I have never been a morning person, so today when my alarm began blaring at 6:30 AM alerting me to wake up I was not pleased. After flinging my body in the direction of the shower, I met up with Caroline – a fellow student – in the kitchen to begin preparing breakfast for our group. For this month to be a successful experience, our group has to cooperate with each other. One way to ensure that our group does not rely on only certain individuals is to have a rotation system in place for who prepares breakfast. While the group enjoyed scrambled eggs and oatmeal, I was busily putting an IV of coffee into my arm in an attempt to wake up.

Luckily Dr. Butt – a professor at Ellsworth Community College – had coffee and donuts prepared for our arrival to his class room. In preparation for our upcoming endeavors on the farm, we spent the day learning about farm safety. This included me trying on a safety suit to prevent spreading disease among farm animals. If you have ever seen Monster’s Inc, this suit replicated those of the CDA – Child Detection Agency – in the case of a possible child contamination.

These suits were not the only type of modernization occurring on the farm, as Professor Butt introduced our group to Precision AG. Precision AG is a developing field within farming that relies on satellites to guide farming machinery when planting and fertilizing or applying pesticides to crops. These advancements in technology are allowing farmers to achieve efficiency in their farming and production operations. I am interested to see whether these advancements in technology will reduce injury rates in the field or create a society that becomes reliant on these fast-developing pieces of technology. While I believe that preventing the loss of lives is important in our world, it is just as important to prevent a society that is dependent on a piece of machinery that could malfunction. We all know how frustrated we become when the application on our IPhone isn’t working properly, could you imagine the loss in crops if this piece of machinery were to malfunction? While the convenience of pushing a button to activate a planter may be nice, our society must ensure that we still understand the value of hard work and how to be productive if and when technology fails. From the hard work I have witnessed on the farm thus far, I have come to the conclusion that current Iowans are at no risk of falling into this trap. However future generations might become susceptible to the dangers of technology, a fear that should deeply concern our society for years to come.

Iowans will tell you that conversations among the natives tend to revolve around daily weather, especially for those Hawkeyes that work on a farm. The weather determines when farmers can plant their crops. This morning I was able to wake up to the peaceful sound of pouring rain and a displeasuring groan from the farmers whom I am staying with. Unfortunately the weather in Iowa has prohibited anxious farmers, such as my host, from beginning their planting. While I could sense some restlessness throughout the house, the weather did not impede me from learning about the history of Iowa.

The journey started off with all six students and our teacher, HN, hopping into a car and driving to Des Moines. While HN was busy being critical of a work sign attached to the back of a truck ahead of us, we were busy brushing up on our Henry Wallace family history in hopes of avoiding any possible embarrassment upon our arrival at The Wallace Centers of Iowa. After learning about the accused “communist” Vice President Henry A. Wallace, I was disappointed to see that a politician that showed backbone in politics was fired because he was honest with the power brokers. Instead of being glorified as a true “man of the people,” Wallace was betrayed by an ailing President Roosevelt. FDR originally chose Wallace as his running mate, despite the numerous complaints from the head of the Democratic party, due to Mr. Wallace’s popularity among rank and file citizens. When President Roosevelt ran again in 1944, instead of facing the criticism from his party heads again, FDR chose to replace Wallace with a “safer” option in Harry Truman. Wallace’s replacement Truman would later fire him for making a controversial speech that President Truman himself had previously approved. Fortunately, the end of his Washington career did not stop Mr. Wallace from being able to make many other contributions to society with his numerous writings and work on chicken breeding.

The contributions that Mr. Wallace and his family provided Iowa led our group to investigate who else contributed to Iowa’s history. We stumbled upon a museum called “Pride of Iowa,” believing we would be able to further our education of Iowa upon entering. Unfortunately, the museum was focused around the “glory” of the state’s high school sport teams rather than the history of the state. After briefly taking a tour around what felt to be a high school coach’s trophy room, HN and I found a Dance Dance Revolution interactive video game and proceeded to have a dance off. Luckily the screen mistakenly indicated he “won” our dance off, meaning he would have no extra incentive to fail me in this course.

Dancing, among other activities, left our group hungry and tired, and our group once again piled back into the car to head back to the farmhouse. After enjoying the company of our house patrons at the dinner table, we headed into the barn to watch a documentary based around the benefits of a whole foods, plant-based diet had over a “Western” diet. A “Western” diet is one that promotes eating animal meat and milk over vegetables and produce, resulting in a higher cholesterol count and a higher probability of heart disease. Our group was shocked and a bit disarrayed by how our “main” source of protein and calcium in meat and milk was not as healthy as the “Got Milk” ads had originally suggested. After discussing the health risks that a bad diet could present, our class retired back into the house to enjoy a piece of cake with a whipped cream topping. Ironically this type of meal had the ingredients, dairy, that the movie had advised us to remove from our diet. I never realized how sweet the taste of irony was until tonight.

Today I will be flying out of Greenville en route to Des Moines, Iowa to begin a month of living on a farm. To study away during May at Furman University – this course is known as a “May Experience” – is fairly common among students, but usually students choose a program that will allow them to spend the month on a beach in Bermuda or do a pub crawl in Ireland. This is where I am different from my classmates,  I wanted to experience a different lifestyle instead of being a tourist who is only able to see a shade of the environment in which they are living. By living and working on a farm for the next 21 days I will hopefully will be able to encompass what it truly means to be an Iowan.

I keep visualizing a setting similar to the one in “Smallville,” – a show that reveals the upbringing of a local farm boy named Clark Kent who would later become Superman – where there is only open land and friendly town-goers who wave as you walk by. While I know working on the farm won’t be as easy as depicted in the show, in part because I do not have Clark’s “superpowers”, I am rather looking forward to doing some “good ole fashion hard work.” Through this hard work I can hopefully gain an accurate perspective on a different lifestyle and become more aware of life in a different region in our country. By living in a suburb for the entirety of my life I know little of a place as rural as Iowa and the culture that goes along with it.

While the barn itself was just as I had imagined, the inside of the house took me by surprise. Instead of walking into what I had imagined as an old outdated house, I was pleasantly surprised to see Iowans were as modernized as the east coast. However the rushed feeling of the northeast was countered by the calm and relaxing pace of the Midwest. Dinner – or supper as they call it in Iowa – was not being rushed to be thrown onto the table, instead everyone in the house congregated to have simple “how was your day” type of conversations. I feel as though my life has already begun slowing and I am interested to see if it will pick up during the duration of the course.