It was the Fourth of July, and I was making my way home from Rathbun Lake.  It was nearly dark, and I was hoping to make an hour and a half drive without introducing a deer to my Galaxie.  I was alone, and there was one more party I was headed to.

Rathbun sits just across from the southern border of Monroe County.  Monroe was first known as Kishkekosh, named after an prominent Indian of either the Saux or Fox tribe.  Frank Hickenlooper, who wrote the history of the county in 1894, said translated the name meant “a savage biter.”  Perhaps someday it will resurface for a new species of mosquito.  Others say it meant “man with one leg.”  Perhaps someday it will resurface for a new, one-legged species of mosquito.

The county seat is Albia, and I was coming through the town, snaking around it’s beautiful square in what was now darkness.  Sitting at a stop light I couldn’t get over that on the Fourth of July there was absolutely nothing going on.  Out my driver’s window was a concrete soldier atop the Civil War monument in front of the courthouse.  The butt of the gun rested on the ground, both his hands held the barrel, and he gazed off serenely in the direction I was headed.  He seemed to have no intention of doing anything either.

In the darkness on the edge of town, I came upon a cluster of cars I took for a used car dealership.  That is until I noticed the silhouettes of those seated in lawn chairs, on tailgates and trunk lids, and standing with old friends.  Block after block was lined with them and their cars, and everyone was looking over the open field to the east, waiting.

The old veteran was looking in the right direction after all.  I thought of him and my neighbor who did three tours in Iraq as the shelling of Albia commenced in the rear view of my ’64.  Pandora was finally getting my tastes down, a deer was nowhere in sight, the cool evening air was rushing in my windows, and I couldn’t help but think how it all felt perfect.

Off in the west sat Jupiter and Venus on the level, not unlike Christ’s mother would have seen all those years ago, minus the haze of a Canadian forest fire.  In that haze I could see the bombardment had began in Knoxville.

There we were on Independence Day, all of us in it together in the darkness on the edge of town.

“The world is a very big place.”  This is something we tell our children to keep them from overly focusing on themselves.  I couldn’t argue with the truth of it, but in the world’s entirety the only thing I seem to find any hope in exercising control over is myself.  My efforts have served to keep my hopes modest, but if we are to try to control something, controlling ourselves is probably the best course.

Someone once told me that wanting others to do what you want them to do is a sign of immaturity anyway.  I would find that true enough as well, were it not for the fact that it might also be a sign of a natural inclination towards politics.  The truth of whether or not the two are related I’d leave up to the reader.

In doing so, I’d simply comment that the things which generally harms us most are the things we think we know that aren’t so.  We naturally refute anyone who tries to correct us on those topics, and we are left to discover the errors ourselves.  It is an uncomfortable thing when we do, so we quit looking to avoid it.

Last Saturday we helped host a group of 25 Danish farmers for part of the day.  I was excited to do so. It seemed like an opportunity to pay back the hospitality I was greeted with a couple of years ago in Ukraine.

Being the oldest of my siblings, I’m particularly predisposed in trying to figure out what others’ expectations are, how I might meet them, and what kind of job I’m doing along the way. Feel free to tell me how, ‘It’s a big world out there.’  It so happened I was with 25 of the rest of them.

We had a farm style lunch for the day, with the county cattlemen grilling steaks and sides and deserts from the Machine Shed Restaurant.  While they were eating it, I was thinking about how much they seemed to enjoy their visit with our neighbors, the rest of the day’s schedule and weather, and whether or not they were enjoying their meal.  As they began excusing themselves to get pie, one returned with a, “Now there’s an American-sized portion.”

He had a slice of lemon meringue, the meringue being twice the thickness of the deep pie and foreign to him.  Another had returned with a slice of the Snicker pie, took one bite, looked at me, and said, “How do you say….that’s rich, yes?”  The sweetness was foreign to them as well.

My train of thought would have took me through the rest of the afternoon, were it not for a tall, raw-boned young man I was sitting next to.  I would have took him for an American were it not for the accent and his near perfect English.  The Madison County Youth Beef Team had helped serve the meal, and he wanted to know what effect I thought they had on advocating to the local public on behalf of those involved in agriculture.

“What’s the relationship like between those in agriculture and the general public in Denmark?”  I asked him.

“The two groups are very much disconnected.  We are labeled all sorts of things, both good and bad, without any real understanding.  A large part of the public thinks of us as being bad for the environment for instance.”

“In Denmark?  All thought all the European regulations were supposed to have fixed that,” I said with a smirk.

“Yes, yes,” he smiled back.  “The fact is Denmark prides itself on being even more restrictive than the EU.  Everyone is for “less fertilizer,” but no one has any real understanding of what it means beyond the few of us in agriculture.

Here I am amazed at the efficiency your farms operate with.  We use so little nitrogen we are at a fraction of it.   It is so difficult we are now having other countries reject our wheat shipments because the wheat is not high enough in protein.  It is not high enough in protein because it is malnourished.  We import some livestock feed because we can get a higher quality grain elsewhere.”

“Is this making an impact on the people in your country?  Are they seeing the light?”

“No.  They are as convinced as ever that they are doing the right thing.  They don’t understand what they are doing.

I like farming.  I like the lifestyle.  I have two young sons, and I enjoy being able to take them to school in the morning and pick them up.  I wonder what it will look like if they ever want to do what I do.”

Perhaps the world isn’t as big as we make it.  Maybe we don’t know what we think we know.  Perhaps we are never as great as what we think we are.  Maybe someday the public will have the courage to take a look again.

June 11th was the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association’s Summer Policy Conference. It is an annual effort by the group to identify current issues in the beef community and to educate members about them. The keynote address was given that morning by Dr. Kim Stackhouse, whom has headed up the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s look into our industry’s sustainability.

It had been three years since I had made one of these conferences. The last was made when I was part of the Young Cattlemen’s Leadership Program. (I take comfort in the fact that my youth is not more than three years behind me.) As part of that program, we discussed how NCBA was then getting the ball rolling on Stackhouse’s work.

I wrote a little editorial at the time which found its way into an online part of Beef Magazine. Twenty people probably saw it. It was titled “Is Our Use of ‘Sustainability’ Sustainable?” In it I was critical of NCBA’s efforts in chasing a term they seemingly had no control of the definition of.

Activists groups, some of who were intent on putting us out of business, had been so successful in their definition that in 2007 Time Magazine proclaimed “a 16 ounce T-Bone is the equivalent to a Hummer on a plate.” In 2010 San Francisco passed a resolution which made them the first “Meatless Monday City.” Despite the urge of some of us to ‘hunker down,’ NCBA entered into the conversation.

Three years later, hearing Dr. Stackhouse, it was readily evident my bunker mentality had been in error.

“We will never have a consistent definition of sustainability,” Dr. Stackhouse said, but taking us step by step through her years of work, it quickly became apparent that thanks to her efforts the beef community will have a fair sized seat at the table as it is being debated, discussed, cussed, and reviewed. The community got this seat by engaging in the argument armed with facts, and these facts came from Stackhouse’s research. She had created a ‘Life Cycle Assessment’ for the entire beef industry, looking at all the system’s inputs (right down to counting rolls of toilet paper a packing plant uses in a year) and weighing them against the system’s outputs. To date I believe it is the only life cycle assessment that has been completed by a major commodity group.

There were two goals in doing the assessment. The first was to establish based on facts where the industry was. The second was to establish based on the same facts what the trend was in beef production. Were we becoming more or less sustainable?

They looked at 2006 to 2011 and found that while there was no organized effort to improve sustainability, it had happened anyway. There had been a 5% improvement over those 6 years. Also notable was the new light shed on how many factors seemingly outside beef production impacted it.

1/3 of all energy use of all energy used in the system is actually used by the consumer in their homes. Believe it or not, your in house refrigerator pales in comparison to the efficiency that a packing plant operates at. The system also has to account for the food the consumer wastes. 1/3 of the world’s food is wasted. If consumers could merely cut their waste of beef in half, we would realize a 10% boost in sustainability overnight.

Acquiring and putting such detailed data to use has allowed NCBA to spearhead roundtable discussions on sustainability that groups like McDonald’s, Walmart, and Costco have sought to be part of. Whether or not Stackhouse is present during these discussions, her voice certainly is. “Zero impact is not possible. There are tradeoffs; always have been and always will be. The questions are what is the trend overtime and is technology part of the solution?” To the latter the data shows it has been, and with a needed 70% increase in food production by 2050 to meet world population growth, it had better continue to be.

Luck placed me behind Dr. Stackhouse in the lunch line. I found her quick witted and a joy to talk to. “It’s a pleasure to be in Iowa where so many of you are so progressive,” she said.

“It’s rare that anyone considers me progressive,” I quipped back.

Somewhere in cyberspace is an editorial which underscores it, but what can I say? I was young then.

A few weeks ago I got a call from Nancy Degner of the Iowa Beef Industry Council.  A group called The Iowa Food and Family Project was partnering with the Mills Civic Hy-Vee, and they had invited six people and their friends to spend an evening making a week’s worth of meals for their families.

The meals were designed to be taken home, froze, and ready to use when needed.  Since May was Beef Month, they decided on a “beef” theme and wanted a local cow/calf producer to come in and address the group.  Being close to Des Moines, Nancy contacted me.  I was happy to go.  Our local Madison County Cattlemen Association has always been on the lookout to find ways to have a greater footprint with our urban neighbors.

This happens to be the mission of the Iowa Food and Family Project:  Connecting families, farmers, and food.

The evening went well.  I burnt nothing.  The guests had a good time.  Nancy even treated me to supper at Hy-Vee’s in store Chinese Express afterwards.  The only wrinkle was that they were about to close, and their beef options were exhausted.  Later, as the 12 participants filed past us, half of them took time to comment on my choice of Sesame Chicken.

There are at least 10,000 comedians out of work in this country.

I volunteered additional time if the Iowa Food and Family Project ever needed it, and last Saturday they took me up on my offer.  They had a booth at Des Moines Downtown Farmers’ Market and wanted help staffing it.  I navigated through a parade of runners participating in the annual Dam to Dam race and made my way to Court Avenue.

IFFP features the work of two bloggers, Kristin Porter from Iowa Girl Eats, and Cristen Clark from Food & Swine.  Last Saturday Cristen was on hand, signing copies of the Iowa Food and Family Cookbook we were giving away.  The book contained recipes from both bloggers, as well as additional ones from farm families across the state.  I provided relief for her husband, who had been in charge of spinning a wheel where guests were asked random questions on agriculture in exchange for a free Subway sandwich.

In no time flat my mouth was in gear, and in no time flat, with never a down moment, three hours passed. Somewhere in the process I got a bottle of water.  I never had time to open it.  Cristen had signed so many cookbooks, they gave away 700 that day, I was surprised her hand hadn’t fell off.

They estimated a couple of thousand people went through the booth.  I would call that conservative.

Conversations ranged from the Des Moines Water Works lawsuit, GMOs, organic foods, support of Iowa’s agriculture, animal care, and Fred Hoiberg coaching the Bulls.  For my part, I learned it took 48 hours to get milk from the farm to the grocery store shelf, that Jethro’s restaurants purchase over one million pounds of pork annually (making them the largest independent purchaser of pork in the state), and that 11 million turkeys are raised in Iowa (making us the largest supplier for Subway and Jimmy Johns restaurants).

There were two questions I used particularly for their advocacy.  The first was in detailing what a bioreactor is and it’s role in removing nitrates from agricultural drainage water.  The second was about the inability to find a nutritional difference between organically raised and conventionally raised produce.

In regards to the first question, I got to witness one guest accurately describe to another the Des Moines Water Works lawsuit in 30 seconds.  I was impressed.  With regards the second, I had one boisterous guest take issue on it.  With regards to the cookbooks, I had one turn it down because it didn’t look very vegan.  I think it was the pot roast that gave it away.

Make that 10,001 out of work comedians in this country.

 Iowa Food and Family Project:  http://iowafoodandfamily.com/

Food & Swine:  http://foodandswine.com/

Iowa Girl Eats: http://iowagirleats.com/

May is the time of graduations, and graduations are an annual event where the old feel free to give unsolicited advice to the young.  Generally we select the advice we have never taken ourselves.  If we are unaware of this fact, the young are free to look at us and judge us hypocrites. If we are aware of it, however, then may the young look at us and realize we see in them a chance to get it right in the ways we haven’t been able to yet.

May is also Beef Month, and cattle producers celebrate it in the coming of green grass, the growth of this year’s calf crop, and the onset of breeding season.  They hope you celebrate it with the grill on the deck. For the Madison County Cattlemen, however, we are blessed with something more.  We get to celebrate the Madison County Youth Beef Team.

The team has been headed for many years by John LaFratte and his wife Shirley.  As an association we try to help cover expenses, but the vast majority of the expenses are covered by John and Shirley themselves.  The two have an ice cream stand at the county fair, and for most it would turn a good profit.  John and Shirley use it as an engine to propel the county’s youth, either through the purchase of trophies that help to fund local scholarships, their support of the 4-H auction at the fair’s conclusion, or their monthly commitment to the Youth Beef Team.

The team itself boasts 30 youth, which spend time learning about cattle, how they are raised, all things beef, communication and presentation skills, and how to advocate for it all.  Somewhere in the process, the youth also learn about becoming adults.  I suspect they don’t learn about it via John and Shirley’s advice, rather it is by their example.

At Tuesday’s cattlemen’s meeting over 20 directors got a chance to see a small part of what that looks like.  John and four of the youth joined us and gave the same presentation they had recently given to over 270 fifth grade students from around the county.  You might be able to go a day without eating beef, but you cannot go a day without benefiting from it and those who raise it.

In the midst of it all, it was hard not to think about what the future might hold, as the youth from years ago are now returning and putting the skills which John and Shirley worked to give them to use.  May tomorrow’s promise become today’s realization.  They have a much better chance of getting it right.

Upset people tend to see the world in a way which justifies the continuation of the upset.  At least that is what a guy told me once, and he seemed believable enough.  I was thinking about this as I looked over at Raylan, somewhere in the vicinity of age 3, currently knee deep in a man made creek in the middle of Reiman Gardens in Ames, Iowa.  He had tried to jump on a rock.  He had missed.

I laughed.  Raylan chose a different direction.  I still laughed.  He wasn’t mine after all.

My mother, God bless her, had decided we should celebrate Mother’s Day on Saturday, giving my four younger sisters the chance to spend Sunday with their families.  My mother thought she had done a great thing.  I suspect what she’d really done was give my four brother-in-laws heartburn.

She had picked Reiman Gardens in Ames as part of the way to spend the Saturday.  They were hosting a butterfly and a treehouse exhibit, and she assumed the kids would find both enjoyable.  Two sisters and an assortment of nieces and nephews went with my parents and I.

To get to the butterfly exhibit, you walk into a short hallway.  Either end has a door.  Both can’t be open at the same time.  This is to keep the butterflies from escaping they say, but I would guess it also ensured the lady laying down the law had a captive audience.  She spoke to the kids in the voice most adults use to read to fairytales to them in.  Among the instructions she laid out was, “Don’t touch the butterflies.”

There were three boys in the group, ranging in age from 3-5.  Evidently she thought the boys would try to pet them.  Evidently she hadn’t raised any boys.

I haven’t either, but I knew my own kind well enough to know they were looking to make grease spots of them.  This is exactly what one nephew, Bowen, was intending to do.  I caught him by the arm as he was bending his knees to jump on what was probably a Duke of Burgundy on the sidewalk before him.

“You can’t touch them, Bowen,” his mother said.  Hmmm.  Maybe that woman had raised boys after all.  Mothers view their children in a way which justifies the continued belief of their good motherhood, I suppose, and I am sure it is the same with fathers.

We ventured out into the gardens.  It was similar to a pasture walk without any anxiety that I would find cows out.  Free of such worries, my mind was left to think of how much its stocking rate could be improved with an application of 2 4-D.  I should tell the little old lady about it, I thought.  I’ll try to corner her in the butterfly hallway first.

As far as the treehouse exhibit, there were two main problems.  First, not a single one was in a tree.  Second, hardly any of them resembled a house.  Below are some examples.

I’m sure the adults responsible are quite proud of their contraptions, but they held little enticement for the kids.  Instead they found a green, grassy knob that they could roll themselves down, and here spent more time than with the butterflies and treehouses combined.  A mother brought her daughter over.  I would guess the daughter was 2.  The mother threw herself down the hill.  I would guess she was trying to show her daughter how to do it…or she had been drinking.

Reiman Beer Gardens, now there is an idea for a college town.  Just need to get the bug zapper installed by the butterfly display.

The say we all have an infant inside us, but that infant needn’t run the show.  Raylan was trying hard not to let him, but eventually the infant won out.  They probably do most of the time.

We grow older and think we grow up.  We take pride in that.  Instead our infant has only got more sophisticated.  We still want our mothers, our pant legs dry, someone to listen, to squash any bug we come across, real tree houses, and to be blissfully ignorant of all of it.

If we could grow up, perhaps we would lose our mothers, but might actually know them for the people they really are.  Hell though, now you’ve heard it in my voice too.

“Duane Honnold died this morning.”

This is how I was greeted the 7th of March, arriving at the Madison County Livestock Auction to look over a set of yearling bulls.  We were in the midst of an unusually mild string of March days.  The bulls looked nice on display.  Either of these would have been normal starters for conversation, but on that day they were just too common to do.

Duane was 90, and I had only really gotten to know him over the last few years as I became more active in the Madison County Cattlemen’s Association.  A cattleman is how I will remember Duane, but like most cattlemen, he was a lot more than that.

He was a stone mason, a teacher, drove a truck, drove a school bus, was building inspector, the past president of the county pork producers, the county cattlemen, a county Farm Bureau member, a commissioner on the Madison County Soil and Water Conservation Board, a 4-H leader, a Lion’s Club member, an elder of his church, and the list goes on.  Longer than he had done any of those things, however, he had been a husband to his wife, Edna, for 71 years.  They enjoyed the type of collaborative partnership nearly all hope for in getting married, but plainly speaking, most find elusive.

Duane struck me as a man who was very particular about what he wanted.  What he wanted was the best, and naturally those who were affiliated with him benefited from the results.  The results live on in Madison County and beyond, from the stonework of the north shelter house at the Winterset City Park to county fairs around the country and their peddle tractor pulls which he’s given credit for establishing.

Edna is every bit his equal, and I always wondered how that worked.  How could two people, equally particular on what they wanted, form such a strong bond with nary a quarrel?  I finally figured it out a couple of county fairs ago.  Outside the fair booth was Duane’s domain.  Inside was Edna’s.  Duane never forgot that, and Edna never had to remind him.

Together they were a power couple long before anyone had ever coined the term “power couple.”  They remained so always.

Attending his funeral, I thought I would see Duane one final time, yet when I got there I realized I was mistaken.  What was before me was just his body.  I thought of all the people in my own life that were still living, and I had failed to see any deeper than that.  Duane seemed to see beyond it, and even as a church elder, saw something more in an individual smoking with the sulfuric smell of brimstone like me.  Because of that, he will live on for some time, especially for us fire eaters.

A week later, at yet another Madison county bull sale, Edna, along with her son, Dwight, and his wife, Lynn, came into the sale barn.  They sat up in the rafters, and after awhile I went up and took a seat beside Edna.

I hadn’t visited with her since Duane died, and before I left, she lightly grabbed my arm, looked me in the eye, and said she didn’t want the Madison County Cattlemen to forget about her.  She wanted to stay active.  I was moved.  Edna and Duane had been part of the Cattlemen since the Cattlemen began.

I was also moved by her strength.  Most of us will live our lives convinced if we can only become harder, life won’t touch us.  We will, and it won’t.  Edna reminded me that true strength isn’t shown by us getting harder, but by the ability to be vulnerable to whatever life throws at us.  Our hardness is a crutch for what was already broken.  Vulnerability is nothing more than having the strength to bend.

I suppose understanding that is what made her and Duane so capable in working with us stones.

“And one more thing,” Edna added, “I don’t want to see the Cattlemen go downhill.”

Neither do I.  Judging by the masons, the roof might leak, but the walls are sound.  And God knows, if Edna is willing, there’s nothing going to be headed downhill in the Cattlemen’s booth when fair times rolls around.

At 6 this evening I found I had been tided over the whole afternoon with nothing more than a little bottle of Gatorade.  I had one more trench to dig and another intake to set.  It would be dark in a couple of hours.  Still, it seemed as good a time as any to take a break.

The closest town was Churchville.  The closest real town was Martensdale.  “Real” in this case means a group of houses with a gas station and a post office.  Churchville has neither; Prole has one.

Martensdale also sports a school, and twenty years ago this spring I left it.  I was happy to go; they were happy I went.  I never looked to make sure the diploma was signed; they never looked to make sure it was there.  It was a draw then.

In my day the gas station was known as K&W.  It’s called something different now and is further proof that my day has passed.  Beyond the name I wouldn’t have known the difference until I had either tried to rent a VCR or noticed that John, the man with the curiously long fingernail on his pinky, was no longer manning the register.

Tonight I found the heat lamp trying to culture a science experiment on the jalapeno poppers.  I wagered that the heat of the jalapenos would kill anything that was attempting to grow.  Had I thought it a close bet, I would have hedged it with booze from the cooler in back.

I was in the process of paying for the poppers, a Sprite Zero, and a cheeseburger hardly worth mentioning, when a former classmate walked in.  We caught up, and as we did so my attention wandered down to his son.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

His son looked surprised that I had spoke to him and bashfully looked up to his father.

“Answer the man,” his father said and pointed in my direction.

“Nolan,” the boy said quietly.

I judged him to be in fourth grade, but I asked to make sure.

“Well Nolan, I’m Dan.  Your Dad and I went to school together.  What grade are you in?”

“Kindergarten.”  And just like that the bashfulness fell away, and Nolan began to talk.  “But nobody believes that, though, because I am so tall.  I’m the tallest one in my class.”

“Have you started playing basketball yet?” I asked with a touch of sarcasm hardly above his head but evidently beyond his grade.

“No,” he said in an honest and puzzled way with the same clear eyes I remember his father having when he and I were boys.

His Dad was there to pick up a taco pizza, and Nolan was excited about it.  I suspected time would cure him of this, and I thought that a shame.  Adults are never satisfied with the right moment unless it comes at the right time.  A taco pizza is nothing to get excited about if the bills are piling up, work is a mess, and the neighbor’s dog is still fertilizing your yard.  To the young, however, the time is always right if the moment is.

No junior high boy worth his keep worries where the girl he’s attempting to steal a kiss from is going to be five years down the road.  He only knows she’s worth the attempt, and that the moment currently presenting itself might not come again.

“Well, Nolan, you pay attention in school.  If you don’t, you’ll wind up like me, digging a ditch someday.” It was my standard joke.

“Don’t let him fool you, Nolan.  He was one of the smartest kids in our class,” said his Dad.

I was trying to instill in young Nolan a certain sense of work ethic.  Work hard, and good things will happen.  His Dad comment, however, might give him the idea it’s mostly for naught anyway.  I suppose it’s best to have the boy see the world for what it is, instead of forcing on him what we hope it to be.  Maybe that’s what being a man is, after all.

Still, when he gets older he should try to steal that kiss when the moment presents itself, even if it is for naught.  Tomorrow might be a foolish thing to do, but today usually ain’t half bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=24&v=I5j6fcCAF-Q

“Recently, the Des Moines Water Works announced it would pursue a lawsuit against three northwestern Iowa drainage districts because of record high levels of nitrates in the water flowing from those districts, leaving the job of removing the nitrates to Des Moines Water Works. Do you think the Des Moines Water Works is right or wrong to pursue this lawsuit?”

This is the question that was asked by the Des Moines Register for an Iowa Poll featured in last Friday’s paper.  63% of the respondents were in favor of the Des Moines Water Works intended action.  23% were opposed.  14% were unsure.  Donnelle Eller, whom covers both the agricultural and environmental beats at the Register, wrote the story.

On the same day the story ran, I was taking part in a group that brought together everyday people telling the story of agriculture and rural Iowa so they might share how they do it and what they have learned with each other.  Donnelle had been asked to speak to us.  My impression of her was that of a ‘straight shooter’ and someone striving towards unbiased reporting.  She had a good sense of humor, spoke directly, and was very approachable.  This was all well because a few of us thought the question above was off the mark, and we didn’t miss the opportunity to say so.

“I think it is pretty fair and straight forward.  What do you take exception to about it?” asked Donnelle.

“Why did you need the first sentence before you asked the question?” asked someone.

“It’s accurate isn’t it?”

“Actually, I think the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Geologic Survey say it’s been trending lower over the last eight to fifteen years.  I think Des Moines Water Works own data supports this claim.  What would have happened to the poll results had you mentioned that trend?”

Someone else added, “I’ve never read an article in the Des Moines Register which actually examines the trend of nitrates in the Raccoon River.  Did I miss it?  I read Bill Stowe saying it keeps trending higher and higher, and that there is no evidence we are having an impact.  At least two other government agencies and a former governor, the current U.S Secretary of Agriculture, say otherwise.  Which is it?”

“That’s on the top of our list to cover next.”  I think it was supposed to be reassuring.  The fact that it had went unexamined this far wasn’t, however.  “I think Bill Stowe would say that he’s not in the business of dealing in trends, though,” she added.  For not dealing in them, he certainly seems to be selling the hell out of a particular one.

It is frustrating for me.  As an assistant Soil and Water Conservation Commissioner in Madison County, I get to see first hand the waiting list of farmers wanting cost share assistance for large scale conservation projects.  This assistance isn’t just in terms of dollars, but also design and engineering.  As a commissioner and a contractor, I got to witness a staff laying these projects out as fast as they can, but hardly keeping up with contractors also facing the same workload.  As a farmer I know firsthand how these new practices will compliment existing ones already in place and are part of a long term plan for the future.

In terms of the trends involved, one can do a Bing image search of “nitrate levels in the Raccoon River.”  The two graphs below will pop up.  One can see how both trends can be argued at the same time.  What do they look like to you?  Does it impact how you would answer the poll?

I would like to be able to tell you how all the stakeholders involved collaboratively view the below, but unfortunately I can’t.  One of them has not been in a collaborative relationship with the rest for some time.  For my part, as a farmer, contractor, and assistant commissioner, you get up every morning, try to do the best you can, and try to figure out how it is you can do better.  In this effort I get assistance from all groups but one.  It is harder because of their absence and will likely be harder if attorneys get involved.

Last month found Dad and I in Vicksburg, Mississippi on a Sunday.

“Suppose there is a Catholic Church here?”  Dad asked.

There was one.  The Gospel that Sunday was John’s and featured the Apostle Andrew.  Only in this Gospel do we find Andrew as a disciple of John the Baptist and the first to follow Christ.  John tells us Andrew recognizes Jesus as the Messiah and seeks out his brother, Simon Peter, to come follow Him as well.

“This morning we get one of the few mentionings of Andrew which takes place in the New Testament.  The New Testament only references Andrew a dozen times, and half those times it goes on to mention that he was the brother of Simon Peter.  It is as though Andrew’s name doesn’t carry any weight unless his famous brother is thrown in.

You see folks the Apostle Andrew was just like you and I:  He was an ordinary man.  He never makes a great speech that gets recorded.  There is no mention of some great act Andrew performs.  He simply recognizes Christ and follows Him, and brothers and sisters that is all that is asked of us.

The other three which join after him, his brother, James, and John, all get called on by Christ to be present in some of His finest and most trying hours.  Time and time again Andrew, the first, is left out.  Do we ever hear about Andrew being bitter about this, of his throwing a temper tantrum, or being jealous with the others?  No.  We don’t.  What is remarkable about this ordinary man is how easy Andrew makes it look, but Christ knows how hard it was for Andrew, and Christ loves him for it.

You and I know how hard it is to be ordinary too.  You and I know how hard it is to follow Christ.  You and I know how hard it is to be Catholic in the state of Mississippi.”

The priest’s name was Malcom O’Leary, though I wouldn’t have guessed him for an Irishman. He had walked up the aisle humbly, with graying hair, a bowed head, and a decided limp hardly concealed by his vestments.  His homily, only partly caught here, was as skillfully worded as any I had ever heard and was delivered to a parish no larger than one which might exist in a small, rural Iowa town.

Ninety percent of this congregation was black, and some of them, along with some of Mississippi’s whites, were part of an expanse of poverty like I had never seen in this country before.  I wouldn’t have faulted Fr. O’Leary for saying how hard it was to be poor in Mississippi, nor would I have faulted him for saying how hard it may have been to be black.  He had said neither of those things, however.  Instead he talked about how hard it was to be Catholic.

Perhaps if it hasn’t been hard for us to be Catholic, or whatever faith it is we choose, we haven’t been doing it right.  Maybe the same applies for being ordinary.  It is the Gospel of John that uses the ambiguous phrase “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”  This unnamed disciple is almost always in the company of Simon Peter.  He’s in his company so much, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think they might be related.

The traditional interpretation is that the disciple whom Jesus loved was John.  If we lay tradition aside, and sometimes it is the best thing to do, perhaps Christ saw in an ordinary man, whose name was hardly worth mentioning, exactly what Fr. Malcom O’Leary saw.  Perhaps in embracing the difficulty of the ordinary, Andrew was anything but.