Changes in rural America

I left the farm exactly 50 years ago. Having grown up in rural Iowa, I've not lived on and have rarely visited a farm since heading off to college in the big city of Iowa City in September of 1970.

So I am always amazed in the ways in which farming and life in small towns here in the Midwest has changed. On a road trip (primarily to hike state parks in west central Minnesota), it was fascinating to take in not just the beautiful foliage of the area, but the harvest as well. Farmers, or perhaps "agricultural workers", were busy combining soybeans and corn. We saw a few loads of sugar beets as well, but we were a bit south of sugar beet country, I think. Our trip took us through Willmar, Ortonville, Pelican Rapids, Alexandria, Morris, and innumerable small towns inbetween.

When I was a kid in 50s and 60s, my dad had a corn picker that only separated the corn from the stock. The whole corn ear was then stored in a corn crib. Just before going to market, he would hire someone with a sheller to come to the farm where the kernels would be brushed from the cobs. My sister and I gloried in those days since thousands of mice escaped from the corn crib where until that time they had been living fat and happy lives. An often repeated family tale is when my sister came to the house and said in disgusted voice, "Dad says if I'm going to stomp on mice, I gotta wear shoes." We fed our harvest of mice to somewhat ungrateful cats.

Today's farmer uses a combine to harvest corn. A combine is a "combination" of tractor, corn picker, and sheller. Only corn kernels are now stored. I don't know what farm kids do for fun anymore without mice to catch. This equipment is gigantic, as are the tractors, wagons, planters, discs, sprayers, and other farm implements, having increased in capacity from four rows to a dozen that are turned in a single pass. Had one of these monsters suddenly become a Transformer, I would have been in the least surprised.

Hay baling for me was having a neighborhood gathering in which my Uncle Pete who owned the baler would circulate to four or five different adjoining farms, where his machine would produce 40-50 pound rectangular shaped bale of hay. These were loaded on to a hay wagon and pulled back to the barn, where a pulley system with large forks on one end and small tractor on the other, pulled the bales, four at time up into the haymow. With a trip of a rope, the forks would release and bales drop, where workers (usually high school boys since the temps were often over 100 in the mow), would stack them for storage. The haymow made a great place for us kids to play as well. I suppose I was nine or ten, when given the job of driving the small tractor back and forth that pulled the hay rope. The pride of eating at the "men's table" at lunch was payment.

Today, hay is formed into giant rolls - and I have no idea how it is stored. But I do love the look of the round giant rolls of hay as they form patterns in the fields.

My dad farmed an average 320 acres back in the day - one half of one square mile. My cousin, last I knew, farmed over 2000 acres - over three square miles. And the fields in western Minnesota often seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, with trucks generating great clouds of dust far out in the fields. Not the endless prairie, but close to it.

My traveling companion who is a city girl asked a lot of questions about the farming we saw. Questions like "What's the difference between hay and straw?" I could still answer. But too many of them I simply could not.

These economies of scale have impacted the small towns through we drove as well. (Johnson, Minnesota, Population 29.) Some towns like Pelican Rapids which has a large community of lake cabin owners nearby seemed to be doing OK. In others, the grain elevator and a few scattered old houses were about all that was left. Nearly every town had a Mexican restaurant and often a supermercado as well - I did not eat Mexican food until moving to Colorado during college. I often wonder what the critical mass of a town needs to be to support a water and sewer system. My hometown of Sac City, Iowa, has dropped in population from a high of 3300 in 1960 to only about 2000 today. About three fourths of farmsteads I remember from my youth are now gone, simply plowed under. I believe I read that less than three percent of all Americans are now directly working in agriculture.

I was surprised to see quite a number of Biden/Harris political signs on both rural roads and in small towns. Although far outnumbered by Trump/Pence banners, it indicates to me that the Democrats may do better in these red counties than one might assume. When I was a kid my dad was a staunch Democrat; my mom an Eisenhower Republican, having grown up the daughter of small town businessman. The tide turned sometime. Interesting thing about tides, they do change fairly often...

Rural America, I'm sure, will continue to evolve. And I am guessing it may become even less recognizable before it is time to "plant" me.