by Taylor Brorby  

I remember water — how it felt around my legs as I stood in gin-clear Canoe Creek in northeast Iowa, hunting rainbow and brown trout; the need for rain to tamp down the forest fire smoke flowing south and east, down from Alberta; the mid-June frost that then sent shivers across the landscape of small farmers in Iowa’s Driftless region about whether to start over, how to absorb the loss, or the patience to wait and see whether the crops would survive.

During the summer of 2023 I lived for six weeks on a one-acre, organic farm north of Decorah, Iowa, to work on a revision of my novel about a multi-generational, conventional farming family in North Dakota. I took Annie Dillard’s advice to write about summer in winter or, like Ibsen, Norway from Italy. To write about the downfall of my imaginary family due to the farming crisis, I thought it made sense to live on one of the smallest, most biodiverse farms I had ever seen. 

Growing up in southcentral North Dakota, the landscape was riven with farms well over one thousand acres. Wheat, as Ole Rolvaag wrote about in his novel Giants in the Earth more than a century ago, was king, canola was right behind, then barley, and flax. I remember endless seas of sunflower fields as we drove to our lake house on the south shore of Lake Sakakawea, how the waves of yellow finally washed away into blue once the lake came into view. Section lines and shelterbelts framed my understanding of the structure of nature.

I grew up in a monoculture landscape that’s led to monoculture thinking. North Dakota, after all, is fenced in by violence: hydraulic fracking for oil in the west, strip mining for coal in the south, the sugar beet mafia reigning supreme in the east, and minute men missile silos of nuclear warheads in the north. That’s the way things have been done, that’s the way things will continue to be.

It makes sense to think of the crushing weight of industrial farming from a more hospitable vantage point: A farm that doesn’t grow candy corn and soft drinks, but instead nutritious broccolini, onions, edible flowers, kohlrabi, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, and cucumbers. Unlike in much of the industrial landscape of farming in North Dakota, it’s refreshing to live in a region where your windshield gets dirty from bugs. It was seeing another possibility, another way of living on the land that confirmed what I already knew: nature flourishes in diversity.

But the farm I lived on in the Driftless region of Iowa is an exception.

When I moved to Iowa in 2014 to attend graduate school in Ames, I discovered a landscape of high and low green: Corn and soybeans. Fields were tiled to carry away water, nitrates were pumped into the soil to help the corn and soybeans grow. A teacher, when I first arrived, cautioned me not to swim in any streams or lakes in the state. It became clear to me that, like the prairie, Iowa’s agriculture was one large clearcut. 

But each day in 2023, in the farmhouse where I worked along the banks of Canoe Creek, I revised my sentences to convey the advice so many farmers in the second half of the 20^th century were given by Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford: get big or get out. 

The farm where I lived for those six weeks had, over its years, actually gotten smaller – down from ten acres to one, down from producing one hundred dozen eggs a week to just enough for us on the farm. But in the shrinking, if that’s what I should call it, something else became possible: the farmer was able to open up unused acreage to young farmers. (Anyone in agriculture knows that the main issue for any young farmer is access to land.)

Each night, recovering from working on my sentences, I’d slip on my waders, walk past the goats and geese and down into the bottom fields, scramble down the bank, and step into Canoe Creek. I’d tie on my fly – a Copper John, what I called my “insurance policy” –   and wade further into the creek. I then began casting.

An entire world opened to me. Swallows darted out of their creek bank homes and skimmed the water. A pair of bald eagles cruised overhead, unleashed their anemic cries before landing in their pine tree-perched nest. A fawn and its mother silently slunk to the stream’s edge for an evening drink, and I would watch clouds of caddis flies rise from the water, and the mouths of hungry trout break the clear, still surface.

In this watery world, my shoulders loosened and stretched as I’d cast my flies upstream. My body reached out into that wild animal world to release the stress I had wrought upon the page earlier in the day – a stress that, to me, began west from Canoe Creek, in Cresco, Iowa, with Norman Borlaug.

In the 20^th century, Borlaug, along with the Rockefellers, launched what is now known as the Green Revolution by developing genetically modified crops to supposedly help feed the world. The world of corporate agriculture seized on this technological opportunity, rendering the countryside safe for machines, corporate profit, and large scale, industrial agriculture. Family farms dried up, rural towns shrunk, topsoil eroded and blew away and was replaced by a culture of resentment – something that’s taken root across much of rural America today.

Borlaug’s vision of this advancement in technology was to buy us time, a type of agricultural transitional moment into something beyond GMOs and Pepsi. However, it seems that his vision didn’t extend to feeding the bottom line of corporations such as Monsanto and Cargill. We’ve become stuck in Norman Borlaug’s world, one that Ole Rolvaag seemed to anticipate when his protagonist Per Hansa struck out for Dakota Territory in the early days of settlement on the Great Plains: we have settled and have continued to poison our well.

But where large corporations attempt to corner the market on the conversations on matters of the day, there is opportunity to look in corners, play to the edges, and press against the status quo and the tired way of saying this is the way things are. Perhaps that’s the lesson I learned while living and working on a small organic farm in Iowa, a lesson I learned from my friend Frederick Kirschenmann, one he learned from his father: If you take care of the soil, it’ll take care of you.

Now, whenever I’m stuck with my writing, I close my eyes and go back to Canoe Creek and think of those quiet evenings, casting my line along limestone banks. 

Whenever I emerged from an hour of fishing, inevitably catching two or three twelve-inch trout, I was refreshed, my body ready for the next day’s work on my novel: to explore what happens when people are forced to participate in industrial systems to make ends meet.

As I sloshed out of the stream and strode across the bottom fields, some days a fog rolled in, and beyond the fog were dozens of deer watching me, watching an intruder walk across the landscape, the place that they call home.

Taylor Brorby’s residency on a northeast Iowa farm was funded by AgArts USA.

Copyright © 2024 by Taylor Brorby

Photographs courtesy of Carroll Foster, and Marko Blažević, Oliver Paaske, Jakub Kapusnak, Nathan Dumlao, Jax and Jim on Unsplash.