Changes
in Farming Life: Part 2
by Michael Carey
[Editors note: This is presentation is an excerpt from a speech Michael Carey delivered to the Montgomery County Historical Society in Red Oak, on the occasion of the dedication of the Nims barn on the Montgomery County Historical Society Grounds.]
In the short 20 years or so that I have been farming in SW Iowa, I have already seen many changes in farming and its sustained and sustaining communities. Gone is the intensive plowing that was still going on when I started and its subsequent clouds of wind blown dust. Gone is almost every chemical we used back than as our knowledge of the pesticides themselves and their residual effect on the soil and its people has grown and changed. I don't "walk the beans" anymore. I have air-conditioning in my house and sometimes even in my tractor. I don't have to carry drinking water from town anymore in a big orange cooler to be propped up on top of the refrigerator and dribble down its side all week long. I don't get dirty anymore when I take a shower in the in iron-red well water. Come spring, there are no longer chicks chirping away on my back porch. "Minimum-till" and "no-till" were exotic words back then, as were "terraces": now, they are commonplace.
But perhaps the most lasting and disturbing change I have seen is the disappearance of people - young hard-working farm families on the land. Each year, it takes more and more land to make a minimum income. As the older generation retires, the younger generation is not moving in. Neighbors by up the land just to try to keep themselves going
The size of the average farm is steadily increasing [and yet the number of farmers is decreasing]. In 1960, there were 7 million farmers.
By 1970, there were 6 million.
By 1980, there were only 4 million. By 1999 that number was down to 2 million. ...
Compare that to where
the population was in 1900 and you'll see how far we've come, how much has changed
in such a short time. If present economic trends continue, one wonders if the
whole state won't eventually be just one huge farm growing one enormous ear
of corn three hundred miles long and one hundred miles wide - run by one minimum
wage teenager sitting idly by the computer.
Poet and farmer Michael Carey
is from Farragut in Southwest Iowa. He hosts our weekly sampling of poetry taken
from the state’s fertile literary soil. The Humanities Iowa radio program,
called “Voices from the Prairie,” can be heard Saturday mornings on
KMA 960 AM radio in Shenandoah and FM 90.9 KUNI radio in Cedar Falls as well
as translator stations throughout the state. Michael is also a member of our
Humanities Iowa Speakers Bureau. For more information about his presentations
contact our office at 319-335-4153.