Today was a rather easy-going day.  Due to the fact that our only obligation for the day was at 3:30 p.m., the group got a few hours to ransack Iowa City, otherwise known as the home of the University of Iowa.  It was pretty much your standard college town, featuring a good amount of different cuisine varities, more than enough alternative clothing stores, and several trendy bookstores.  One such bookstore was called the Haunted Bookshop, Iowa City’s oldest secondhand bookstore.  It was a quant little used bookstore, but my personal favorite aspect of the store was the cat.  It had long, soft gray and white fur and quite literally demanded attention by constantly meowing and lying right in the middle of the stairs.

But enough about the bookstore.  It wasn’t the point of today.  The real objective was to meet with Mary Mascher, a Democratic representative in the Iowa House of Representatives from Iowa City.  Facilitated by another one of Dr. HN’s high school buddies, Rep. Mascher invited us to her house to discuss Iowa politics and whatever topics we decide to bring up.  She also had over another state representative, Sally Stutsman, along with Jim Walters, a local environmentalist and tree enthusiast; David, owner of Friendly Farm; and Lance, a friend of David’s, worker at Friendly Farm, and also a Ph.D. candidate in water sustainability and climate change.  They each told their story and what stake they have in Iowa politics and culture.  Having already conversed with people with more Republican inclinations, we now got a Democratic and relatively more urban position on Iowa’s most important issues.  Because we are working on Farm politics and policies, Mascher gave her opinion on sustainability and the nutrient standards that seek to regulate the amount of nutrients flowing into waterways.  In true Iowan form, she expressed strong opposition to EPA involvement in the matter—that is, if the water gets so bad that the EPA comes in and forces a plan on the entire state—and even went on to say that she doesn’t believe government is always the answer.  Mascher would like to see voluntary compliance with the nutrient standards, but she doesn’t believe it will happen if there aren’t enough funds to give famers that boost in modifying their land.  Republicans have been opposing such funds, only dragging out the time it will take to reach the minimum contamination goal.

Lance brought up an interesting point about sustainability: it is not just about the environment.  You actually need a good balance between financial, environmental, and social sustainability.  Without one or the other, the gains will only be short-term and blowback may even force the movement backwards.  Jim, the tree enthusiast, expressed his opinion that the best way to achieve this balance is to start small.  Find problems in your own life and your own local area and solve them before you try any bigger endeavors.  Mascher and the others agreed.  I’ll admit that I never truly thought of sustainability in that way.  Perhaps it provides some of the motivation to many state legislators, and why they don’t always attempt huge endeavors or run for national office.  If they can make things right in Iowa, they can set an example for the rest of the states.

One interesting dynamic to the group is Sally Stutsman’s non-legislator occupation.  Like most Iowans, she works in conventional agriculture but also wants to be as sustainable as possible.  However, she has a stake in her husband’s fertilizer and chemical company, an aspect of conventional farming that perhaps attracts the most condemnation from environmentalists.  All agreed that we will never see all the changes that environmentalists want until these changes become economically viable and/or beneficial.

Today had a good mix of topics and even a little learning on-the-go.  We first met with Renae Zoske, an independent crop insurance agent who also happened to be the agent of Scott and Denny, who told how farmers and agents work through the complex world of insurance plans and regulations.  To start, crop insurance, as with any insurance, is all about managing risk and preventing a farmer from losing all his income due to a natural disaster.  Although getting crop insurance almost seems a given, it hasn’t always been that way.  Congress first authorized an insurance program in the 1930s to recover from the Great Depression, but the program never caught on, receiving low participation even when subsidies were authorized in the 1980s for paying some of the premiums.  Therefore, after every natural disaster that significantly affects farmers in a certain area, Congress would have to come up with an emergency relief plan.  After drought in 1988 and floods in 1993, Congress decided that it had had enough and drafted the Agriculture Risk Protection Act that greatly boosted the subsidies given to farmers to reduce the amount they paid on premiums.  According to Zoske, as of 2013, $4.5 billion is spent on crop insurance, and 90% of farmland is insured.  However, the Obama administration is looking at cutting these subsidies.  Insurance providers widely oppose the plan because it is assumed that farmers will drop plans if they decide the new premiums are too high.  As with any insurance plan, providers need a wide participant base to spread out the cost of the risk, i.e. having the capital needed to provide compensation to those that lost crops due to natural disasters.  Additionally, agents are afraid that the larger corporate farms, such as Summit, will pool their resources and begin their own insurance plan.

Although this topic was very technical and business heavy, it was much easier to understand than learning about bank plans earlier in the course.  There are five main steps in getting crop insurance. 1) Know your cost.  Your agent has to know the input costs and the potential yields to know who much to insure.  2) Pay attention to deadlines.  There are several deadlines that farmers must follow when trying to insure their crops.  This is unique from other insured materials because analyzing risk and responsibility depends on the planting season.  For example, if you try to plant before the official start of the growing season (which is different by crop) you cannot qualify for replant coverage, which exists in case seeds do not germinate.  Additionally, because farmers often change their crops and planting habits year to year, they need a new plan every year. 3) Know your APH.  The Actual Production History is basically the life story of your farmland, and each farmer has his own number.  It tells how good or bad the land’s yield have been and therefore used to calculate the guarantee and premium.   New farmers do not have their own APH, so they must go by the county average.  Luckily, in an effort to boost the number of the nation’s farmers, the new Farm Bill boosted the subsidies to these new farmers, or “new producers.” 4) Choose products.  These are different plans that can be applied to different farms and across different counties.  There are two main products: yield protection and revenue protection.  The first pays according to the expected yield by number of bushels per acre.  The second product has a higher premium, but the farmer collects if the spring price falls (set before the growing season by the Chicago Commodities Board and announced March 1) or if the fall price is higher after a loss. 5) Choose private products.  Federally subsidized crop insurance only pays up to 85% of the crop.  Therefore, you insure the other 15% by buying different disaster products, such as for hail, wind, drought, or rain.  The most common threats in Iowa to the corn and soybean crops are wind and hail followed by rain and drought.

We then traveled for two hours to Decorah, IA to visit the Seed Savers Exchange, a non-profit that collects and preserves heritage seed varieties of vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers.  It’s basically a smaller version of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway (link).  People from across the U.S. will send their seeds to Seed Savers either just to increase the library or if they do not have any remaining family to whom they can pass down the seeds.  I think it is a very neat idea and a good representation of the variety of foods that I didn’t even know existed.  Toby, our guide, told us that we may only really see four to five different varieties of apples at the grocery store and maybe a few more at a farmer’s market.  However, at Seed Savers, they grow, harvest, and collect 950 varieties of apples.  I was also taken aback by the size of the farm.  Since its beginning almost 40 years ago, the farm has grown from around 80 acres to 890, featuring over 30 gardens, an orchard, and fields for raising chickens and Ancient White Park cattle, one of only five herds in the world.  To put it in perspective, Furman’s campus is 750 acres, including the woods and golf course.

After Seed Savers, we traveled to Iowa City to meet with state representatives the next day.  Having been graced with a built-in DVD player, we were able to watch My Father’s Garden while on the road.  This documentary tells the stories of two different farmers.  One is the director’s own father, an orange grower, who jumped on the new developments in agricultural technology, specifically chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.  He died at 40 years old of an undiagnosed illness that affected most of his organs.  It is implied that his heavy and arguably enthusiastic exposure to these chemicals contributed to his death.  The second farmer is Fred Kirschenmann, a farmer in North Dakota.  His story traces his efforts at turning his dying conventional farm into a large-scale organic one.  The film tries to set a positive example for a turn towards large-scale organic farming and away from conventional, chemically driven conventional farms, whose input costs and tolls on the land are driving away small farmers from the lifestyle.  One quote that struck a chord was by Fred, who said, “Every farmer must treat his farm as a garden.”  This approach stresses a devotion to sustainable practices, including utilizing natural ecological process and maintaining soil health.  I would say more, but we will actually meet Fred two days from now, so I will have to more to say then.

Today, after we woke up and ate breakfast, we got a couple hours of free time to hang out in downtown Iowa City, which was exciting because we don’t get very much free time, especially not in a populated area. As in any new city that I go to, I found a good record store and went immediately there. It was called Record Collectors, and it was a pretty cool store for being in Iowa. I bought The Judas Factor’s “Ballads in Blue China” LP, which I’ve never seen before and am excited about. After that was done, I basically wandered around the city with everyone else and watched them shop in various clothing stores. At one point we went to a local ice cream shop and I got a slushy smoothie. The town itself was pretty hipster, and so were most of the stores that we went in. Hedley is a pretty preppy individual so it was funny to see her trying to navigate the world of hipster fashion while looking extremely out of place, especially when she bought a ring at this one shop and the girl at the counter said, “I think this is a step for you in the right direction”.

Our free time ended with a trip to Mary Mascher’s house, who is a Democratic state legislator in Iowa. She had organized a type of panel discussion in her living room which ended up being really interesting. The panel included Jim, who was an activist and did a lot of planting of trees and restoration of native habitats, Lance, who was acquiring his PhD and doing research on climate change, Sally, who was also a Democratic state legislator, and David, an organic urban farmer in Iowa City. We talked about a lot of large questions regarding agriculture, climate change, and politics, and I found myself agreeing with a lot of what Jim said, as he took a pretty radical stance on the side of small-scale sustainable organic farming that most mimicked the natural environment. He said that Iowa has the most changed landscape of any state in the United States which makes sense, given that Iowa was mostly covered in wetlands before European immigrants settled here. It still saddens me to think about all of those wetlands being drained to plant rows and rows of the same crops across the entire landscape of Iowa. 60-70% of Iowa’s land is corn and soybean fields. One thing that Lance brought up that I thought was really interesting is how much building, roads, and other types of pavement contribute to climate change. I vaguely understood this argument but would like to know more about this. We also talked a lot about population control in the conversation because Sally was making the common argument that conventional agriculture is necessary because we need to feed the world. However, we finally came to the conclusion that it was not population that needed to be controlled, since population is leveling off in most industrialized countries and that will most likely happen in any country that is industrialized.  Rather, the demand for food is rising because of the growing middle class in nations such as India and China, and with that rising middle class comes the demand for animal proteins.  Consumerism is driving the bus.

This morning we got a nice break from animals and corn fields. We got to explore Iowa City for a few hours. I got my much needed girly fix by getting my nails done and buying a bracelet. I also bought a ring at a more “hipster” store and got called out for being a preppy girl, and she told me I was taking a step in the right direction buying something hipster… whatever that means. Once we got back together we went to Mary Mascher, a Democratic Iowa House Representatives’s, house. There we met with Mary, Sally, Jim, Lance and a few others to discuss policies, practices, and politics. The discussion began with Jim describing Iowa. He told us it was the state with the most changed landscape, smallest amount of public land, highest density of roads, and full of corn and soybeans. His questions with the way things are being run now was, is the the right way? Is this sustainable? Sally responded with the reoccurring conflict that we have been discussing this whole trip. Conventional vs. Organic in looking at the economics and sustainable issues with both. If the conventional farmer is going to have the big equipment they need the high yield to pay for it. Also with corn prices going up, everyone wants to plant as much as possible. On the sustainable side, they want incentives to plant grass waterways because that land contains acres they could be making money off of with planting corn. The economic factor plays a bigger role in the conventional farms than the sustainable. They want to feed the world and the way they see to do that is with chemicals. There is a however a coexistence of organic farmers in the mix, who do have sustainability in mind more, but they cannot mass produce the food the conventional farmers can. It is important, I think, that they work together. You will not convince all conventional farmers to go organic, but you can slowly get them to change their ways to be more sustainable. But, we still need both kinds of farmers.

Another big topic discussed was population and our negative effects on the Earth. The population is continuing to grow, but according to Jim there will not be a decent world for them to live in. There will be no more wild fish, he believes, because of the way we fish with large nets and the soil will be in worse condition than it is now. Jim’s way to fix this is by fixing yourself. He said you can’t change others, but you can change yourself. Then he went on a rant about how we need to be skeptical because we are not as smart as we think we are. He claimed the doctors didn’t have a clue about how the brain works. I know that we don’t have everything figured out just yet, but I do not agree that we are just “advanced monkeys” as he called us.I think we have a lot to thank doctors for and give them major respect and thanks for all they have done to better our health. I mean life expectancy has nearly double, and he thinks we don’t have doctors and modern medicine to thank for that? He is wrong there in my opinion.

Another interesting thing discussed was the fact that Republicans don’t 100% attribute climate change to humans and Democrats don’t believe science when it says GMOs are safe. That is interesting to me and I don’t really know why this is. Mary was telling us to be skeptical about what we are told as well. It was a little bit scary to hear her say not to always trust the government though. But I do agree you can’t always believe what you hear and it will be interesting to see if any new information comes out in my life time about GMOs or global warming. It will also be interesting to see how farming changes as well in the future. There is no telling what will happen because so many things go into it that are too complicated for us to find a solution for yet.

I have never taken much time to think about how crucial something as seemingly simple as a seed could be. Unless it was in a science class, I’ve only ever really thought of seeds as merely a concept. While I’ve often used the idiom “planting a seed” with a full understanding of its abstract meaning, I never really thought about the meaning of physical seeds until now. I was really excited to get to go to Decorah and see the varied topography which was going to be a break from the flat monotony (which being new to the midwest I still appreciated) and getting to see what Dr. HN referred to as “Little Switzerland.” Neither the Seed Savers Exchange nor the Decorah topography were a disappointment, and I left with a greater appreciation for both.

It was really eye opening to see how the people at Seed Savers valued preserving old seeds. This added a new dimension to our discussions about the controversy surrounding  genetically modified seeds that lead to the creation of the optimal plant. It seems very likely that in this process we would lose track of countless species of plants without even thinking about it or caring. This loss of biodiversity seems extremely tragic. The founders of seed savers may not have had genetically modified seeds in mind, but they still valued biodiversity enough to make preserving thousands of seeds their life work. Hearing about all the ways people acquired old seeds that may have been the last of their kind was fascinating. I have never thought about seeds as being an heirloom to be passed down through the generations. But apparently this isn’t entirely uncommon as that is how the bulk of seeds that the Seed Savers Exchange have acquired came into its possession. Seeing how seriously they took preserving these thousands of types of seeds and plant varieties made me consider the importance of biodiversity. And less profoundly just appreciate the beauty of different, exotic plant species that have just barely escaped extinction. The highlight of our visit to Decorah was getting to go on a mini-hike to an orchard that housed about 450 apple varieties of the nearly 1000 that the Seed Savers possess. This experience gave me a greater appreciation for the value of a seed and the preservation of plant diversity.

Seed Savers Garden

Just one of hundreds of unique species of apple trees

We finally had a sort-of break this morning. We slept in a hotel last night in super comfy beds and didn’t have to wake up until 9:30. We went to breakfast at a small vegan restaurant called Trumpet Blossom Cafe. I’m really glad Adam and Cecily found a place where they had lots of choices, but I certainly picked the wrong thing! I got cardamon pancakes with unidentified berries in them with maple syrup. I had never had cardamon before and I will never be eating it again! They really did taste like cleaning supplies. Cecily really enjoyed them, though, and finished mine up. I caught up on lunch later at a noodle place in Iowa City.

After breakfast, we had three hours to kill in Iowa City. It was such a huge and cool place! I figured it would be like Downtown Greenville or smaller based on the rest of Iowa, but it was more like Atlanta. We went to a used book bookstore first called the Haunted Bookshop. It was probably the best bookstore that I’ve ever been in. It had two cats and two floors overflowing with books, new and old. I could have spent all day in there, and I’m pretty sure Cecily felt the same way, but we wanted to see the rest of the city, so we bought our books and left. We went to get ice cream at Whitey’s, which satisfied my sweet tooth. We met up with Hedley and explored a few of the clothes shops. Iowa City actually had lots of alternative and vintage stores. I liked a lot of things, but everything was pretty expensive, so I didn’t buy anything but my books. There was a t-shirt in a place called Raygun, though, that had a picture of a cat and said “You’ve cat to be kitten me right meow.” Jon (my boyfriend) says that all the time, so I wanted to get it for him as a souvenir, but it was expensive. I wouldn’t mind coming back sometime.

At 3, we left to go to Mary Mascher’s, a state legislator, house. We were meeting her to get a democratic perspective for once. HN described her as the complete opposite of Annette, the anti-Annette. I could absolutely see that now that I’ve met her. There were lots of people that joined us at her house, including another state legislator, a naturalist farmer, and organic farmer, and a beekeeper. I liked hearing all of their diverse opinions, but having such varied beliefs led to tense moments in the room. I found myself disagreeing with Mary and Sally a lot and siding more with the organic farmer and beekeeper. I definitely sided with Annette. I think they handled the discussion well, though, even when people seemed to disagree. We talked about a lot of topics, but stayed pretty broad instead of going deep. We unfortunately didn’t get to meet with Connie the naturalist this evening, but that was ok because I’m pretty sure everyone is pretty worn out, including me.

On Tuesday night, we went to see a new documentary that had just come out called Farmland. It was funded by agribusiness groups, and its purpose was to counter some of the more recent food documentaries which have questioned conventional food production practices. Farmland sought to help the public understand what farmers do, and it followed the stories of six farmers who were involved in different types of farming operations. While it was a well-made film and could have maybe been successful as an introduction to farming for the general public, I did not learn very much new information from it after being a part of the FARM class for two weeks.

The latest in the organic farms that we have been visiting on the trip was Blue Gate Farms, an all-vegetable farm where the owners, Jill and Sean, also kept chickens for their eggs and two alpacas for their fur, which Jill would use to create various products. Blue Gate Farms had the most chickens of any farm we had been to yet, as I think they had about 125 birds. Also, a huge difference between Blue Gate and Table Top farms, which we visited earlier in the trip, is that Jill and Sean from Blue Gate found that attending the Des Moines Farmer’s Market was very important to their business, while Luke and Sally from Table Top just found it to be a lot of effort but not really worth it. This exemplifies the variety of different options one has when deciding how to run a small-scale organic vegetable farm.

This morning we went to both the offices for the Iowa State Extension Program and the Hardin County USDA, which are in the same building. On the Iowa State Extension Program side of things, we learned about how there is a land-grant university in each state, and part of the mission of that university is to be a resource to the community. I might be interested in taking advantage of some of the resources offered from NC State or Clemson in the future, which are the land grant universities in North Carolina and South Carolina. Upstairs in the USDA offices, we heard some information about water quality and conservation issues that contradicted some information we had heard from Denny Friest. While Denny was of the opinion that water quality improvement efforts were getting better and that farmers did not need to be regulated because they were slowly beginning to make the needed changes, we heard today from one employee that he thought we were going backwards as a farming society and actually creating more water quality problems; therefore this employee was of the opinion that regulations were necessary.

After leaving those offices, we went to talk to a representative from Niman Pork, which is a company that has a commitment to raising animals using traditional, humane husbandry methods, all natural feeds and no unnatural hormones and antibiotics. I thought it was interesting how there seems to be plenty of demand for the Niman Ranch pork products, to the point where they can’t actually keep up with the demand for some of their customers, like Chipotle. There seems to be a greater interest among consumers about buying meat that has been humanely raised, even though as a vegan I think that concept is kind of an oxymoron.

The last thing we did today was talk to Denny Neubauer and Caleb Knutson about the history of tiling in Iowa. One of the things I found out on this trip that I did not previously know was that Iowa was originally primarily wet lands which had to be drained to be turned into farm lands. The tiling is basically just pipes that are installed under the land so that the water will drain down into them and flow into a ditch or creek downhill. When this tiling was first being put in and laws started to be made regarding it, a farmer could drain his tiling right onto the surface of his neighbor’s field if the neighbor refused to pay the fee to tile his land. After talking about tiling for awhile, I can’t help but be of the opinion that the wetlands should have never been drained in Iowa, which is probably not a very popular view among Iowans involved in agriculture.

The day began with another one of those business meetings. Entering it, I was scared I would be lost in the technical terms, but I came out surprised and full of knowledge about crop insurance. Renae Zoske spoke with us today, keeping in mind we were not business people. I thought she did a very good job of explaining everything with ease. I now know that if I were to have crops, my insurance would cover 65-85% of my yield and revenue loss, and hail, wind, or other insurance can cover the rest. Many farmers do use the insurance system as a way to manage their risk. Renae said that up to 90% of farm land in America is covered by insurance, which proves the system we have now is working. What she does not want to happen is farmers to self insure or changes to occur in the amount of money put into the crop insurance subsidy. Either of these changes could come about if the Obama Administration’s desire to lower the crop insurance subsidy in 2015 materializes, but Renee is hoping that things do not change too much. The system is complex already and involves 10 years of past yields going into the calculations of the amount of insurance they will receive. One bad year can really hurt a farmer because it will stay with them for 10 years. There are hundreds of acronyms that go into crop insurance and changing what farmers are used to and understand, especially with cutting the funds that go to them will negatively effect farming as a whole.

The next place we went was Seed Savers Exchange, which was really cool! It started with a couple who wanted to save the seeds that were important to their family. They wrote into a popular magazine and found others who were interested in saving seeds as well. Once all these seeds began to gather in their home they realized they needed a farm and more space. They moved to Iowa and began what is now Seed Savers Exchange which employs over 60 persons and has grown in size over the past forty years. It was so fascinating how many seeds they have collected over the years, keeping some from extinction. They now sell some of the seeds to the public and are working on mass producing others so they can expand even more. It was an awesome place, and I love what they are doing there to preserve seeds for the next generation.

The last thing we did was watch a movie on the importance of preserving the natural soil and not polluting it with chemicals. It was called My Father’s Garden and was focused on treating the land with respect and working with it, rather than against it by covering it in chemicals. One person in it had a large-scale organic farm and that is something we haven’t really seen. All the organic farms we have been to have been small, CSA farms and it was neat to see how organic can be done on such a large scale. I agree that we need to take care of our soil, so it can take care of us.

This morning we woke up and Renee Zoske came to the farm to talk to us about crop insurance. The last time someone came to the farm to talk about farm loans, it got a little over my head, so I was hoping that this would be more accessible. It was in fact very accessible and Renee did a great job explaining a concept that we weren’t very familiar with to our group. Something that is important to understand is that farmers don’t pay the entire premium for their crop insurance because a large part of it is subsidized by the government. I had understood why this was the case for small farmers because paying the full premium would be too much of a cost, but I did not understand why the government still subsidized the crop insurance for larger ones like Summit Farms. According to her, the reason is that if the government chose not to subsidize crop insurance for the larger farms, those farm would join together and create their own insurance company, which would take money out of the insurance pool for the small farmers. My impression was that this would raise their premium a lot. This was a good explanation I thought and gave me a better idea of why the government is subsidizing larger farmers.

After lunch, we drove three hours to Decorah to go to Seed Savers Exchange, which was one of the coolest places we have been thus far. It was started by a couple who had been entrusted with some heirloom seeds that had been passed down through generations. The couple realized that they could very well be the only ones with those seeds and did not want to be completely responsible for the continuation of the plant species, just in case something happened, so they decided to start searching for other people who had heirloom seeds so that the different seeds could be exchanged, therefore increasing the likelihood that they would survive. The list of people who had heirloom seeds to exchange grew larger and larger and that is how heirloom seeds came to be. The headquarters of the Seed Savers Exchange were pretty cool, as they kept an extremely large amount of seeds there, growing different rare plants and selling many seeds in its gift shop that I had never seen before. I thought it was really awesome that there were people who were so dedicated to pursuing genetic diversity in a world where the most efficient genes for plants are selected and the rest are just sort of forgotten. A woman named Toby Cain gave us the tour of the property and took us through her personal garden, where she had divided her plants by their country of origin. For all of the countries she had included, she included vegetables from those countries’ traditional diets that have in many  caseknown different types of apple. This is remarkable when you look at the few types of apple that are sols become forgotten. When we went over to look at their apple orchard, we learned that there are 15,000 apple varieties, but only about 12 in a typical grocery store.

We basically just spent most of the day in a car (6 hours). It may not have been fun for us, but I’m sure much less fun for the teacher driving us across Iowa. First we had a meeting with the crop insurance agent who actually insured the crops ont he farm on which we are staying at to understand how it all works. My understanding came to that they use your history to say how many bushels or corn or soy you can expect in an average year, and to determine the rate for the farmer’s premium. They then offer subsidized options for protection from yield losses compared to some percent of your historical norm (10 yrs back) or protection from market changes spring to fall (you get reimbursed for corn going down 2 dollars during the year). In addition to the federally subsidized crop insurance program, our presenter also spoke a bit about private insurance products that farmers purchase, namely hail and wind insurance.  Hail and wind insurance are regulated like other insurance products by the State of Iowa.  Hail and wind insurance products vary in price, bu the federal crop insurance does not–those prices are set by the federal government..

From there we took the three-hour drive to Decorah, Iowa where we visited Seed Savers. Exchange.  It’s basically a giant repository operation that collects, stores, trades, and sells thousands of old breeds of seeds for crops and flowers. They have:

lots of seeds. For example, our guide, Toby said that in the US there have been some 16,000 different varieties of apple. Seeds can be traded between members using their catalog and once their online catalog is up then folks can buy those that they have enough seeds of from almost anyone. Since seeds can’t be stored forever and growing the number of seeds makes it possible to start selling them, they grow out the vegetables from time to time. Right now they have over 900 apple varieties growing there in two orchards.  Many of the apple varieties in the orchard pictured below were apples cultivated before 1900.

They also have two nice gardens and a few heirloom chicken and cow breeds, with turkeys coming later.

I think seed savers was really cool and really like the idea of preserving the diverse mix of crops that have been developed over the years for future use in the ways they were intended. Some of these seeds were cultivated for taste, some were better acclimated to certain areas, others were pest or weed resistant, and then some were bred just to look cool (we heard Hereford pigs were bred just to look like Hereford cows). I find it really cool to have these varieties around and safely stored for the future, even if I personally believe that folks should try to get the breeds that work best in their area with normal breeding or buying instead of getting some of the foreign developed ones that they had (traditional German, Italian, and Mexican varieties as well as old America natives).

After that we went for another three hour car ride to Iowa city and are now happily at a little Marriott for the night. During this ride we also watched a movie about Fred Kirschenmann who is one of the earlier sustainable ag people who did it on a large scale (~3000 acres). I felt he was talking about sustainable ag vs industrial as if things had been proven and things are to my knowledge still more opinion than fact, even if I agree with what he’s doing. Most importantly is how he essentially demonized industrial ag, and I feel that doing so only causes a bigger divide whereas providing solid, quantitative evidence of the benefits of sustainable ag as well as the harms of industrial ag (if there are any, which I feel there are) will be convincing enough to slowly transition to a new kind of agriculture. The same applies for the majority of his soon to be published paper from soil to sustainability, which I read before bed. I believe it makes a lot of good points such as agriculture’s high dependence on limited resources like oil and potassium which will only be increasing in rarity and price (oil production was estimated to have peaked in the 70s by the way, although I’m not positive if it was confirmed to have). They provided some scientific backings, such as the work of Liebman at ISU who has been studying the benefits of sustainable ag practices like cover cropping. My only real issue is how uncompromising it is with changing industrial agriculture. Every other farmer we’ve seen in Iowa has been very reasonable and is happy to farm their way, and let others farm their own way and that’s true of sustainable and conventional farmers. I just feel that it’s something that will make his work more polarizing and the issue less compromising and positively viewed.