On the plane into Des Moines I flew with a long
time farmer. He was distressed to see that so many towns in Iowa were
being depopulated as city life became more interesting and attractive.
His three children were all in the urban world working in the computer
IT profesions.
There are only two crops in Iowa. Corn and soybean. Corn is planted in rows 30” apart and soy 15” apart. They are rotated. This farmer, whom I met on the airplane, grows food grade soy. There is also food grade corn, neither of which are the main crops.
The food grade soybeans are shelled and put into 30 kilo bags (roughly a bushel), 640 bags into a 20’ foot container, trucked to Minneapolis, taken by train to Seattle or Vancouver and shipped to Tokyo or Taiwan. At $13 a bushel (today's price), cash to the farmer that comes to $7,000 per container after deducting the $1,500 container shipping costs. In Iowa, where there is no irrigation, it takes 4.2 acres of soybeans to produce one full container.
The farmer I was talking to sends 1,200 containers to Asia every year. You do the math.
One little tofu shop in the neighborhood where I stay in in Tokyo every year uses one 30 kilo bag a day.
My farmer friend has to call on the buyers of his soy crop four times a year. They are wholesalers in Tokyo and Taiwan. They have to know and trust him for his food grade soy. They should. He is a solid American farmer of Danish heritage.
All of Iowa I saw was Nordic clean (except Ft. Dodge) cleaner than Switzerland.
Imagine, clean and worldly, with regular travel to markets in Asia. That sure doesn’t sound like Washington D.C.,Boston, New York or the standard image of Iowa. But why not? Unions don’t exist in most of Iowa and hard work and honesty are the norm.