Returning to Iowa

It was muddy when I visited ILF farmer partner George Schaefer in Washington County in late March. George made bedding for his cattle the previous evening when their stalls were too wet to sleep in. While George expressed a love for many aspects of the farming life, he didn’t shy away from describing cattle work at that time of the year as a slog in every sense. Throughout our conversation, George humorously admitted that he isn’t the idealist he once was, and that he’d often prefer to be on a beach with a mai tai.

Regarding conservation of his land and the shared water resources downstream, however, George’s concerns have only grown with time. He affirmed the same sentiments of fellow Washington County farmer Rob Stout, featured in our last farmer partner blog. Beyond economics, productivity, or tradition, George believes Iowa needs more conservation on the landscape because it is ethically the right thing to do. “If you’re looking at the 100-year view, or not even that far… if you’re simply thinking about your kids, then it should be a no-brainer.”

In some ways, George’s farming background is storybook. He and his brother operate their family’s century farm outside Kalona where each has raised a family. George grew up cherishing the solitude of the hilly landscape bordering the English River. Moreover, the Schaefers’ history on the land dates back to 1855.  

In other ways, George’s story is uniquely his own. After he left the farm, he studied business at the University of Iowa and had no intention of returning to Kalona or remaining in Iowa. He had a successful life as an insurance salesman in San Francisco. Then after 20 years on the west coast, he dropped everything to travel the world, continuing west. From San Francisco, he lived an itinerant lifestyle as far away as India before returning to Iowa around 2000 for his brother’s wedding.

After the wedding, he was presented with another crossroads—continue traveling (his next idea was to drive to Tierra Del Fuego at the southern tip of Argentina), or farm with his brother in Iowa. He clearly chose the latter. Because of all he’s seen, his description of Iowa’s beauty carries some weight. “I’ve been to the top of the Himalayas and looked out over the mountains. It gives me goosebumps right now, but I get goosebumps here, too. What you come to realize is that beauty is how you see it, and Iowa is truly beautiful. I come up here to my brother’s house most mornings for sunrise, and my God, Iowan sunrises are hard to beat.”

Throughout our conversation, George described himself as someone who can’t help but see things from multiple angles, and his opinions on Iowan agriculture share this tendency. For example, half of the Schaefer farm is organic while the other half isn’t. His organic crops go almost exclusively to the Amish who live across the English River, which is a market that gives him meaning and joy. But he knows from experience that “fighting weeds on an organic field is an absolute war. There is no other option but to till the crap out of the soil.”

He goes to no-till conferences and organic conferences and sees the merit in both perspectives, when considering the benefits of extended rotations on his organic ground. But where George draws a hard line is at the disappointing trends of conservation adoption. “What troubles me more than anything else is the lack of acceptance of no-till farming and cover crops. I don’t understand what people are thinking when they rip their fields up for no reason. And there is so much out there about the benefits of cover crops. We’re getting to the point where our only option is that the government will have to take away money from those who don’t do it.”

Going deeper, George drew on his expertise in the business world about the economics of conservation. “Financially, there is really no reason to not do cover crops. You can get more profit from beans, that’s been clearly shown. And any drop in corn is more than offset when we think about the cost of nutrients and soil loss.” But, again, George affirmed that natural resource conservation cannot have a price-tag. “A person has to really try to block out the news of what we’re doing to our waterways. Well, cover crops can soak all of that stuff up, all the manure, all the runoff. We have a solution, and we’re ignoring it.”

Richard Frailing

Conserving Family Farms Means Conserving the Soil

When ILF farmer partners and brothers Ben and Andy Johnson sow cover crops onto 100% of their acres, they are not only acting to conserve the living systems of their farms. They also know that their actions towards land health will simultaneously preserve the opportunity for their sons to continue the trade that Johnsons have practiced outside Floyd for over 150 years. 

In conversation with the brothers, Andy Johnson gave a humorous anecdote about the meaning that farming already has for his young sons. When the boys don’t do their homework, he doesn’t punish them by taking away their video games. Rather, he takes away their sheep chores for the day. The punishment works, which is a powerful sign that another generation of Johnsons will farm after Ben and Andy. Simultaneously, conserving this familial connection with the land is impossible without conserving the land itself.

Rather than running contrary to Ben and Andy’s goals of productivity and profitability, they know that conservation sets them apart and makes them more competitive than other farmers. When the Johnsons and their father first tried no-till on beans during the late 90s, they saw their best yields ever. What’s more is that these yields came from their three worst fields.

Their experiences were similar for cover crops, which they first tried during the flooded spring of 2013, when farmers across Iowa were unable to plant cash crops. While Ben and Andy kept their land from eroding with cover crops, Andy recalled, “Some farmers just did tillage throughout the summer: they worked the ground 3 or 4 times.” When the brothers saw “big increases in yields the following year,” they quickly realized cover crops’ ability to build resilience and ensure productivity in the face of extreme events.

Ben and Andy also had insight into what hinders conservation adoption even when benefits are clear. In their view, the ability to act on knowledge about conservation often hinges on whether or not a farmer is able to make their own decisions. The brothers discussed some of the complexities of the current situation when fewer and fewer young people are able to become decision makers.

Andy, who had taught high school agriculture until the “prevented planting” season of 2013, strongly believes that getting young people on the land will have the greatest effect on increasing adoption rates. On the other hand, Ben responded that this can’t happen when young farmers only hear “what dad is chirping” in their ears about the practices they must do. Andy jumped in and related this to his own experience while teaching students whose dads are “hesitant to give up much of the reins.”

Again, the brothers returned to the power of conservation to help young farmers to be more competitive when they are starting out. Ben affirmed that, “Conservation is one of the most crucial tools that young farmers can use to set themselves apart from other renters.” Andy added, “We’ve never had a landlord say, ‘Boy I wish you’d do more tillage.’ It’s always been the opposite. I hear more stories about renters losing land because they weren’t willing to change their practices than the other way around.”

The brothers agreed on most points but had slightly different perspectives on the effect that age can play in conservation adoption. Ben countered Andy’s points about young farmers by affirming that some of the best conservation farmers are those “who know what happens when it rains 10 inches a month for 3 months, and those who have seen droughts and terrible prices.”

The key element that returns, however, is the importance of keeping decision-makers on the land who understand the importance of conservation to keep family farms viable. At the end of our conversation, Andy returned to the significance of continuing the Johnsons sheep operation even when labor became short. “On a farm, what can a 9-year-old do? Keeping sheep involved has allowed my sons to have some responsibility and some stake in on the farm’s overall operation.”

The Johnsons’ farm is ultimately founded on preserving these lived connections. As such, some of their greatest concerns involve vertical integration. Andy specifically discussed the movement toward consolidation and confinements. He affirmed that while “confinements bring jobs, it’s a job for someone else. That’s not why I’m farming, and that’s not what I want for my sons. So I hope that similar patterns don’t occur in row-crop agriculture or for other livestock operations.”

Richard Frailing

The Joy of Farming

“Look at this potting soil,” ILF farmer partner Nathan Anderson said, laughing, as he pulled up the early growth of his rye cover in one his fields outside Aurelia. “Absolutely perfect. People talk about good soil looking like chocolate cake – well, this looks pretty close.” Nathan then dug a few feet away, where his tractor had compacted the soil, and showed the difference, while talking through the finer points of how his soil has improved since implementing cover crops. For Nathan, improving organic matter and the soil microbiome isn’t an obligation of data and chemical symbols. It’s a joy.

“I haven’t been bored in a long time, let’s put it that way,” he said as we pulled up to a shed that had damage from the last derecho. “Sometimes, I err on the side of being too busy, but we take a lot of pride in doing a lot of things ourselves. It gives us flexibility to manage our farm the way we like it, the way that brings the most joy.”

Nathan always wanted to farm, though he didn’t know if it could become a reality. He considered grad school, but the year he finished undergrad at ISU, grain prices were high, and his parents told him it was a good time if he wanted to return. His father and uncle still farm around Aurelia, on different fields but with most of the same equipment.

Nathan lives in the same house his grandparents lived in, and he takes pride in this. But he was also clear that what qualifies someone to farm isn’t their heritage. “I always struggle with the ‘I’m a fourth or fifth generation or whatever.’ Some people use that as a club. It’s a point of pride as it should be. But farming a certain way for a couple generations doesn’t justify that method any more than what the next generation does, and it’s way harder to be a 2^nd generation farmer than 6^th generation.”

As we drove to another chore, Nathan slowed by the field where his cattle were grazing and pointed to a cow separate from the group. “Do you see that dark little shape at her feet? I’m gonna guess she’s cleaning off a new calf. Dad called 40 minutes ago and said it looked like she was in labor. Forty minutes isn’t bad for a first-calf heifer. Looks like she’s doing a good job.”

Why does Nathan raise cattle? The same answer returns: because it’s a joy. He and his wife Sarah, who teaches in Storm Lake, have two boys and Nathan described their love of cattle, especially his two-year-old. He described pulling the boy on a sled during the last snow and asked him to point where he wanted to go. The boy pointed to the cattle pen and just wanted to sit and talk to the cattle, “and I don’t understand what he’s saying, but he’s just jabbering at ‘em. That’s fun. So is watching them pick fresh stuff from the yard, cherries, strawberries, whatever, and just start eating it. That’s fun.”

In addition to raising cattle, row crops and some small grains, Nathan and his wife Sarah have also started raising fruit trees. But he doesn’t sell the fruit. He considers the trees one way to give back to the community and invites families from his church and the town of Aurelia to pick their own fruit. “There’s a lot of talk about preserving independent family farms. But there was never such a thing. There were interdependent farms. We’re trying to make it independent, and we shouldn’t.”

What is at the heart of Nathan’s conservation? Conservation doesn’t occur to him as separate from what he cares about most deeply. “That’s the label that gets put on it, appropriately so, and sometimes I use that label, too. But our farm’s mission is to ‘honor God, family and community by caring for the resources we’ve been entrusted with and doing so to build a resilient farm and family.’ It’s a long mission, but I couldn’t figure out how to shorten it.”

For Nathan, conservation is not a value that supersedes joy, love and community. Conservation happens because of these values, and it’s not a checklist. It’s an ongoing process of asking what brings human value in the current trajectory of agriculture, and “what we’re not okay with.” Even though Nathan views patterns of consolidation as inevitable and “not unintended” on the part of the agricultural system, there has to be a place for families who challenge each other to create resilient systems. Most importantly, this is impossible and pointless without joy.

Richard Frailing

History Through the Lens of Soil Health

“The definition of a good farmer has changed over the years,” Mark Mueller told me in his study, lined with history books and maps. He continued, “When my grandfather was a boy, a good farmer was the one who planted the straightest rows, even up and down hills.” Mark described the definition’s change across successive generations, tracing the adoption of contours in his father’s upbringing and reduced tillage in his own. He ended by stating “Now, I’ve taught my daughters that a good farmer doesn’t disturb the soil, leaves as much residue on top as possible, and they use cover crops.”

Even with cover crops on 100% of nearly 2000 acres, however, Mark knows this evolution must continue. “The fact is, I am doing everything science says I should do, and I am still losing soil.”

Mark still farms with his father J. Howard outside Waverly, on the same road where two generations of Muellers farmed before them. When he took over operations in 1995, Mark bought all but three of his father’s tractors. Of those three, J. Howard held onto his moldboard plow and refused to let Mark sell it until 2015, although they only used it once in those 20 years. Mark explained that his dad “loved plowing, and I can’t fault him because at the end of a day of plowing, you could look back and say, ‘here’s something I did today.’”

As a lover of history, Mark is astutely aware of the complex relationship between tradition and change. This ambiguity lies in three broad observations: change is inevitable; people rarely want change; not all change is good.

A key shift that Mark wishes hadn’t occurred in the 20^th century is the loss of diversity on the farming landscape and the rise of monoculture. And yet, in a future where consolidation seems inevitable, Mark maintains his belief in the ability of conventional farmers to remain profitable through diversity and the innovation of new markets.

Amidst difficult questions about the nature of science and progress, the unambiguous foundation of Mark’s ethic is a commitment to soil health and the necessity of international collaboration to reach new levels of conservation and productivity. As a district director of Iowa Corn and chairman of its Exports & Grain Trade Committee, Mark is immersed in the national patterns of agricultural trade.

When I spoke with Mark, he had just returned from a trip to Mexico fostering trade relationships. In addition to his regular trips in Mexico, Mark has traveled to numerous countries and observed patterns in agriculture and rural landscapes similar to those in Iowa. “Small towns in Iowa are no different from small towns in Central America or anywhere else: they are struggling everywhere.” Regarding the ways this pattern can be reversed in Iowa, he returned to the vital importance of diversity: “I keep asking myself, why are we working so hard to keep out industrious, resourceful people?”

Throughout our interview, when I asked Mark a question, he’d point to his bookshelf or to the large US map in front of his desk to illustrate his answer. When I asked what source informs his conservation ethic most directly, he pointed to Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, which traces the rise and fall of nations based on the sustainability of their farming practices. At the core of Mark’s ethic is the firm stance that conservation equates to no less than the survival of a nation.

Mark is an optimist and a self-described missionary for trade to connect agricultural systems across the globe and solve problems of every scale. However, he balances this optimism with his global concern about climate change, as well as the legacy this generation leaves in history books by our action or inaction. “We farmers rely on science. So, for example, if you wanted to ban ethanol based on its environmental effects, I’d say, ‘Show me the science.’ But it’s been established that global warming is man-made, and there’s so much we could be doing that we’re not. I also know that attitudes are changing, but not nearly fast enough.”

Richard Frailing

I’m Still Here

To farmer partner Doug Nolte, conservation has always been a matter of survival.

I visited Doug at his farm in Muscatine County on a day that the last winter storm swept across Iowa. As wind from the front whipped outside his dining room, Doug began the conversation with some stories, and he has quite a few. The house he currently lives in was rebuilt on the century farm’s original homestead, where his German ancestors used to hold traditional dances. He has no idea how dozens of neighbors fit into the small house. It is the same house where he was raised and where he would eventually start a family of his own.

Doug and his brother—who operates the family’s other century farm down the road— bought a no-till planter in 2004. At the time, they were discerning the future of their operations following the death of their father. Like all our conversation, Doug expressed the “why” behind this switch with refreshing honesty. He simply recognized the necessity of something new, when farmers all around him “were tilling the crap out of the soil” and the ditches were black.

There was uncertainty with the new practice, but the need to preserve the natural systems was clear. Conservation became a matter of survival. Describing this time, Doug said, “You have to understand that in those first four years we were just exploring what directions would work for us long-term. We were willing to experiment and didn’t have a strong influence from my father to say, ‘That’ll never work.’”

As one of Iowa Learning Farms’ earliest farmer partners—joining in 2006—Doug received significant guidance from ILF’s network in the early years of his operations and generously offered his expertise by hosting a field day in 2009. By that time, with just a handful of growing seasons under his belt, Doug and his brother believed in no-till and knew the practice well enough to guide other farmers who were interested in quitting tillage.

Now, after 17 years, Doug takes pride in his conservation successes, but retains a sense of humor and humility. When I asked what he was most proud of as a farmer, he took a long pause and then said with a laugh, “I’m still here; I’ve survived and made my operation work long enough to earn some respect.” Doug is also honest about the difficulties he’s had with cover crops, and he’s far from being alone.

But he has tried them and continues to work towards new conservation solutions on top of his full workload. In addition to crops, Doug raises hogs in hoop confinements, which fits his management style better than traditional confinement buildings. He had received a new litter the day I visited and had just finished grading them before I arrived.

As we walked to the hog confinements from his house, we passed numerous historic buildings left on the property, an RV and finally an enclosure with a few cattle. When I asked Doug about the cattle and RV, he paused again and smiled. He had mentioned that his son was interested in show cattle. Rather than buying the RV for vacations, the Noltes use it to live out of during cattle shows.

Characteristic of his nature, Doug balances an investment into his son’s interests with a sense of humor at the aspects of the “hobby” that perplex him. He joked about the existence of chiropractors for show pigs and all the special shampoos and supplements sold for showing cattle, before adding, “A steer is a steer, and in the end, it’s all gonna be hamburger.”

At the heart of his joking, however, is earnest concern for the industry his son will inherit, and the ways farmers will continue to support themselves while ensuring the health of the land. He explained his attitude towards the changing landscape of farming: “I don’t want to pigeonhole my son, because he may have to do it way differently than I think it has to be done. Things change, so you just do what you can to make sure that change is wise and the land stays healthy.”

Richard Frailing

Environmental Innovation Led By Farmers

Leading up to the 2020 election, multiple presidential candidates visited ILF farmer partner Matt Russell in Warren County to hear his insights about Iowan agriculture. In each instance, Matt gave a tour of his farm which culminated in a walk through a barn built during the 1930s, equipped with numerous stalls for a team of horses.

Matt explained to each candidate that when the barn was built, industry believed the future of agriculture lied in “horses and harnesses” rather than mechanization. Similar to this transitional period between the 30s and 50s, which was followed by the green revolution, he believes we are on the cusp of another shift: this time away from many of the fossil fuel era’s central tenets.

However, Matt doesn’t dismiss the advancements created by the green revolution and characterizes the last half-century as something society needed to go through, and which raised standards of living across the board. In his own words, Matt describes the fossil fuel era as a time of “pushing against nature to force yields… and it’s been great. That we went through it isn’t a crisis at all.”

What Matt does argue is that the benefits of the fossil fuel era have drastically diminished. When describing the cause for this, he switched to the language of systems theory, describing negative “feedback loops” of pushing too hard against natural systems rather than working with them. More specifically, the inputs we spend on forcing yields—whether excess fertilizer or herbicide—have too many detrimental side-effects and can set us back on the very problems they aim to solve.

But as widely knowledgeable at Matt is (with expertise ranging from ag law to the specifics of raising beef cattle), his primary concern has always been with the everyday livelihood of farmers. He is, before anything else, a fifth-generation Iowan farmer who wants Iowan agriculture to empower and incentivize practitioners towards innovation rather than against it.

“This is a very hopeful future for farmers. We’re the point of action, we’re the decision makers. The paradigm must change so that our problem solving is what gets rewarded.”

Having been a teenager during the farm crisis, Matt left his hometown with the initial hopes of being a priest. He attended seminary, but just before his last year, he felt called back to his roots and took a job with Catholic Rural Life, focusing on agricultural discipleship at the beginning of the local food movement.

After meeting his husband Patrick, the two eventually decided to take a chance supporting themselves by raising cattle, explaining that they “bet the farm there was an opportunity.” They set up at the Des Moines Farmers’ Market every weekend for their first six years, and even after developing a robust business, they maintain their original focus on stewardship and local relationships.

Now, after directing Iowa Interfaith Power and Light for many years, Matt has been appointed by President Biden to be the Iowa Farm Agency’s Executive Director. Both he and Patrick still raise cattle, but he explained that their interests now lie primarily in discerning and moving towards the paradigm shift. “I grew up on a commodity farm, did the local food thing, and the next shift is toward ecosystem services, particularly mitigating climate change—not just resilience.”

Late in our conversation, Matt reacted strongly when I asked whether he thought the culture of farming needed to change to drive more conservation. He decried the notion that farmers are unwilling to adopt environmentally conscious practices and reiterated a powerful phrase with numerous examples and applications: “Farmers are making rational decisions in an irrational system: let’s get serious about this. Let’s get serious about the system in which environmental action is disincentivized.”

“The solutions aren’t bigger horses and stronger harnesses. The future is partnering with nature.”

While Matt affirmed that most of the major agricultural players are nominally on board with diversifying agriculture, “incentives are still baked to keep driving less diversity, more chemicals, and more monoculture… We know we can’t have 23 million acres of corn and soybeans and hit any of these ecological goals, and yet everything incentivizes that.”

Always returning to his belief in the autonomy and purpose of the farmer, he powerfully labeled what he views as one of the central identities of all farmers. “It doesn’t matter what size of farm, republican or democrat; one of the deepest identities of farmers is that we’re problem solvers.”

Matt and Patrick observe a small plot of Miscanthus: a species which presents enormous environmental opportunities to both replace fossil fuels and sequester carbon in the soil.

Richard Frailing

Balancing Tradition and Innovation

Badger, Iowa, where Mark Thompson’s family has farmed since his great-grandfather moved from Norway, lies about 20 minutes north of Fort Dodge. On the bright day when I interviewed Mark, he set aside a couple hours in the morning for me, after which he would combine in the afternoon and finally help organize his church’s annual Norwegian fest—featuring lutefisk and other traditional Scandinavian fare.

In addition to farming 900 acres and being an active leader in his community and farmer partner with ILF, Mark has a day job with Sunderman Farm Management, where he helps oversee 60 operations across the country. Mark has traveled to nearly every agricultural area of the country and as far as Brazil to communicate with farmers and learn about their operations. But his attitude that “There is always a better way to do things” comes directly from his grandfather. When his grandparents moved to town, his grandfather functionally lived with Mark’s family during the busiest months on the farm.

Mark described his grandfather as being progressive and innovator for his time, switching to minimum tillage using a chisel plow in the 60s, at a time when no one else in his area was doing so. “He was the smartest guy I knew with a 3rd grade education, and a man of not very many words. He showed you, and he didn’t talk a lot about it.” Mark paused, then said with a laugh, “which is the exact opposite of me.”

Since Mark switched to strip-tillage 20 years ago, he has implemented cover crops on 100% of his acres. There are still changes Mark would like to make that are difficult with his current equipment. While he’d like to finally switch to no-till, he still finds strip-tillage to work best for him, due to the limitations of his planter, which doesn’t have fertilization capabilities. However, he stays true to his grandfather’s ethic that equally emphasizes doing things “right” and doing them “economically” to “let soil be soil”.

In Mark’s view, it’s a good thing that his operation continues to evolve. When I mentioned our farmer partner Dennis Staudt’s concern about the high capital to “get into” farming, Mark resonated but also joked that after 30 years of farming, he’s “still trying to get in it”. He simply doesn’t sweat that he doesn’t have the newest equipment or that his neighbors think he’s crazy when they see his fields full of rye in the spring.

Limitations, more than anything, have been the impetus for Mark’s innovation. He recounted that it was when his father began to slow down and Mark had labor shortages that he asked himself if all the time and diesel fuel he spent on tillage was making any money. And when he saw the results of reducing tillage, he asked himself why he hadn’t made the switch years before.

While Mark isn’t interested in telling other farmers what they should do, he does love communicating what has worked for him. When speaking at field days, he often begins with the same question: “Who here wants to make $50 more an acre?” Everyone raises their hands, and he responds simply, “Then quit tilling your soybeans.”

Mark also acknowledged that there is a complicated relationship between tradition and progressiveness. On the one hand, when he asks farmers why they till, he mostly gets the response that their father or grandfather did it. Then, when he asks why their grandfather tilled, he doesn’t get clear answers. At the same time, he openly admits that his first years were a “trial by fire” where he “got burned several times” from not listening to the ways older farmers were making no-till work.

The communal nature of farming, whether on the county, state or national levels, is central to the ways Mark balances tradition with innovation. As a farm manager, he doesn’t suggest any practices that hasn’t been tried by the farmers at Sunderman on their own land. Yet he holds fast to the progressive mindset that “there is always a better way to do something, not just the way you do it.”

Richard Frailing

Mathematical Beauty and the Miracle of Multiplication in Farming

I initially pulled up to the wrong house when I visited ILF’s farmer partners Dennis and Patty Staudt, who farm just outside Marble Rock in Floyd County. It was late October, sunny, but windy, and dust from the road glowed around a house labeled “Staudt Homestead: Established 1877,” which I realized was uninhabited.

Upon finding the right house, which immediately looks loved down to each fencepost, I learned from Dennis Staudt that the first was the home his great grandparents lived in after their immigration from Germany. The original 160 acres—one half mile by one half mile, as Dennis writes in a short book about his family’s farm—dates to this first generation of immigrants, of whom there exists no photographs.

In the brief history that Dennis wrote, however, he does not start with his family, but first traces the story of the land itself from its glaciation 10,000 years ago through millennia of prairie. Both in his speech and his writing, Dennis is precise and clear in his usage of numbers. A lover of algebra, he studied mathematics in college before moving to Fort Dodge, where he taught math to high schoolers for eight years, a job that introduced him to Patty Heithoff, who had also been a math teacher.

By his own admission, he never thought he’d continue the tradition of farming when he was a boy. I asked about his early memories on the farm—tasks he enjoyed or disliked—and he didn’t need any time to respond about the latter. “My all-time least favorite task was walking beans. This was when farmers had volunteer corn in their soybeans, and a crew of people would go out there in the summer to pull the plants,” emphasizing every adjective, “when it was hot… and wet… and dewy… and muddy.”

On the other hand, harvest, the season which Dennis mentioned as his favorite, is fundamental to his image of farming—what it means to be rewarded for a year of problem solving and industrious solitude in collaboration with nature. “Harvest, to this day, is my favorite. On a nice, crisp, fall day when the sun is out, and the wind is blowing, and the crops are all grown. You and nature have done your job for the year, and you get to see the results of your efforts.”

Like most farmers of his generation, he has witnessed the innumerable changes to agriculture from the time of horses and harnesses to genetics and GPS. The theme of changing technology and its implications for the life of farmers returned a few different times during my interview. In each case, Dennis was even-handed in his view of technological leaps, stating firstly “Nothing is either right or wrong in terms of mechanization. It’s just the way things have gone.”

It was 1981, during the height of the farm crisis, when Dennis moved back to Floyd County to care for the same 160 acres he was raised on. During this time, while family farms folded across the state, Dennis’s father encountered health issues and Dennis felt called to return. This confluence of cultural and familial factors, as well as Patty’s desire to return to rural life, brought the Staudts back to Floyd County where they would raise three children. In addition to crops, they also raised hogs for their first 20 years on the land, and Patty is a Master Gardener—raising a diversity of plants, including many apple trees.

When I asked Dennis about what he hopes will change in Iowan agriculture and what he hopes will remain the same, his responses affirmed a deep value of both tradition and innovation. About what needs to change, Dennis spoke of economics: “For a young person interested in getting started, it’s brutal with all the capital that’s involved: first to get control of some land, and then a whole fleet of farm machinery. You almost need to have help from another generation to begin.”

Dennis’s concern for the next generation echoes his broader hope that families—both new and old to the life of farming—can viably continue to support themselves and be a significant part of Iowa’s rural landscape. Regarding the significance of the autonomy of small farmers, Dennis said this: “If you can be the owner of a small farm and have everything at stake, then you have a little more skin in the game. It becomes a little more yours. I fear that things will just get bigger and bigger. You can make a living on not that many acres.”

Late in our conversation, the cat that had been curiously lurking around the garage during our interview jumped into my lap without warning. Dennis laughed and explained that John—the cat—didn’t get along with other cats at the shelter where he and Patty got him. He’d been in “solitary confinement” and, similarly, didn’t associate much with other cats on the farm. However, he felt comfortable and confident in the garage, which Patty had converted into a veritable greenhouse to raise her many garden plants from seed.

It struck me that both Dennis and Patty deeply loved the science and the minute details of their lifestyle—industriously and happily blurring the lines between art and science in their attitudes towards the life of farming. Regarding the reasons why he farms rather than working an 8 to 5, I can’t tell it as well as Dennis does in his own book, so I’ll include each reason he wrote, verbatim, because of their value and poetry.

Nothing in life compares to the anticipation and promise of a new growing season on the first day of planting.

Nothing compares to the satisfaction of a job well done and a good harvest.

Witnessing the miracle of planting one kernel of corn seed, and 150 days later having a majestic, 10-foot-high plant with one ear on it, containing over 600 kernels of corn.

Being rewarded for attention to detail (and punished for lack thereof—sounds fair).

Being outdoors, amidst the beauty of God’s creation.

The solitude involved in farming is invaluable. It affords one the opportunity to clear one’s mind of clutter, and to focus on what is really important.

Getting to do what I believe I was put on this earth to do.

For all these things, I am grateful.

In each of his answers and in the way he tells the story of the Staudt farm in his book, Dennis affirms that his work on the farm is just a tiny part of a larger story equal parts familial, ecological, and spiritual. I asked a final question about whether his Catholicism plays a part in his conservation, to which Dennis immediately said, “Yes, to a large part. This is not my land. This is land that I am privileged to use and maintain for a few years, here on this earth. And when I’m done doing that, it’s my duty to have that land just as good as when I started if not better.”

Richard Frailing