Here here Kruse, well done!
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Earth Day Question From a Bean Walker
Date: Thursday, April 22, 2010, 11:49 PM EDT, 11:49 PM EDT from Todd Kruse
In all my travels around the USA and nearly 60 countries the only location that I have met people who know what I am talking about when I say “walking beans” is in Iowa. Perhaps I need to create an “English-Iowegen, Iowegen-English” Dictionary complete with such phrases so non-natives of Iowa know the cultural context.
Walking beans – I would hope – was a part time job, not a career, for everyone that I worked with since it is not the type of job you want to do for a lifetime. Walking beans is not walking a dog at the dog park folks! Beans don’t need exercise but they do need to have the weeds around them exorcised. Okay, okay I can hear our non-farm country readers crying out for answers – “come on Kruse, TWO full paragraphs already and you have not even told us what ‘walking beans’ actually is yet?”
Walking beans is the time honored Iowa institution of having hired help actually walk through the rows of soy bean fields to clear the fields of various weeds that harm the beans’ growth and yield for the farmer at the local grain elevator. While “walking” the crop rows was the norm some farmers were equipped with “bean buggies” attached to the farmer’s tractor. These buggies allowed the hired hands to actually sit down while the tractor propelled them through the fields. During my career as a bean walker there were essentially three options for completing the job with the option chosen by the farmer:
· Pulling weeds and volunteer corn by hand – wear gloves you rookies!
· Spraying weeds with herbicide - rhymes with genocide and not fun if you did not happen to own a surgical mask!
· Chopping the weeds with a “corn knife” -- if you know what a machete is then you can appreciate how the corn knife scared most farmers and mothers! The farmers were scared because too many beans were usually cut along with the weeds and mothers because not everyone wore steel-toed work boots.
Nearly 90% of my walking beans work was of the old school “pulling weeds by hand”/bending over for around 7 hours a day starting in the early morning variety which will probably leave me shaped like a shepherd’s staff in my future nursing home. As I reflect back on those days clearly my memory has faded but it seems that we awoke at 4 am so we could be ready to work in the fields by 5 or 5:30 am with the day ending around 11:30 am for lunch and to avoid the afternoon sun. Our typical ward robe consisted of work boots, jeans, long sleeve shirts, gloves, and wide brim hat to project you from the plants and the elements. I will never forget the feeling of walking in jeans that were completely wet due to the early morning dew on the plants which you could not avoid as you walked the rows of soy beans. Why is it that so many Iowans leave this prairie glamour for the bright lights of New York or Hollywood!!?? It remains a mystery yet today.
At some point this summer I plan to have our children do some bean walking on the family farm to reinforce the value of hard work but also to remind them of man’s connection to the land. As the nation celebrates Earth Day this week the flash backs to the farm work I performed as a young man in Iowa come to me readily. While I can give the “Save Mother Earth” crowd some credit for turning Earth Day into a religious holiday for our modern day Druids I have to stop at that to ask – what is their actual connection to the land? Are these activists involved in farming, forestry, animal husbandry, or similar industries where maintaining a clean environment is essential for the success of these industries? Personally I trust the land stewardship of gentlemen farmers like my father before I would trust a member of the Earth Liberation Front regarding what is best for Mother Earth.
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