Today, we participated in a variety of activities. We started off our day bright and early with a breakfast of hash browns, sausages, eggs, and peach bread. It was delicious, and the peach bread was made with real peaches. One thing that’s certain about this trip is that we are well fed!

Following breakfast, we traveled to Clarion to visit the Hagie Manufacturing plant. Hagie is very interesting: they produce largescale sprayers, typically for co-op and major operation usage. According to their website,

A few of Hagie Manufacturing’s industry firsts include the invention of the four-wheeled Hagie sprayer, front-mounted boom, and a high-clearance Nitrogen toolbar. As the inventor of the industry, we have a strong responsibility to continue to be the leader in application. We remain committed to providing innovative solutions to optimize our customer growth. As a result, today our customers are capable of performing various full season applications with STS attachments, making it the most versatile application machine on the market. (Hagie Manufacturing)

At Hagie, I was struck by the scale of the operation. During typical demand, they produce one sprayer a day, and production can be ramped up during peak season. I also was struck by the size of the equipment. Hagie sprayers are truly MASSIVE.

Following Hagie, we made a pit stop back at central command for a lunch of walking tacos. Before this, I had never had a walking taco, so I’ll explain them to our readers back home: typical fair food, they are a combinations of Doritos and Tacos. Taco fillings are added to bags of tacos, so one can walk and eat. They’re pretty good, and I highly recommend.

After lunch, we met with local farmer Glen Hodenfield to broaden our knowledge of low till farming, CRP and CSP programs, and to finally understand how tiling works. He has a cool cat too.

To culminate our activities (but not our eating), we were allowed to visit an Iowa Select hog barn, or caepho. This was a pretty cool experience that I think someone else will blog about, so I’m going to gloss over it. However, it was also an experience that focused our seminar discussion, including questions of ethics, responsibility and attitude. Is it right to confine hogs? How can farmers separate their emotions from business, especially when animals are being slaughtered? What level of animal is acceptable to consume? (To contextualize this debate, we had pork chops for dinner). As someone who grew up raising beef cattle, I find these issues challenging. I eat beef. I’ve also eaten beef from cows that I have raised, and they tasted pretty good. Additionally, my grandfather was a butcher who cut beef and deer meat. We made our own sausage, cube steak, and hamburgers frequently when I was a child. I always knew that in order to eat beef, cow x would be no longer. Poppie even played a terrible prank on me one time and convinced me I was eating dog (I definitely was NOT, he had made deer stew).

For some people, this ethical dilemma is hard to overcome: how does one eat the meat of an animal that they have raised? For me, it is a simple fact of life, but is also an issue worthy of discussion and rife with alternative viewpoints.

Following our time at the hog barn, we played with tractors with Denny and then ate a lovely supper of mixed vegetables, pork chops, potatoes, and rolls. Finally, we closed out our day by working on our blogs!