Published Sep 29, 2009

No better place to be

By Teresa Opheim

It’s dusk, and we’ve just finished at a Practical Farmers of Iowa Field Day. PFI Staffer Sarah Carlson and I drive slowly along a gravel road lined with tall corn, stopping every so often to jump out to pull PFI Field Day signs out of the ground. Field Day goers pass us, their car headlights catch Sarah’s neon yellow-green PFI shirt, and they honk goodbye.

This is how we spent our Saturday night: loading up the car with PFI materials, traveling across the state, shoving PFI signs into the ground, listening to farmers talk grazing, taking photos, holding the intercom for the speakers, just helping out where we could. Sometimes the work can seem a bit mundane.

Yet it strikes me that there was no better place to be that Saturday night than on a gravel road near South English, and no more important work than yanking PFI Field Day signs out of the ground. We work with the greatest group of farmers in the country, and we do what it takes to keep them coming back to Practical Farmers of Iowa.