“You can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.” -Norman Borlaug, Nobel Laureate, old Iowa farmkid

It’s Monday night.

Where are you?

I have an interesting Monday night ritual. I make a point, weekly, of being in attendance at another apartment in Frederiksen Court, where a very – we’ll say intriguing – group holds a weekly social on par with any other gathering in this town.

What makes this group so special, though, is a common demographic trait: They’re all farm kids.

Now, farm kids are an interesting bunch, that’s for sure.

It’s a conservative crowd, for one thing. Very conservative. Theirs, however, is not a conservatism born of someone else’s politics. Nor is it a conservatism born of party loyalties. Theirs is a conservatism born of pragmatism – perhaps the last pragmatic politics left.

They may all be Iowa farm kids, but therein lies the connection -ÿthese are the children of the ’80s Farm Crisis. Many of those present are the sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of farmers from across the state and the nation, most of whom only barely survived the decade of the 1980s and, until recently, have been in a cash-strapped business dependent on subsidies to survive. Their communities were similarly cash-strapped, with severely underfunded small schools, little or no child daycare, no after-school programs or other extraneous government programs.

Disadvantaged? This makes the southeast side of Des Moines look well-supported.

No one would ask a Des Moines schoolchild to drive an hour one-way to school. No one on the state level would entertain the idea of forcing the Des Moines School District to consolidate. But this is most certainly the case where these folks are from.

These are the American farmers of tomorrow. Why are they here? They are here because this university is the premier institution for agriculture in this state and a leader in that field in the Midwest. They’re here to learn about cattle, nitrogen fixation and soybean genetics, among other topics. It says something, for instance, that this group postpones or cancels its meetings to accommodate exams in Animal Science 214.

The conversation revolves around sundry topics, but inevitably conversation floats to one subject: an extreme distaste for cattle lacking a rear flank. If you don’t know what a rear flank is, it’s probably best that you’re not present.

These are the kids who, while most of the city kids were watching Saturday morning cartoons, were learning to drive tractors, feed cattle and do hard labor. They work and work hard – they wouldn’t have it any other way, of course.

It is this culture – the culture of hard long work against what seem to be a formidable array of obstacles, from weather, to markets, to government – that sets this group apart.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t diversity within this group. It divides itself along livestock preferences. There is the porcine faction, a lively bunch, though a little sensitive given the criticism their industry inevitably comes under. The dominant faction, at least in this group, is the bovine faction. The discussion revolving around a certain cattle show, or even a single calf, can often go far into the evening.

The uniform for these gatherings also says quite a lot about these people. Plaid shirts, jeans and cowboy boots definitely dominate the scenery, and criticism of the dress code is – rightly – not tolerated. The ladies? Well, the more sparkles on your belt, the better.

My point in describing all this to you?

What I’ve just described is the perfect microcosm of that other great microcosm: small-town America. Hard workers working hard and playing hard. These are the men and women for whom land means more before the housing development is erected on it, and they are the true environmentalists, understanding the coexistence of mankind with the environment instead of the mutual exclusivity of the two.

That’s the business these people are in and still preparing for. What they do and what they will accomplish is the basis of our way of life and standard of living, and to that I will gladly raise my glass.

– Ryan Frederick is a senior in management from Orient.