We spent last weekend at my hometown’s big annual event and doing our yearly pilgrimage to the Iowa State Fair with our granddaughter.
While we were at the fair some banners containing information about Iowa’s agricultural output caught my eye.
I started doing some research and came across some interesting and sometimes counterintuitive facts.
For instance, we all know that the family farm is being wiped out by giant corporate agriculture. The big mega-corporations are systematically crushing the small farmer and driving mom and pop operations off the lands. The plains look like an updated version of The Grapes of Wrath with families straggling into the cities, their belongings piled high on the pickup, so pop can do night stock at the Hy-Vee grocery store and mom can work at Starbucks. Right? Isn’t that what the populist politicians and the media have taught us and shown us – over and over and over again? If it is shouted in the stump speech and appears on TV and in print doesn’t that make it fact?
Actually, in 2002 there were 379 non family corporate farms in Iowa, or 0.42% of the 90,655 farms in the state.
See what else I learned at:
http://www.hackneys.com/docs/iowa-factoids.pdf