In Iowa, "AI" means something else entirely...
And if you want to hear about my child labor on a sheep farm, you're in for a treat!
Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former/future tech worker who recently moved back to rural Iowa. I write about my wild and weird #smalltownlife, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
Here’s a fun fact: in rural Iowa, “AI” usually means “artificial insemination.”
This caused a lot of confusion in the early 2000s, when I studied artificial intelligence as part of my cognitive science major in college. As AltaVista and Ask Jeeves were dying, it briefly seemed that I’d be better off doing “southern Iowa cattle barn AI” than “Silicon Valley startup AI”. I still remember trying to explain my field of study, under anesthetic, to a Des Moines oral surgeon before he cut out my wisdom teeth. He seemed to think I was high long before the drugs knocked me out.
Selling vials of bull semen is major business in ag land. One high school friend’s Instagram feed is entirely photos of bulls whose semen he’s selling, like he’s running Tinder for cattle. In some cases (like prizewinning show cattle, which are a thing) it’s preferable to artificially inseminate cows (using the turkey baster method1, not full-on IVF) than it is to rent a bull and let nature take its course with the herd. My dad raised some miniature cows a few years back and his rental bulls were pretty useless when it came to mating — they preferred eating as much as possible and occasionally harassing cows around the pasture.
No, this is not a metaphor for dating in modern America, but I guess it could be.
I know a bit about this stuff because I had to take a mandatory vocational agriculture class (aka “vo ag”) in high school. It was pretty easy for me, since I mostly had to memorize the gestational lengths for major farm animals (pigs = three months, three weeks, and three days!). I vaguely remember all the cattle and sheep breeds, and we also learned the charts with all the cuts of various meats.
I don’t think I knew any vegetarians until I went to college, so no one seemed too upset about learning the meat cuts. This was back when Oprah was being sued by the Texas cattlemen for saying that mad cow disease made her never want to eat a burger again2. Compared to all the culture wars that have come after, that trial was quaint and hokey — but I’d love to read an opinion piece somewhere that ties together how the Oprah/Texas Cattlemen lawsuit is a brick in the road toward the Bud Light / Target / Chick-fil-A boycotts today.
Anyway, back to my dad’s minicows. They were miniature Dexter cattle, which are an offshoot of an Irish cattle breed. Dad had seven or nine of them — not enough to make money off of, but too many to keep as pets. Dexters have grown in popularity in the 2000s, largely due to hobbyist homesteaders and doomsday preppers. They’re perfect for both groups because they don’t require much pasture, and they’re good for both dairy and meat (most cattle breeds are bred for milking or butchering, but not both).
Of course, many doomsday preppers bury a thousand pounds of powdered milk and beef jerky in their backyard rather than raising a miniature cow, but to each their own.
I think my dad got the miniature cows because he always has a hankering to have some livestock around. His farming days ended, not by choice, in the 1980s, and he still gets the occasional urge to raise something. The cattle were the most excessive demonstration of this desire3. Usually, he goes through a phase of having chickens or peacocks until he remembers he’s too busy to deal with them, or until foxes kill them all. We’ll have a few seasons where we have to eat a dozen eggs a day, and then we’ll go back to our non-chicken-raising life as though it never happened. The minicows were an aberration, but they were cute, and now they’re gone like we never had them.
There are many seasons of my life that feel like they never happened, or happened to someone else. One of my early memories is in my grandparents’ barn, on sheep shearing day. I was probably five. My job was to compact the freshly-shorn wool as it was tossed into burlap sacks. Each sack was six or eight feet long, hanging from a big metal hoop. As the sheep were sheared, the shearer tossed wool over the hoop and into the bag. I stood in the bottom of the bag, dirty wool raining down on me, and stamped it down as much as I could. I kept stamping until I reached the top of the 6 or 8 foot tower of wool. My dad or aunt would help me down a ladder. Then they’d hang the next bag, with me in it, waiting for the next round of wool.
That memory is visceral. Wool is thick with oil (lanolin) when it’s freshly sheared, and dirty even if the sheep are bathed first. Burlap scratches your skin, and lanolin coats it, and everything has that unique barn smell of old hay, warm feed, and dozens of sheep passing through. My granddad herded sheep through the line, with the Marines-issued flattop haircut that he kept for his whole life after the war. My grandma also worked the sheep, and would cook something delicious for us after we were done for the day (but never lamb, because my family never ate them despite raising them for two decades).
Some days it feels impossible to hold that life in my mind. The barn decayed until it was bulldozed in; the farm was lost; my grandparents are gone; I grew up to live my life staring at a screen instead of stamping wool.
Not to say, of course, that I regret my path. I absolutely abhor being dirty or sweaty (classic Virgo). I’m better suited for wearing cashmere than processing sheep by-products. It’s just that, sometimes, I have trouble navigating these split halves of myself. The cashmere-wearing side and the sheep-shearing side feel like two different people and two different lives that can’t coexist.
But it’s a nice day here, and this isn’t a problem I’m going to solve in the next hour, so I’m going to pause this rumination and mess around with some gardening.
And I can still tell all the bad sheep puns that my family loves without actually having to raise sheep, right? Like this one:
Q: What’s a French sheep’s favorite holiday?
A: Baaaastille Day!
Cheers,
Sara
It’s actually not as simple as a turkey baster. Look away if you’re squeamish. If you’re not squeamish, artificial insemination in cows involves the inseminator putting one hand in the rectum of the cow and palpating the reproductive tract from the inside while the other hand guides the insemination wand through the cow’s cervix. As someone who’s had experience with human reproductive / IVF procedures that begin to feel like an impersonal, grotesque factory line, I’m glad that a) the human rectum mostly stays out of it and b) that twilight anesthetic exists.
Oprah’s feud with Texas, if you don’t remember: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/joshbillinson/oprah-winfrey-texas-beef-industry. She won, both in court and in life.
Actually, I take that back. The most excessive demonstration of my dad’s urge to raise animals was when he accepted 2000 baby turkeys that an uncle was trying to get rid of, and we picked them up in the back of our Chrysler sedan after an all-you-can-eat crab leg buffet. But that’s a story I’ll tell you some other day.
Bastille day is hilarious but also a personal attack!
2000 turkeys! I have so many questions. That's so many large birds.