Farming Facts

Nearly 60 million Christmas trees are grown each year in Europe.

When a fire shut down an Ohio dairy's milking parlor, 11 other dairies took in its 1,100 cows within a day and milked them for months. The farmer's daughter logged every truck that came. One driver almost stayed home. She asked his name at his truck. Today they are married, and the herd is back on the family farm.

Field of Dreams finished filming in 1988. The baseball diamond stretched across two Iowa farms, and both were supposed to go back to corn. Farmer Don Lansing left his half standing instead. His family had farmed that ground since 1906. He never charged a cent for admission or parking. By the film's 20th anniversary, about 65,000 strangers a year were coming to play catch. They still show up today.

In 1971, a fellow farmer told Gary Vermeer he was quitting cattle because haying took too many hands. Vermeer set out to build a baler one person could run alone. The prototype took about six weeks. It rolled bales about 6 feet wide and 7 feet across. That helped pioneer the modern round baler. Vermeer still builds them in Pella, Iowa, and every summer farmers still roll them his way: one person, one tractor.

Lane Unhjem's combine caught fire during harvest. Fighting it triggered a massive heart attack, and he was rushed to intensive care. Meanwhile, 60 neighbors showed up with 11 combines, 6 grain carts, and 15 semis. They brought in his entire 1,000-acre crop in just 7 hours. Unhjem later received a heart and kidney transplant, and went home 108 days after the fire.

Iowa farmers gave 36 breeding hogs to Japan after two typhoons wrecked the farms of Yamanashi in 1959. The Air Force flew the hogs over, and 35 survived the three-day trip. Within nine years, about 500,000 hogs in Japan traced back to them. When Iowa flooded in 1993, Yamanashi sent help back. Iowa and Yamanashi are still sister states.

Yacouba Sawadogo was a farmer in Burkina Faso who fought the desert with holes. He spent four decades digging zaï pits by hand. Each pit was packed with compost to capture rainfall and feed the soil below. Cracked, barren land became a living forest of nearly 40 hectares with more than 60 species. He won the Right Livelihood Award - the Alternative Nobel - in 2018.

Herman Ostry's barn kept flooding. He joked he could carry it up the hill himself, with enough people. His son Mike did the math for real. He welded steel handles onto the frame so 344 neighbors could each grab one. Every person would lift about 55 pounds of a barn weighing almost 20,000 pounds. On July 30, 1988, all 344 showed up. They lifted the barn off its foundation and walked it up the hill. It took about three minutes. It worked.

A million-plus FFA members wear the same blue corduroy jacket. It began as one Ohio band's uniform. In 1933, teacher Gus Lintner ordered the jackets from a local store. FREDERICKTOWN was stitched across the back in gold. His band wore them to the Kansas City convention. Delegates voted it into FFA's official dress for every member. Now each member's own state goes across the back.

Bill Gross's parents couldn't afford to pass down their North Dakota farm, so he became a 747 captain. Over the Pacific, he told a copilot his retirement plan: buy a tractor and help farmers in crisis. A friend said not to wait, so in 2005, still flying, he started Farm Rescue. It has helped more than 1,300 families and is looking for the next one this harvest.

Temple Grandin got down inside the cattle chutes at Arizona feedlots in the early 1970s to see what the cattle saw, and people thought she was crazy. She found what made them stop: a shadow, a hanging rope, a coat on the fence. Her curved chutes with solid sides now work on ranches and feedlots worldwide. At 79, she still teaches at Colorado State.

Colorado farmer Nick Venetucci began handing free pumpkins to children from his truck in the 1950s. Soon school buses were pulling up to his farm, and every child went home with one. Over about 50 years he gave away more than a million. Local schoolchildren collected pennies to pay for a bronze statue of him. Children on field trips to the farm still go home with a free pumpkin every October.

In a single day in 1952, the people of Moses Lake, Washington, built a whole farm for a stranger. From one minute past midnight, more than 50 tradesmen raised a seven-room house by floodlight while about 100 men on 25 tractors leveled and planted 63.5 acres. By day's end it belonged to Donald Dunn, a WWII tank driver whose Kansas farm a flood had wiped out.

Arthur Ehrat, a farmer who barely followed basketball, built the rim that bends on every dunk. In 1976, his nephew, a college coach, said players kept bending rims. Ehrat tried magnets in his shed. They failed. A coil spring off a John Deere field cultivator held instead. A player shattered two backboards in 1979, but the NBA didn't adopt the rim until 1981. Every dunk since traces back to a farmer's tractor spring.

A cornhusking contest was a race to strip corn by hand, timed to the minute. In 1935, one of those contests drew 110,000 people to a cornfield in Newtown, Indiana. Two aerial bombs marked its start and finish, eighty minutes apart. Elmer Carlson of Iowa husked about 41½ bushels of corn by hand and won. NBC broadcast the whole contest live on national radio. Farmers still compete for the same title every October.

The village of Piplantri in Rajasthan, India plants 111 trees every time a girl is born. In a region where daughters were once seen as a burden, the birth of a girl now triggers a celebration. They also start a savings fund for each girl's education. Piplantri now has over 350,000 trees. Every tree is named after a girl.

Bill Bader's family ran Missouri's largest peach farm. Then Monsanto's herbicide drifted from neighboring fields and killed 30,000 of his trees. He sued. During discovery, 180 internal documents revealed Monsanto had warned it would drift. They sold it anyway. A jury awarded Bader $265 million. Monsanto's dicamba is still on the market.

Larry Yockey farmed wheat in Ritzville, Washington for over 30 years. When Stage 4 cancer left him unable to harvest, his neighbors quietly organized a plan. One Sunday, 60 farmers showed up with combines and 18-wheelers. They harvested all 1,200 acres in six hours - work that normally takes three weeks.