of the resources offered from NC State or Clemson in the future, which are the land grant universities in North Carolina and South Carolina. Upstairs in the USDA offices, we heard some information about water quality and conservation issues that contradicted some information we had heard from Denny Friest. While Denny was of the opinion that water quality improvement efforts were getting better and that farmers did not need to be regulated because they were slowly beginning to make the needed changes, we heard today from one employee that he thought we were going backwards as a farming society and actually creating more water quality problems; therefore this employee was of the opinion that regulations were necessary.

After leaving those offices, we went to talk to a representative from Niman Pork, which is a company that has a commitment to raising animals using traditional, humane husbandry methods, all natural feeds and no unnatural hormones and antibiotics. I thought it was interesting how there seems to be plenty of demand for the Niman Ranch pork products, to the point where they can’t actually keep up with the demand for some of their customers, like Chipotle. There seems to be a greater interest among consumers about buying meat that has been humanely raised, even though as a vegan I think that concept is kind of an oxymoron.

The last thing we did today was talk to Denny Neubauer and Caleb Knutson about the history of tiling in Iowa. One of the things I found out on this trip that I did not previously know was that Iowa was originally primarily wet lands which had to be drained to be turned into farm lands. The tiling is basically just pipes that are installed under the land so that the water will drain down into them and flow into a ditch or creek downhill. When this tiling was first being put in and laws started to be made regarding it, a farmer could drain his tiling right onto the surface of his neighbor’s field if the neighbor refused to pay the fee to tile his land. After talking about tiling for awhile, I can’t help but be of the opinion that the wetlands should have never been drained in Iowa, which is probably not a very popular view among Iowans involved in agriculture.