Dramatic change on the family farm in a single generation

The 18-year-old pickup bounces down the hillside an hour before sunset. We're on a family field trip of sorts, around the Morrison farm near Traer to see the crops and the cows. This ride is not just because my brother wants some pictures before he returns to Washington, D.C., but for another reason as well.

Dad is going to stop raising cattle.

Bruce Morrison has been on this farm, around animals, all his life. In 1967 he was a member of the Tama County 4-H team that represented Iowa in the livestock judging competition at the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago. His degree from Iowa State University is in farm operations.

He mentioned his plans so casually one day that mom and I both had to make sure he had said what he had said. There were two recent signs it was time to hang part of it up.

First, he was with a newborn calf when its mother pinned him against the four-wheeler. Cattle have about three emotions - placid, flighty, and ornery - and this one was ornery.

Luckily, he only had bruised ribs, but he could have been in big trouble. He's not as young as he used to be. In 2007, he caught up to the average age of an Iowa farmer, a number that itself has gone up by nearly a decade since he started farming.

The second sign was the tornado. On June 30, 2014, a cluster of three EF1 tornadoes destroyed the farmstead of our neighbor to the north and scattered his sheds and grain bins across our fields and pasture land. They clipped our machine shed badly enough to require complete replacement and flattened the last remainders of the many-decades-old hand-built hog and cattle shelters to the east of our house. Our neighbors decided they would live in town instead. Someone dad relied on a lot to help out wasn't going to be quite as close.

Dad's not going to stop growing crops, not yet. He's still a farmer, after all. His father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were farmers. But I am not. It would be lying to say that doesn't come with a sense of loss.

I helped when I could, moving cattle from one section of the farm to another, shoveling corn into the grinder for cattle feed, once chasing a cow on someone else's land under a full moon on Christmas Eve. Those are all experiences fewer and fewer Iowans have these days. But this farm is, for the most part, a one-man show, and the curtain is about to come down on one of the stages.

James 'Tama Jim” Wilson once looked over this land.

At the turn of the 20th Century, the nation's secretary of agriculture owned this sloping pasture and cropland between the Ridge Road and Wolf Creek. His descendants eventually sold the land to the owners of the house across the road. That's how it ended up as part of what is now a century farm.

But Tama Jim didn't have rural electrification, in the high-line poles running down the side of the farm, and he didn't have four-wheel drive, which dad now engages as we go past an ancient windmill and around a small grove of trees. The tornadoes made such a mess here dad can't make his way through it on the four-wheeler. They then plowed through the much larger timber on the way to Traer, felling trees in all directions and taking away the full-shade canopy there used to be. They left intact the structure holding hay bales of an indeterminate age that, like so many things on so many farms, were put there and left for whenever they might come in handy only to become part of the permanent landscape instead.

The pickup proceeds through a gate closer to the 'crick bottom,” where the crops are. Corn and soybeans, soybeans and corn, along with a rotation of hay that will end since there won't be cows to eat it. The combine still does four rows of corn at a time, dwarfed by the 12- and even 16-row heads built to handle acreages many times our farm's size.

Living History Farms could dedicate a portion of its grounds to the common farming practices of the 1970s and they would be about as unfamiliar to today's kids as the 1870s. Dad grinds cattle feed the same way he always has, with equipment old enough to qualify for 4-H and FFA restoration projects, using ear corn from his fields, in the corncrib his grandfather built. When the ear corn picker broke down near the end of this fall's harvest, that was a message of its own: This is it. This is all you're going to need. Ever.

The rattle of the machinery in the corncrib to make hog feed has long been silent. Dad hasn't been in hogs for a quarter-century. It doesn't work the way it used to, when he could call Gladbrook at 8 to say he'd be bringing a load there around 10. Operations are larger, much more organized, more industrialized, to get maximum efficiency from farrow to finish. Big round gray outdoor feeders are rusting relics. The farrowing crate frames in our empty two-row farrowing house remain stacked against the wall, and if it's the right time on a hot summer day you can still almost smell the sows and piglets.

My brother and I get out of the pickup near the south end of the cropland to look around and, as typical of our family's sense of humor, make sure we get pictures of Dad 'out standing in his field.” Right here, right now, we're a million miles away from debates over genetically modified seeds and ethanol subsidies and the idea that farmers, of all people, would need to have a public-relations industry to counter misconceptions of what they do to put food on a table in their home, across the country, or around the world. We are appreciating the bounty coming forth from sweat of one man's brow and the rich Iowa soil.

Mom's about to get out of her line of work, too. In 1974, after a period of going through math teachers like the Union Army went through generals, the North Tama school district hired a newly minted teacher from Goldfield who was coming to live with her husband. She stayed, got into teaching computers for 26 years, then returned to math. This year she's combining both and will be retiring soon as well.

North Tama has made it 50 years without further consolidation, making it a survivor in the rural Iowa landscape, but it has not escaped the declining trends. Enrollment is down more than 15 percent since I graduated. In fall 2014, suburban Waukee added more students than are in North Tama's entire student body. Tama County, like 32 others in Iowa, peaked in population in 1900. Between 2000 and 2010, the equivalent of its entire population moved to Ankeny.

My brother lives in D.C., my sister moved to Colorado when her husband got a new job. I have stayed here, and that makes me a victory for Iowa. For decades now, Iowa has been exporting young adults - exporting its 'seed corn.” The advances of technology have benefited agriculture and other industries at large but devastated the economic and social systems that aren't able to adjust with them. I can empathize with farmers in that, because when it comes to a way of life getting plowed under by forces it can't control and doesn't quite understand ... well, I work at a newspaper.

The pickup passes through the field gate and again past the cows. Dad never had more than 100 total head at any one time. He is making arrangements for someone else's cattle to graze on this land, but it won't be the same. They won't be Morrison cattle.

We stop at the top of the hill and take in the view: the pasture to the south, more fields across the road, and the farmstead itself. I have tried to call this place something other than 'home.” I cannot. You can take the boy out of the farm, but you can't take the farm out of the boy. I carry the vocabulary of hundredweights and the honey wagon, of elevators that don't transport people and neighbors that aren't right next door. At night, when the yard light is shining, I look out and see the spots of a hundred other yard lights in a rural constellation. I look up and see a dizzying array of stars and the Milky Way galaxy.

This land has shaped me and my family as much as generations of farmers have shaped it. I think Tama Jim would be proud of what's been done with the place.

' Jeff Morrison is a Gazette copy editor who grew up in rural Traer. He has traveled every current mile of every highway in Iowa taking pictures for his website, iowahighwayends.net. Comments: jeff.morrison@thegazette.com