Ending my time here in Iowa wasn’t hard. And I don’t mean to belittle my time I spent here—I learned more about corn, Iowa, conventional farming and the people who produce all this corn, than I ever though I would. But as I leave Iowa and write this last blog from an airport café, I have an energy about me that is kin to the energy every farmer I met while in Iowa. An itching for a hard day’s work, and itching to put my head down and grind.
Farming in the United States has become a trickier subject for me, one without a comprehensive solution to a number of problems both on the conventional and organic side. I still don’t know how I feel about Monsanto and the never-ending debate of GMO seeds. But what I do know is that Iowans work hard and are genuinely happy people who love to eat, laugh and be around one another. The people I’ve met in Iowa grew up milking cows before the sun rose and slopping hogs from a young age and are just trying to find a way to make farming work in this 21st century of GPS driven tractors and the Des Moines Waterworks. I encountered Iowa at a time of great change and it was a time of great change for myself as well. As Connie Mutell said, we will not be farming in this fashion in the next 50 years.