Take a Deep Breath and Smell the…crap

Well, the snow has finally melted, and the farm equipment is once again on the road. This is one aspect of rural Iowa living that always seems to get overshadowed. As you drive along these nice straight roads, suddenly you’ll spot a tractor that would be more at home in the world of Mad Max, tooling along at around 25 miles per hour, sporting a clearance of six feet or looking like a futuristic command center. These machines are huge, and they need to be too. Farms out here span hundreds, if not thousands of acres. Any farmer that has less than a hundred acres of farmland out here is thought of as a hobby farmer. I remember when I was growing up, and the couple of years when I lived with my parents, and they decided to plant a garden. Tilling the ground was a couple hours’ worth of work that meant pushing an archaic rototiller with an engine that looked more at home mounted on a car, occasionally stopping when the blades tried to cut through rocks and roots, which had to be manually removed. My mom usually wondered just how hard this could be, and really did it need to take a couple hours? There’s no really good way to answer that without seriously dishonoring the fifth commandment.

So modern farming, at least modern farming done by actual families and individuals, requires a lot of machinery. And with any business, there’s a lot of overhead costs to consider. One of the drivers at my company owns tens of thousands of acres, which he farms. According to him, he makes around $100,000 a year.  I was thinking that was pretty good for a farmer—heck, it’s pretty good for anyone!  I’ll take it! However, the combine that he uses to harvest his crops? $100,000. And that’s just one of the vehicles he has to buy. To give you some sense of comparison, that’s the price of a small cottage, even without factoring in the cost of maintenance, fuel, and the occasional repair.

Another aspect of farming, one which I’m sure no books on the subject have covered, is the ever-present smell of manure, which is a fancy word for saying crap. When I was growing up in the rural areas of northern Michigan, I was occasionally exposed to the smell. There were a lot of farmers and Amish around, and occasionally in a parking lot there would be what are poetically called “road apples.”  I have no idea who came up with this nickname, but I’m willing to bet he had a sick sense of humor. If you’ve never smelled horse or cow manure, it’s not as bad as, say, the restrooms at a New York bus terminal. It still smells like crap, though, and it permeates the air of Cresco. Currently, when I walk out the door to my apartment, the first breath I take smells like cow manure. Or horse manure. I’m not entirely sure which it is, and I have no great desire to find out.

You get used to the smell, which is a small blessing, and it’s not exactly overpowering, but I will say that living in an area where you live in a sub-zero arctic hell for six months and the other six months you start your day by smelling cow crap really kind of puts the rest of your problems into perspective. The northeastern Iowans may be some of the most stoic people I know. They’re affected by tragedy the same as anyone else, but other things, like injury up to the point of losing a limb, don’t really get under their skin.

However, the smell of pig crap is an injury which no one can really ignore. There are a couple pig farms around here, and both of them smell like a sewage plant. Actually, that’s an unfair comparison—sewage plants smell a lot better. Still, I defy anyone to drive by a pig farm one day and eat pork within the same 24-hour period. I mentioned there are two pig farms—one just outside of town and the other about eight miles away. I pass them both on my way to and from work, and it’s amazing how they’ve managed to position themselves so that as the odor of one pig farm fades, the other picks it up like a baton in a relay. The only conclusion I can come to is that pig farmers are jerks. There may be another explanation, but that’s the only one that crosses my mind right now.  In fact, true story, one of the people my company employs has his house across from one of the pig farms. This wasn’t on purpose—the guy built his house first, and then a few years later the pig farmers came in and built a huge barn, and as it turns out living next door to a pig farm seriously lowers the property value.  Personally, if I were in that situation I’d be thinking of several hundred pounds of barbecued pork, but that’s just me.