Dirt in a bag

Recently, I was in Boone, Iowa, trekking around the Farm Progress Show, when rain hit the grounds. Soon after lightning shut the show down, I waded through mud to get back to our car.

There was mud in my shoes, in my socks and in between my toes and it wasn’t the kind of mud I was used to.

“This is the kind of dirt we buy in a bag in western Kansas,” I thought. This black, black dirt with organic matter in spades that I was washing down the drain was exactly like the dirt I bought for my flowerbed labeled “top soil.”

What would it be like, I wondered, to be a farmer in Iowa—just like many of you do? What if I had black dirt with lots of potential to plant my crop into each spring? How easy would that be?

What a trap that is. The grass is always greener, they say, and I know “they” are right.

No matter the area you live, no matter your soil type, no matter what crops you grow, we all face challenges. In western Kansas, we might fight drought, wind and weeds with regularity. In Iowa, they need tile lines to whisk away too much water. In Texas, the heat can burn up a crop in a matter of days.

And not that I’m happy about your challenges, but if this farming and ranching profession was easy, you wouldn’t need High Plains Journal nearly as much.

There would be no need for farm shows where millions of dollars worth of technology and equipment is offered to solve nearly every problem a farmer could experience. Is it difficult to bale your hay at exactly the right humidity? There’s a steamer to fix that. Does your farm struggle with compaction? There’s a piece of iron, a cover crop and a soil additive that could all help depending on your situation.

The theme of nearly every booth I visited was “efficiency” or “productivity.” I don’t think farmers 100 years ago could have fathomed a grain cart that could load a semi in 90 seconds. Frankly, grain carts and semis would have been unbelievable.

What is consistent across time and across all geographies is that the agriculture industry will never sit still. Farmers will always want to do more with less. They will always want to find exactly the right way to find the most profit despite their limitations.

And they will always want to improve their soil. Which is why I may have been slightly tempted to scrape that mud into a bag and bring it home with me. I didn’t. But I was tempted.

Holly Martin can be reached at 1-800-452-7171, ext. 1806, or [email protected].