So today was interesting. Make that HOT and interesting. I think it was about 95 in Fairfield Iowa today when I left there in the mid afternoon. Ugh lol. I mark today as the first official day of serious research for the Iowa Prairie Documentary Project. I drove the one hour and change from my home in Iowa City to Fairfield and marveled at the endless rows of corn. I mean…I can’t say enough about how much land here is ruled by corn. It’s really bonkers to me to see all this land under the dominion of a single crop…a practice that any farmer knows breaks the land. I’m not a farmer and even I know it. You can simply look out at any non farmed piece of Earth and see that nature has a different set of rules, a different kind of design. Diversity is nature’s design because it’s what works. And here we are, trying to force dollars out of the ground against all logic, using more and more fertilizer like amphetamines to resurrect the tired and overworked soil.

One of my favorite quotes of all time is this: “A Fallow Field Is A Crime Against The Land” I thought it was a direct quote from Steinbeck’s book “Grapes of Wrath”, but it seems it is not. I can’t find where I discovered that exact quote, but what it meant to me was quite poignant. For me it meant (please note the past tense usage) that the land was the victim. The land was suffering, because it wasn’t under the command of what people wanted. It meant that not growing food is wrong. Not making the land productive is wrong. As a young person I strongly identified with this mandate…that it’s our right to put the land to our designs however we see fit. In my mind, we didn’t have to justify it. That began to drastically change when I became an outdoorsy hippie in my twenties.

Now, to me, a monoculture field is a type of crime against the land. And a fallow field is a chance at recovery. A fallow field never to be plowed again is a chance at redemption, to undo the harm that’s been done. Not in all cases mind you, but compared to King Corn, yes.

I am 53 years old ya’ll…and if you had told me even 2 years ago that I’d be writing this down this post in an Amish town’s (Kalona, IA) coffee house, after returning from Fairfield where I toured 2 different restored prairies…I would have quite simply said “but I will never live in the midwest, so that’s impossible”

Today was wild though. I learned so so much about what is happening with restored prairie. I met with folks, who between the 7 of them, possess over 100 years of combined prairie restoration know how. I got my first glimpse of actual restored prairie, got to walk barefoot along the firebreak pathways…oh…and now I know what a firebreak is. It would be too cumbersome to recount everything that I gleaned from these folks. And I won’t have to, because at least one of them is going to tell us in her own words…I am returning next weekend; one of them has agreed to commit to an interview for the Iowa Prairie Documentary Project Podcast. And three of the others I met are pondering doing the same a little bit further down the road.

Stay tuned for that interview. And if you’d like to listen to Episode One, which is me talking about my motivations and influences that led to the beginning of this project, that was released yesterday. Currently I believe it’s only on the main Simplecast site…not quite filtered down to Spotify and the others yet. Click on the pic to listen.

And finally here’s two pics I took today…