I am thankful to be a farmer. My family’s farm is in the southwest quarter of Section Four, Colfax Township, Pocahontas County, Iowa, in what is considered a prairie pothole region. The land was opened for settlement via the Swamp Land Act of 1850. But it wasn’t until the 1870s, when dredge boats cut ditches through the sloughs and hungry immigrants dug tile lines to drain the marshes, that settlement began in earnest. Pioneers unknown to me broke the prairie sod, and in 1899 my great-great grandfather bought 240 acres for his son, with the deed signed on 9.9.99—auspicious, indeed. We have been here ever since.
In Iowa, as in other states, when your family has owned a farm for 100 years, you can apply to the Department of Agriculture and be recognized as a “Century Farm.” You can even brave the heat, hills, and hordes of people at the State Fair to receive your plaque at a special ceremony. Certainly, enduring family farms are a thing to celebrate.
Yet, there is a funny phenomenon about these Century Farm signs. They will often be attached to a highline pole, fence post, or lone tree, with nary a farm in sight. Maybe I’m the only one who finds this odd, but does a quarter-section of corn by itself constitute a farm?
In other words, what constitutes the essence of a farm? Farms produce crops, and Pocahontas County glacial till is undeniably productive. One acre can easily get you 200+ bushels of corn one year and 60+ bushels of soybeans the next. The corn/soybean duopoly does feed our nation—but whether it feeds us well is up for debate. The average field in Pocahontas County has grown nothing but corn and soybeans for at least a generation. Like our best and brightest youth, most of the hay fields, pastures, and small grains up and left the countryside long ago. No, a monocrop of corn or beans on its own is not a farm.
Can a farm be a farm by raising livestock? Rural Iowa raises a lot of livestock, leading the nation in pork production with over 24 million hogs, and we’re also #1 in eggs—over 13 billion laid by 43 million hens in 2024. Don’t like bacon and eggs? Well, we’ve got 3.5 million head of cattle too. Lots and lots of livestock. But good luck seeing them when you drive around, since most are kept indoors all their lives. I get it. Confinements are easier, more productive, and they make good money. I don’t want to be too hard on my fellow farmers; we are all just trying to make it in life, and confined, intensive animal raising is how a lot of folks are able to get into or stay in farming. However, I don’t think anyone would drive by a lone hog confinement or an egg-laying super-complex and confuse it for a farm.
Can a farm be a farm if it is too big? Farms in Iowa are big and, like the average waistline, getting bigger. Most farmers around here seem to think they need at least 2,000 acres to make a living. But Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution warns that farms cannot scale indefinitely: “The more the farmer increases the scale of his operation, the more his body and spirit are dissipated and the further he falls away from a spiritually satisfying life.” That is a bit Zen for rural Iowa, but Fukuoka is onto something. Is meaningful communion with God’s creation possible when your X9 John Deere combine can harvest 30 acres an hour? Not a lot of time to get to know the place. Eventually, we aren’t running farms, we are running tech-powered corn plantations.
Which leads to a fourth, crucial question: Can a farm be a farm without people? Our modern agricultural system is a marvel, wildly productive and efficient doing more with less (the title of a good cookbook too). But that efficiency comes at a cost. The “more” we get is cheap and affordable food, while the “less” we get is fewer farmers. Bigger fields, bigger barns, bigger machines … and fewer people. During my grandfather’s childhood there was a country schoolhouse every four square miles; my boys now go to a school with a catchment area of 165 square miles spanning 3 counties. You can’t have a farm divorced from community, and you can’t have community without people. A farm isn’t a farm without a farmer.
Those Century Farm signs aren’t manning their lonely outposts simply for filial piety or the momentary diversion of a passing motorist. There used to be farms there. Real farms, with a variety of crops and livestock, with barns and fences, with gardens and trees, with farmers and families. Real farms do more than just grow crops and cattle—they are an integral part of our country and our culture. As Wendell Berry writes in his afterword to The Unsettling of America, our goal ought to be “an authentic settlement and inhabitation of our country.” 150 years ago, we drained the swamp and broke the prairie; we settled this land and inhabited it. Now, as the people drift away, our grip on authentic habitation feels as tenuous as a rattling sign tacked to a fence post.
Image Credit: John Whetten Ehninger, “October” (1867)
