Dick Thompson is standing in his machine shed, microphone in hand, striding across the front of an impromptu auditorium of folding chairs occupied by some one hundred farmers, university people, and others among the agriculturally curious. With the portable speaker slung over his shoulder Dick can move around a lot, and he does, asking for questions and answering questions, asking for answers and questioning answers: A talk-show host in blue overalls. He favors Liberty overalls, as it happens, and it says so in blue letters across the front of the bib. He is also wearing his trademark red shirt (sleeves rolled up) with black wing-tips on his feet, gold-rimmed glasses on his blue-eyed ruddy face, and a blue cap on his silver-white hair that reads “PFI: Practical Farmers of Iowa.”

It’s the annual PFI field day on the Thompson farm. Dick is explaining how it is that he, Sharon, their son Rex, and their daughter-in-law Lisa can make a good living for two families in an environmentally friendly way on just three hundred acres while most of the rest of Iowa’s farmers are busily gobbling up their neighbors’ land, and thus their communities, in order to reach the magical goal of A Thousand Acres—to quote the title of Jane Smiley’s dark novel of Iowa agriculture. And every year a lot of people come to the Thompson farm, and to other PFI farms, to find out just how they manage it.

“Your neighbor or your neighbor’s farm?” Dick repeats. “You’ve got to ask yourself that.”

He lets the point settle in, and the crowd thinks over the seemingly inexorable advance of agricultural industrialization and modernization across the American rural landscape that each year drives out another half percent or so of farms. Most farmers in Iowa rely on their corn and soybean crops and
60 percent of the state is covered by these two plants alone, some twenty-two million out of the state’s total of thirty-six million acres.

Prices vary, but in a good year a grain farmer can expect to make maybe thirty to forty dollars an acre profit—but only after the government chips in thirty to forty dollars an acre in subsidies. When the federal government is feeling particularly generous, as it has been since 1999, roughly doubling subsidies over previous levels, that figure can rise to sixty to seventy dollars an acre. Increasingly, what makes for a “good year” is not the climate in Iowa, but the climate in Washington, D.C.

Which means several things. It means that without government subsidies, the average Iowa farm, as currently managed, would be broke. It means that if you’re an Iowa farmer and you want to attain a midlevel income from your farming, say $40,000 to $60,000, which are roughly the median figures for United States households with more than one person, you need something very close to Jane Smiley’s thousand acres of farmland—and the industrial farming machinery and industrial farming approach that make it possible to wrest crops out of so much ground.

It also means that there will be tremendous pressure to increase your farm size by whatever means possible because Iowa currently has 33 million acres of farmland and 96,000 farms. That’s 344 acres apiece, leaving the average Iowa farmer 656 acres, or almost two neighbors’ farms short. In fact, some-thing like 2,000 or 3,000 acres apiece would be better, say many, because some years you’re lucky to make ten dollars an acre, even with government subsidies. That’s eight neighbors’ farms short—and, consequently, eight former neighbors. Under conditions like these, it’s hard to pay much attention to the disappearing soil, the disappearing wildlife, and the disappearing community life that the big farm, big tractor, and big chemical way send down the creek.

However, the Thompsons get by with even less than 344 acres, and for not one but two families. By having a small farm, the Thompsons are able to manage each acre with exceptional care, minimizing reliance on the sure-fire chemistry of Monsanto and Dupont—thus minimizing cost and environmental damage as well. It’s not an organic farm, but they have used pesticides only once in the past twenty years. They use no antibiotics or hormones in their pigs and cattle, they do not plant genetically engineered crop varieties, and yet they have some of the highest crop yields and lowest soil erosion rates in their county. They also have a solid, although not lavish, farm income—without government subsidies, having long ago sworn to refuse them, an act of defiance that many find particularly confounding.

Dick continues. “The problem is we’re raising commodities out here, not crops. But commodities don’t make communities. It takes people to
make communities.”

It was in 1985, during the middle of 1980s farm crisis, that a group of Iowa farmers and farm advocates found that they could no longer close their mind’s eye to the decline, the abandonment, and the environmental degradation. They started Practical Farmers of Iowa, with Dick Thompson as the first president. Convinced that it must be possible to farm in economically and environmentally sound ways on small farms that support community life, PFI’s founders dedicated the group to sharing information among farmers about how it could be done. They also encouraged farmers to conduct and disseminate the results of their own on-farm research.

University researchers at the time were paying next to no attention to anything other than the industrial model of farming, and very little relevant research about other approaches was available. So PFI organized field trials that would be statistically valid, using randomized and replicated plots that could be subjected to tests of significance and other statistical techniques.

The local land grant university, Iowa State, took interest in PFI’s embrace of a scientific approach and agreed to form a highly unusual partnership with the organization. They gave the organization a university office and gave its few staff members (who numbered only one at the time) the status of university employees, although PFI provides the funds for their salaries. By the early 2000s, the group membership had grown to some seven hundred households, about half of which farm. And now a couple of dozen faculty and researchers at Iowa State regularly work with PFI farmers, and many of them are members of the group.

Dick says to the audience, “Some of us know what to do. The question is, will we do it?” Dick has a way of challenging his listeners that most rise to, and today’s audience is no exception.

“So why won’t we do it?” a middle-aged farmer in the group calls out.

Dick breaks out in a big smile. He’s been waiting for this question. But he holds his own views back a bit. “Well, what do you think?” Dick returns. “What are some of the reasons?”

“Communication!” calls out one voice. “Education. It’s what’s in the farm magazines. Or rather what isn’t in them!” calls out another.

“Ya, ya. That’s part of it,” Dick encourages. “But there’s more to it. Keep going. Keep going.”

“Cultivation, I guess,” another farmer responds after a moment, meaning mechanical hoeing, one of the main ways to control weeds without chemicals. “Farmers today don’t like to cultivate. It takes too long. And they don’t like livestock either. That takes too much time too.”

“That’s part of it too,” Dick affirms. “We’re getting closer.” He looks over the crowd in the machine shed, and the crowd looks back. The time has come to put it all together.

“Greed and ease. That’s it,” Dick breathes into the microphone, and a lot of heads give a slow nod of recognition and agreement at this critique of the materialist ambitions of industrial agriculture. Knowing glances are exchanged. “The other way’s easier.”

“But is it?” asks the farmer who had earlier pointed to the problem of what is and is not in the farm magazines. The mood in the shed is crackling now, and Dick doesn’t need to ask for input. Hands are going up everywhere and a couple of people are standing. “I mean, you seem to live well. And your neighbors must see that. So what do they think? Do they ever ask you how you do it?”

Even Dick pauses at this one, and the whole shed pauses with him. “I call that a social problem,” he begins. “I guess that’s just the way most guys are. I hardly ever listened to my father, at least when he was alive.” Dick in fact now farms quite a bit like his father, using a variant on the five-year crop rotation his father developed in the thirties and forties and hardly ever using farm chemicals. “You don’t listen to those close to you, it seems. Maybe it takes a farmer in the next county doing something to show you.”

Dick straightens up a bit and flashes his wide smile. He takes the portable microphone up to his mouth with both hands, and adds the kicker. “But the main issue for all of us is this: ‘Do I really want to know? And if I do know, do I want to do anything about it?’”

In the case of PFI members, the answer to both questions is, thankfully, a resounding yes.