Des Moines Register (link no longer available)
Written by DAN PILLER
Cooper, Ia. – When Chris Henning left Des Moines and a 17-year career with Meredith Corp. in 1991 to farm 145 acres she bought in Greene County near where she had grown up, she took her ideals with her.
Some of her attitudes can be seen on the 300 acres she crop-shares with two managers. About one third of the land is in conservation, either as grass buffers or wetlands.
“My neighbors think I’m crazy,” Henning laughs.
She has set aside one acre to grow vegetables, which she sells in the farmers market in nearby Jefferson. A decade ago she was a booster of the Iowa Green Bean Project, which sold Iowa-grown vegetables in export markets.
“We had our beans in Japan,” she said wistfully. “But the Green Bean Project is gone. Corn prices are too high. Not enough people participated.”
This winter she traveled to Uganda with several other farm women in a venture to connect with African farm women, who constitute most of Africa’s working farmers.
The experience left her shaken.
“They have no equipment. Everything is done by hand,” she said. “And a typical family has six children or more. One family had three bags of their own corn as their food for the winter.”
With her managers, she is experimenting with non-biotech corn and soybeans, in an effort to wean her fields off Roundup herbicide.
“We’re killing everything with Roundup,” she said.
But there are limits to idealism. Henning’s crop-share partners want to till the soil – which can increase erosion – and they still want the high yields that come from biotech seeds.
Henning has the political savvy that comes from longtime activism in the Iowa presidential caucuses. She’s opting for gradual rather than one-time change.
But she’s not entirely comfortable with agriculture today, compared with the farm she grew up on just up the road from the 135-year-old house she now lives in by herself.
Henning’s husband, Max, an asphalt contractor who redid thousands of railroad crossings in Iowa, died in 2003.
“Oh, my gosh, we had everything on our farm when I grew up,” Henning recalled of her childhood. “We grew corn and soybeans, we had cattle and hogs, chickens, we raised German shepherds, and I learned to drive a John Deere ‘B’ when I was 10 years old.”
That was sustainable agriculture, she said, as opposed to the hegemony of corn and soybeans on Iowa’s fields today.
“I want to grow food for people, not livestock,” Henning said.
Henning left the farm in the late 1960s for business school in Milwaukee. She learned secretarial and clerical skills at the suggestion of her mother, who gave her daughter the age-old advice that “if you can type and take dictation, you’ll always have a job.”
That strategy worked in 1974 when she answered an ad for a job at Better Homes and Gardens magazine.
“I thought I would be working for the magazine,” she said. “Instead, it was in the labor relations department at Meredith.”
By the early 1990s Henning had worked her way up to a client account position with Meredith’s Fulfillment Division book club. When the division was sold, Henning decided the time had come to fulfill a longtime desire to return to the country.
“I traveled around the state with my husband and worked with him in small towns when he was doing grade crossing replacements,” she said. “I loved the small towns. On days off I was always poking around Adel or Perry looking for a country place.”
She found it in 1991 when an old family friend put on the market 145 acres adjoining her original family land.
Wary of plunging into farming with little immediate experience, Henning first tried cash-renting her land. Under that system, the owner rents to a tenant who does all the work and makes all the decisions.
It was not a comfortable situation for Henning, who wanted to be involved in the operation.
“I didn’t feel like I could even walk out on my own land,” she said.
So she switched to crop-sharing, in which the owner and operator share the costs and split the decision-making. Her two managers do the hands-on field work. Henning does the marketing, an increasingly complex task in these days of volatile grain markets.
“I’ve sold about half of this year’s crop already,” she said. “But brother, it’s frustrating. Every time you think you’ve gotten a great price, you see a few days later that corn and soybeans have gone up again.”
