09/27/2025    Rod Tomczak, DPM, MD, EdD

A Short Allegory Chapter 2

Steve Winans was the de facto leader of the
unofficial group that sat around the pot belly
stoves at the seed store dropping peanuts in their
Cokes or Dr. Peppers. He was up every morning
before dawn and worked tirelessly all day. He
found work where there wasn’t any work. He learned
these characteristics from his dad who was the
same way. The thing about Steve was that he had
more than a touch of big city in him, something
the other farmers didn’t have, and he saw things
in a way the other farmers of Agronomy’s Best (AB)
didn’t see them. If he hadn’t been born and raised
in AB, you would have sworn he was placed in AB,
Iowa by Witness Protection. He was the only guy
who could tell you how to sink a large yacht in
the middle of Iowa.

Greg Samsa, on the other hand, very smooth in his
hand tailored suits and ostrich non-work boots was
the elected chairman of the Agronomy’s Best Fine
Arts Commission, (ABFAC) by the other members of
the Commission. They did make all the important
decisions for AB. The population of AB didn’t want
to be troubled with all the decisions that came
across the agenda table that the ABFAC had to deal
with, so regular farmers liked things the way they
were and let ABFAC handle the town meetings.
Things had gone smoothly for years and
occasionally one of the members of the commission
would drop by the seed store and give a report to
all the farmers enjoying their Cokes and peanuts.
Above all, ABFAC has fostered an advanced level of
trust with the citizens of AB, or so the farmers
thought.

One day, Greg Samsa called Steve and asked him if
he could borrow some soy bean seeds since he ran
short and wanted to get the seeds in the ground as
quickly as possible. This was not an uncommon
practice amongst the farmers of AB. Your 14-year-
old would load the desired amount in the pick up
truck and drive it over after school. No money
changed hands, as was the practice since it didn’t
amount to that much or it would just be paid back
next planting season with seeds. Forty acres of
land required 2000 lbs. of seeds and a ton of seed
cost approximately $3000. Hardly enough to make a
big deal out of for farmers who purchased million
dollar tractors and paid cash for them.

Steve asked him how much weight Greg needed to
plant the land and Greg said he would take all
Steve had and that he needed at least 6 tons,
enough for 240 acres. Steve said he would send
his own son, Mario over to Greg’s farm after
school. Steve knew Mario had a crush on Greg’s
daughter Tara and this would give him an
opportunity maybe to take Tara for a burger after
unloading Mario’s GMC Denali truck. Steve was
always thinking ahead like that. Steve also told
Greg he was going to the seed store and would ask
the rest of the farmers if they had seeds to
spare. He would tell his wife Jan to have Mario
load the Denali with seeds he had and take them to
Greg’s.

Steve couldn’t wait to get to the seed store.
Either Greg had bought someone’s farm and was
changing crop rotation or something nefarious was
going on. Steve got to the store, sat back in a
rocker and put his custom Carolina work boots up
on the pot belly stove. He had to have custom
boots to accommodate the $1,000 orthotics he
needed to keep his hammertoes from getting worse,
or so said his podiatrist.

Steve told everyone at the seed store what had
recently happened on the phone with Greg and even
the most charitable farmer in AB knew there was
something wrong since no farms were being sold off
and usually orders for large amounts of seeds were
placed during the winter. Immediately the farmers
assumed that Greg was going to plant a lot of land
he had declared would be rested to Iowa State
University and the US Department of Agriculture
(USDA) so they could be registered and Greg paid
for not planting.

Iowa State University has one of the finest
agronomy departments in the United States. Their
College of Agronomy was respected worldwide. They
were extremely innovative and looked for methods
of increasing crop production that could be used
to feed the world. In conjunction with the
Veterinary College that oversee animal husbandry
they monitor staples for consumption. They cross
the two programs to prepare students for a life on
the farm. All in all, Iowa State was the Sister
Teresa of farming.

Iowa State University discovered that four years
of an undergraduate program did not adequately
expose students to all the innovations and
techniques needed for a successful farm. Farmers
were even classified as to their status by what
they have learned and who can teach in the corn
and soy beans in what was called the farm
residency program. The program was much like a
surgical or medical residency program which was
overseen by a national commission while the
farmers program was under the auspice of a more
parochial state accreditor where everyone knew
everyone and approved all the programs where large
sums of money were dispersed.

Graduates of the agronomy college were paid to
spend a couple years on the best farms in the
country, but most of the Iowa State program sent
new graduates to Iowa corn and soy bean farms.
Graduates actually experienced on the job
training. Room and board were provided because it
would be impractical to commute when days run into
tomorrow at times. The resident farmers were paid
a substantial wage by the USDA which is subsidized
by the university. The USDA also paid the
supervising farmers who must be a Master Farmer
quite handsomely. It was like Iowa told the
Federal Government who should be paid, a very nice
arrangement where everyone in Iowa knew everyone
in Iowa and approved their program.

Master farmers loved the program. After an
introduction period the apprentice farmer could
work the land like it’s his own farm under the
supervision of the master farmer. Sometimes there
was literally no mentoring. In other words, the
program is set up to make everyone happy and tax
dollars were being spent to create farmers who
were supposedly conservators of the earth. In
reality, these young farmers then became master
farmers and were able to partake in government
subsidized indentured farm work under the guise of
learning the nuances of corn and soy bean farming.

The apprentice farmer had to read, study, be
constantly on call and be tested on the basic and
advanced concepts of farming. He had to attain a
certain level of learning, expertise, and
kinesthetic tactile expertise to earn the status
of journeyman farmer. Of course all this had to be
recorded on a computer log detailing the time
spent in training. When he had attained this level
he could leave his master’s farm and join the
family farm or go out on his own. The advantage of
the apprentice program was that only through the
apprenticeship to journeyman to master steps could
the farmer ever attain the level of master and be
paid generous amounts of money to train apprentice
farmers. Not everyone who went through the
apprenticeship farming program automatically
becomes a master. It took at least a few years of
oral and written testing along with on-site
inspection of your crops and ability to handle a
circumstance you were never exposed to in your
training. A farmer may have never lived through a
drought or even been exposed to one except in a
textbook, but was expected to know what to do.

The reason a young farmer wanted to become a
master farmer was to become a trainer of young
farmers. The combined stipend to the master farmer
for one apprentice farmer was $30,000 per year. It
was possible for a master farmer to have 12 or
more apprentice farmers under their supervision
each year. As the farmers at the feed store
learned all this on Chat GPT they became more
incensed. Why didn’t they have a say on what was
going on? Did the fact that the regular farmers
elected an elite group to the Fine Arts Commission
give them license to corrupt the farming
profession and line their pockets. Then they
discovered a fact that really upset the farmers.

Some graduates of Iowa State did not want to go
into a program stressing corn and soy beans. There
were huge family farms that only produced milk, a
dairy farm or pork, called a pig farm, the odor of
which was called Iowa Gold. It was possible with
some exposure to corn and soy beans to become a
master farmer and still have a pig farm.
Recertification and loss of master status was
still possible through the recertification
program, but sharing of stipends through their
organization was not as lucrative. They felt like
adopted farmers with no soil in their blood.

Greg and other members of ABFAC were all master
farmers and each had multiple apprentices for
which they received sizeable stipends. They also
belonged to the crop rotation and crop rest
program sponsored by the USDA and were paid to
rest part of their land each year. But this was a
problem if an apprentice was assigned land which
was in a rest period. Greg and the other members
of the ABFAC thought they could get away with
planting land if no one ever looked and they
continued to get paid to train someone working
that land, a veritable double dip. Instead of
hiring outside farm hands to help work the land,
they had apprentices to work without paying them
out of their pockets. It was indeed a triple dip.
Indeed, these normally calm farmers were getting
really worked up.

In order to preserve the program and keep the
fortunate few in the money, there would have to be
a limited number of master farmers created each
year and a justifiable way to accomplish this goal
that could be defended. One method that was
proposed was to say that the hoi polio mandated
the whole program by electing the few and the
wealthy. Much of the questionable monies were
being run through the stocks and accounts of ABFAC
which would have to be thoroughly examined and
transparency would occur for the people at
Spectrum, but also the citizens of AB. This was
not acceptable to the folks of ABFAC and their
minions. They were staring down the possibility of
losing all this money they had kept quiet about
for all these years, so they voted to not have
anything to do with Spectrum thereby keeping the
books secret.

Over in the seed store the farmers began to wonder
if keeping Spectrum from buying that portion of
the Fine Arts Commission was such a good idea and
what really gave ABFAC the rights to do it? Maybe
Greg and his crew were covering up more than they
said. Trust had been broken. It appeared the
fiduciary responsibility the ABFAC preached was
really a cover up for greed.

Rod Tomczak, DPM, MD, EdD

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