About Me...Only

Most of the people who visit this site are nosy and always asking, "So what are you doing?"
And I try my best not to answer, and to leave the room as quickly as possible. Yesterday I was forced to answer that question for credit. Here is how I did it. If you pay close attention you will know everything I've done.

Here's the Presentation

I don't ever talk in public, but when I do, I find it difficult to only talk for 15 minutes. But for Steve Pett, I'll try to do anything. So here we go with my presentation (read slide, pointing out the simplest most basic things, like my name.) I have a lot of field experience. I like to say that I've doctored more dissertations than Gregory House.














I've woken up at 3:00am to chase after birds in Arizona.














I've run away from cows outside of Flagstaff, AZ.














I've sexed Muskies in Shoepack Lake, MN.














I've chased butterflys in CRP in Minnesota. Of all my dissertation doctoring, only my wife mentioned me, "and Gordon Reeder assisted with all portions of the project." Which is nice.














I've even fleeced Monsanto of a couple of thousand dollars looking for birds in 3 cropping systems.














So when I started into this MFA I figured I would do something equally exciting, like searching for the Elusive Javelina of Story County.














But then...Something happened. And I no longer was all that interested in sleeping on the ground in far off counties.














In fact, I decided to become an entirely different person.














But I still wanted to do something I've never done before. I decided to work in an office, where I would see the same people everyday. And if you look closely, you'll see her. [which is funny because, I switched tenses, AND, she was sitting in the audience.]














Happily, I got a chance to intern for Practical Farmers of Iowa. And then I bassically read this slide. Ending with PFI has an active and vibrant membership.














For a non-profit its size PFI does a tremendous amount of work. From program areas in Niche Pork, Grazing, Youth and the Next Generation, horticulture and Field Crops...to sponsering over 30 Field days each year with more than 1900 people attending in 2008 alone...to conducting On-Farm research and Demonstration projects with 40 families doing research in 2008

PFI functions as a clearing house of information. At a field day last week the host said, "I went to school for a long time to learn about farming and Agriculture, but everything I know about farming I learned from PFI."

At its core Practical Farmers is a networking system that brings farmers and non-farmers together to talk about sustainable, healthy, fiscally sound agriculture.



Which brings me to what I do for them. Besides constantly changing computers and complaining about how slow the one I'm working on is...I've signed on to help update and maintain their website. Which will look different in the coming weeks. I maintain their calendar of events, update the list serve, call the media to make sure they've received press releases, and help coordinate a couple of field days.














Until recently the largest portion of my job has been taking old PDF documents and converting them to searchable HTML pages. So that This...














Becomes this...
Which is maybe not that dramatic, but it lead to a discussion of how PFI can better utilize the internet as the best tool to expand your information base.














I've even started a PFIblog, which will be on-line soon.














And in a sort of culmination of my ISUCOMM career, utilizing techniques I learned in Stephen F. Pett's class and taught to many a 105 student, PFI allowed me to desigin their Annual Report.














Can you believe that I used to teach this?
But Lets get serious for a moment...














I find that my life is cyclical, I guess, but cyclical with a square wheel. There are times where I am apathetic, feeling like there is nothing going on but the news, (and all the news is, is video of a 1978 buffalo snow storm) and I wonder if I am ever going to learn anything again. Other times I'm just doing my thing, going along like a popsong or a mini-van. Sure I'm doing stuff, making movements...but it never occurs to me to think what it means. And then there are times in my life when I feel challenged, where I feel like everything I encounter is a re-constructor of my framework, an interesting, vital, unusual nugget that demands attention. These are my PFI days.
Finally, the other opportunity PFI has afforded me is work on their quarterly newsletter. Even giving me my own column. What I'll read is this issues essay, which you'll observe is a intro and a conclusion with a gaping hole in between. Thanks.

Seashells and Balloons

Spring sprung, the red-winged blackbirds are back. I saw my first one on the fence row along the high way, but I didn’t see the arm bar, so I wasn’t positive. Red-winged blackbirds are like chicken pox, rarely do you see just one. Just when I began to doubt myself because I had not seen another bird in 2 or 3 miles, I saw the clear flash of red topping yellow, and then a hundred yards on I saw a bird full out, sitting on a barren tree branch. By the next morning almost every fence post and lupin stalk held a blackbird, it was as though they were a sheet shaken out to dry and I was watching them settle down all over Iowa. Pregnancy is like that, absent for ages it appears as though magically, overnight, brown grass turning green. In my household pregnancy was like the dark spec on your eye that you can only see if you are not looking straight on. After “trying” for 4 or 5 years, we got busy and stressed and looked away, and all of the sudden got pregnant. And pregnant again, and our family grew from a boy and a girl to a husband and wife, 2 daughters, and 2 girl dogs. Even my fleas are women.

As I was driving into Ames this morning, the sky to the east was just beginning to show red. 2 geese rose slowly out of the shadowed tree line. In the dark the birds seemed spectral, pre-historic. The tree’s lining I-35, pretended to boarder a wetlands, and I thought again about what it means to say Iowa. What Iowa might have been and what it might become. The geese flew slowly into the wind as I sped towards Ames. I was left staring over my windshield with empty eyes, the Willa Cather dream of sitting atop a horse, flowers blooming from horizon to horizon, impossible. Unseen, but I knew they were there, new wind turbines rotated and blinked in the Eastern sky. Hurriedly I tipped my saber towards them.

In Walker Percy’s great book The Moviegoer the main character is a sort of angst ridden stock broker who conceives of the possibility of a search. What he doesn’t know is if 99% of the world is wrong and he’s on to something, or if everyone else is clued in and he is clueless. The first time I saw Iowa, I was 17 and driving between Iowa City and the Davenport (this is possible because I drove from Dubuque to Iowa City in a fog and ice storm so thick that I couldn’t even see the black top), I had hair past my nipples and a belly button 1/5^th the size it is now. I drove my fathers Toyota Corolla, a car that would eventually take me from Massachusetts to Oregon, and Georgia to Arizona, an irregular square of what life is like with trees and/or without water. At 17 my impression of Iowa was that it could be beautiful but it wasn’t. It didn’t have the charismatic mega-landscapes of oceans and mountains and canyons that people faun over. It wasn’t dotted with 10,000 precious little lakes or 60 story sky scrapers. What it did have was space, perspective, and opportunity, that seemed to have failed in its quest.

The red-winged blackbirds have been home for a couple of weeks now, their call of konk-a-riiii, is as constant as a cicada’s chirp, and I can almost not wait for them to group up in August and bugger off south. But I stop myself from wishing because to banish the blackbirds would be like loving an infant fresh from the birth canal and then despising it when it cried.

“Its not ceptable, Leila” My daughter who is 2.5 likes to say to her baby sister. I cringe because it’s what I say to her when I get angry. Having children is like watching yourself in a funhouse mirror, they reflect only the images that make you seem ridiculous. Iowa is a mirror too, and after living in Roland for 8 years I am starting to be able to pick out the real pieces and not just the distorted ones. Although it is easy to point out its stereotyped dysfunctions—the endless miles of corn and bean fields, or, 6 months out of the year dirt and stubble, the main streets with boarded up businesses, the stupid ice storms and ceaseless wind,—that is what people think of Iowa, it goes on and on without end and yet is somehow vacant. To stop there is to assume that the crying child never shuts up, or the frustrated father is a cruel parent. those are easy assumptions that get in the way of compassion and understanding.

Removal, is an 18^th century idea that by representing Native Americans as a lost, fragile, retreating, doomed, spectral race, we could pay lip service to their importance while allowing them to slip away. After all it is not us that is allowing their genocide, its pre-ordained. It occurs to me that the small town, the family farm, the diverse farm, is suffering a similar fate of removal. Find me a politician, a doctor, a lawyer, a tow truck driver that wants to get rid of the family or the family farm? Where is the real-estate developer who argues farmland is unimportant? No one will admit to throwing out the 200 acre farm, they will merely bemoan that family farms are slipping away.

Do you know what we do with things that are slipping away? We put them in zoo’s, preserves, children’s books and on reservations. We draw fences around them and move on. We are the stories we tell, and as with all stories, what are the facts? Native Americans didn’t vanish, and neither have small farms or sustainable ideas, cows still lie with turkeys, chickens still mix with goats. You just gotta look for them. Our job, PFI’s job, is to make that looking easy, like Eva Gabor.

Now I'd like to introduce one of my favorite people.