Last Day

Well I slept through breakfast this morning, but as I rushed out the door I saw remnants of Diane’s eggs, sticky buns and bran muffins. I was sorry to miss the last Diane breakfast of the trip!

Our first stop was at the BioCentury Research Farm where we learned about biomass production and processing, which was something I’d never learned about. Our trip to Poet Ethanol plant a few days ago was pretty out of the box for me and so today took ethanol and fuel production to another level. Since the BioCentury Farm can use a multitude of biomass to create fuel, they are a successful business because they can change their production based on market demands. Right now, they deal with corn stover, animal carcasses, switch grass, sorghum and algae. The algae are some sort of experiment to see how efficiently one can pull phosphorous and nitrogen from wastewater using algae on vertical conveyor belt strips.

Next, we went over to Ben Knutson’s research plots where he is working with cover crops and crop rotations with oats, alfalfa for two years, then a corn and soybean rotation. Ben works with both inorganic and organics and while most of his plots looked the same, it was interesting to see the small nuances in each of his field “experiments.” We followed up with a quick lunch at Noodles & Co. Then off to see the beekeeper Mark Tintjer in Hubbard.

Mark is a fascinating individual who approaches beekeeping with a level head and an almost maternal sense of protection over his bees. He moves with slow, controlled movements so as not to hurt any worker bees. He lets us taste drone larvae, different varieties of honey, and his daughter made us Scotcheroos. Ben produced roughly two tons of honey last year and the profits from selling to the local community helped pay for his daughter’s degree from Iowa State. His beeswax art is beautiful and bears numerous blue ribbons. Mark’s battled resistant diseases and incoming commercial beekeepers upsetting his docile bees, but he prevails and keeps plugging along, making his honey.

We ended our day with a discussion of the two book we’ve been reading over this course. Food Politics by Paarlberg and Food Police by Jayson Lusk gave us a scale to put our Iowa experience on. We’ve learned a lot about a very small piece of a global puzzle that involves food, politics and policy. We broke couch again, we ended with a game of basketball, we yelled at Reid when he forgot his phone in the barn. That’s a wrap.