Excursion Car – Day 2 to Burlington

Excursion Car - Day 2, Sep 2, 2016 A visit to an Iowa farm At 11 am we met Dave Wendt in Bennett, the friendly little Iowa town where I had witnessed the bucolic frog jumping contest the previous Saturday. Dave made us park our car at his house and took us first to a newly installed cattle feed complex where we met up with Dave's brother and father. All three hadn't seen this particular modern farm before and we were met by the cattle feeding manager Jim who talked us through the installations. Potentially thousand cattle are fed from a certain weight up to their final butchering weight in this plant which calls for a very precise calculation of high energy food. Jim is a true expert here quoting all the elements and quantities of the feed very precisely. Having the three farmers with us who ask their own precise knowledgable questions the conversation quickly goes beyond our city dwellers' grasp. It soon becomes clear to us that in recent years the price for beef has increased so much that any and every involvement in cattle raising is profitable at the moment. You just can't do anything wrong enough to not earn heaps of money. The methane gas produced by the cows in their dung is filtered off and then used in a turbine to produce electricity. However, there is no system of allowing this elecgricity of the surplus of what is not used by the farm itself to be fed into the general grid, as it is clearly regulated in Germany and therefore the farm owners are quite unhappy about their decision to install the potentially very sensible energy plant. After a nice (and bumpy) ride across half the county and around his land, during which Dave shows us the way he and his brother keep their cattle in a very traditional way on their 1500 to 1800 acre farm - including the story about an elderly vet whom they rather not call anymore at night because he can't stay sober long enough to work during a crisis when, for example, a calf wants to be born lying up side down and needs to be pushed back in until it's turned the right side up - and therefore Dave or his brother just do it themselves ... We next drove in a south-westerly direction to Muscatine, a little town on the Mississippi river with a dam, and a nickname of "Pearl of te Mississippi" because it had the "worlds'" largest pearl button production. The memorial statue is called the "Fisher of Clams Statue" - a large sculpture of a clam fisherman standing in a clam-filled boat and brandishing a pair of clamming forks over his head. "Mississippi Harvest," a bronze created by artist Erik Blome, is over 23 feet tall. It's one of several "Pearl of the Mississippi" projects to beautify the riverfront. From Muscatine we drove toBurlington where we got in time to watch a baseball match between the Burlington Bees and The River Bandits from Davenport. Niklas and I tried hard with the help of a wikipedia article to decipher the different rules and tactics of this game and I believe that together we did a good job of it and really enjoyed our evening which ended with a cool game of pool in our motel.