The Final Harvest

This is the Muench Farm.  I took this photo just east of us at the corner of George Washington Carver and Cameron School Rd, looking southwest.

The Muench Farm is the 40 acres directly south of us.  According to our abstract and the Muench widow in MN who used to own this land, this is the last of the ground still tied to the original farm our farmstead sits on.  Mrs Muench had no intention of selling to a developer, but as you age, it becomes an option that is almost financially impossible to pass up.  I would likely do the same if I was her.

The 80 acres just west of the Muench Farm, south of Jamison’s (our neigbor), is the Dankbar Farm.  It has also been sold to the same developer.  Peterson’s have farmed the Muench Farm and Forth’s have farmed the Dankbar Farm for years, probably decades.  If asked, I’m sure that Ron Peterson, or Steve Forth, or Bob Jensen, or Richard DeMoss, or any number of others who have been around as long as they have could tell you exactly how long.

(Warning, this paragraph contains graphic educational content so you may want to skip:  40 acres is a quarter mile by a quarter mile square.  80 acres is a quarter mile by a half mile.  160 acres is a half mile by a half mile.  A section is a square mile of 640 acres.  Back in the day a family could typically handle a quarter section, or 160 acres.  This is why there tends to be no fewer than 4 original farmsteads around each square mile of Iowa gravel road.  Today the Dankbar 80 represents a minuscule fraction of the total land that Forth’s farm, but it is conceivable, along with hogs, laying hens, milk cows, and broiler chickens that a family could’ve made a living on those 80 acres into the 1960’s.  Maybe you learned something new.  Or maybe you’re saying “Duh, that’s common knowledge.”  OK, school’s out.  Sidetone: only Forth’s know exactly how many acres Forth’s farm.  Don’t ever ask them.  It’s tacky.)

Neither the Muench or Dankbar farms have ever belonged to us.  But our trespassing children have spent countless hours over their years traipsing through them, both on foot and on the 4-wheeler, on their many adventurous excursions of nearly a mile to Squaw Creek and its timber.  Most times it was just our three always accompanied by Holly our loyal Chocolate lab.

Sometimes friends, cousins, and maybe a barn cat or two tried to keep up.  To my knowledge a pig never went along, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it had.

There might be one more soybean crop on the Muench Farm, or part of it anyway, but this was the last corn harvest.

It’s easy for me to tend toward judgement and hypocrisy when it comes to all this.  I am both a professional judge and hypocrite.  Keep reading…

My family farms in a part of the state (and Kris’s in a part of Ontario) where a piece of farm ground with a corn suitability rating over 80 is unheard of.  They’d give a limb for ground that rich to raise crops on. Fertility like that is common here in central Iowa.

My bias is that this ground is best suited for crop production. Not homes, apartments, and a commercial node.  Hypocrisy looks me in the eye when I eat at the Cafe, a favorite restaurant of ours built on the same type of fertile land. 

We like the Cafe. It didn’t exist back in 1992 when Taylor’s had their hog confinement barns on their farm just across 24th St from Schilleter Village, and all of the Somerset neighborhood development was Taylor farmland.

Many of our friends live in neighborhoods that just a few years ago, used to be prime farm ground.

In fact all of us live on land that 175 years ago was prairie or woodlands.

So did this bother me before it was literally right in my own backyard? 

Well, yes, to a degree. 

I cringe when I see another City of Ames sign announcing a planned re-zoning in another farm field between Ames and Gilbert, the “Urban Transition Area” we’re located in and that’s usually colored pink on their maps.

We’ve been to meetings to hear from the developer, the city, and the county about the need for more homes and more neighborhoods for the explosive growth of the area.  I’m no expert, but I’m not sure I’m buying what they’re selling.  Astronomical growth at ISU for sure, but the Ames population has been flat at least in the 25 years we’ve been here, has it not?  If I’m wrong here, it wouldn’t be the first time, but I’ve yet to see numbers that convince me otherwise.

Anyway, students aren’t going to be living between Ames and Gilbert.  So where are all these people coming from?!?  And where’s the affordable housing??  Doesn’t matter, because the developer didn’t buy the ground to collect farm rent from Peterson and Forth.  They bought it because it’s a certainty that they can sell the lots.  

They will.  And the people will come.

And so will all the houses, that in my opinion, look all the same.  

Here’s the thing about development like this.  Every farm field you and I drive past represents decades of toil and hard work.  It is land that 150 years ago was broken and cleared by the sweat and hard work of someone's great-great grandfather, his wife and all their children, so they could clear it, drain it, raise a crop on it, and make a decent living.

Each individual field has its own legacy attached to it. Drought, flood, toil, frost, hail, wind, planting, harvest, failure, success.  Real families, with real names, and real faces, an unbroken chain through the generations.  Real people.

If we would ever want to - and I’m not saying we would want to, but if we would ever want to - we could remove the drainage tile lines, seed it with native prairie grasses, and basically restore it the way it was all those centuries ago, prairie potholes and all.

A neighborhood is different.  Could we ever undo a neighborhood?  Isn’t a piece of creation forever (and ever) altered beyond restoration?

It’s progress, right?  Who in their right mind, in this country of free enterprise and independence and mega-millions, would ever stand in the way of progress?

Besides, I spent a lot of time writing this, and if you’re still with me you’ve already spent a lot of time reading it.  There are a lot more important things happening in the world today.  People are dying in churches and at outdoor concerts and at Wal-Mart.  Humans killing humans.  Male and female, image-bearers of God, created in His likeness to reflect His glory, hunting each other.  The world’s gone mad.  Who cares about a few acres of dirt?  Even if it is the best kind.

Beautiful, black, Iowa dirt.

Goodbye forever, Muench Farm.