Well, it’s the last day here at the farm in Iowa. No more long road trips.   Today was Practical Farmers of Iowa and the neighbors’ pig barn. We did the pig barn first and were lucky to even get in since the PED virus has been going around and contaminating hog barns. It’s a diarrhea virus that kills piglets, and when it hits, PEDv results in nearly 100% mortality, and it spreads fast. Luckily the neighbors let us in so we could see a hog building and how it operates. The pigs were more than content in their cages once they got the food, no squealing or bumping around like some things make it seem. He also doesn’t give them any antibiotics unless they’re sick, other than a probiotic-like feed to support complete digestion. We saw the few different barns he had for different stages of growth and the farrowing crates for the younger piglets to nurse while minimizing the risk of the sows laying on them (which happens in nature and with this system, it occurs less often). We even got to see two sows being artificially inseminated! We talked with the neighbor for quite a while about some of the questions that we have been blogging about and also about some issues within agriculture. One of the things continually coming up is science and how it can back things up or be ignored due to public opinion. There is little science saying GMOs aren’t safe, but the public fears them and calls them unsafe. This is true in a lot of situations and I feel that Liebman’s policy of going through journalists and public outreach with his research helps mitigate this situation, but people will always have ethics or opinions regardless of science and others will not see or disregard science for their personal beliefs. One thing that I though was very interesting to hear was his mistrust of research that made blanket statements for how to run land. He felt that it was difficult to believe research about how to do things when it might not apply as well to his particular land. Researchers may say that no-till is better and doesn’t harm yield, but no till is difficult on the neighbors’ property and when they farmed a portion of land as no-till they saw losses. The family themselves test trialed a number of different practices and will trust their data after a few years of trials, but I feel this shows one of the biggest difficulties with science, mainly environmental science. There are so many different factors from soil to weather and brand of fertilizer to the plant being used that affect how the system may perform that there is no way to make a blanket “this is best” statement. Science has been going more towards saying this is the best method for this area, but that’s something that has to continue and in the case of agriculture we need to focus on disseminating a number of methods and reasons or incentives to adopt them.

Secondly we went to Practical Farmers of Iowa and met with Liz Kolbe, a staff member who explained that the group is a grassroots organization focused on farmers. Surprisingly they seemed to meet some of the criteria for science that I just mentioned since they have farmers come up with the things to be researched, let farmers choose what they are willing to trial, and compensate them some amount for testing. The farmers themselves are the ones who realize that their results are individualistic. Some of the trials are done by so many farmers that they can get a statistically significant result, but this doesn’t always become the case. This group works with both vegetable gardeners and corn/soy farmers so it has a lot of resources to provide everyone. The big thing we talked about was pesticide drift when one conventional farmer sprays their field and causes some spray to contaminate an organic farmers crop. This puts the organic farmer out of some crop and causes them to lose their organic certification for three years, so it is a pretty significant financial hit. They also usually plow under the field that was sprayed since any herbicides will likely kill the plants there. Practical Farmers advises its members how to react and how to proactively keep this from happening. I thought it seemed like a really good organization and would like to get to know a lot more about them and similar groups, but could really consider working for a similar organization one day.