Jon Bakehouse is a corn and soybean farmer in southwest Iowa. He and his family were slowly working to improve the sustainability of the farm, until an unexpected health scare changed Bakehouse’s perspective on farming.
This will be the end of Season II of At the Iowa Farm Table. We will be back in September with new episodes—but until then, please “like” and share with a few friends.
About this episode
This episode is part of a partnership with the Practical Farmers of Iowa, a farmer-led nonprofit with more than 9,000 members that equips farmers to build resilient farms and communities. Through farmer-led education, on-farm research, financial support, technical assistance, business development and solutions-oriented policy work, PFI helps farmers try new ideas, solve problems together and build successful farm businesses.
Every January, at the PFI annual conference in Des Moines, a ‘Conversation Coop’ (a room really) is set up, where attendees tell stories about food and farming. These stories are then stored with StoryCorp–a national story collection site–and at the Library of Congress. I got to thinking–there have to be great stories in that collection, stories that more people should hear. And so, with PFI and the story-teller’s permission, we have edited down the interviews and are sharing them with you here.
Resources on prairie strips
https://www.iaagwater.org/prairie-strips-a-beautiful-tool-for-soil-preservation/
https://www.cals.iastate.edu/news/2025/prairie-strips-can-rapidly-improve-soil-health
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Transcript of Show
Today’s story comes from a corn and soybean farmer in southwestern Iowa. He’s a member of the Practical Farmers of Iowa, a farmer-led nonprofit with more than 9,000 members that helps farmers build resilient farms and communities. Every January at the PFI Annual Conference, an interview space is set up where people can tell stories about food and farming.
This is an edited version of the discussion with John Bakehouse and will be our season grand finale. At the Iowa Farm Table, we’ll be taking a two-month break over July and August to give you a chance to get caught up and me some time at the farm. Without further ado, Jon Bakehouse.
My name is Jon Bakehouse. Our farm is Maple Edge Farm in Southwest Iowa. Really the core has always been corn and soybeans. We had livestock with probably 15 or 20 acres of pasture, about that same amount of hay, so not really diversified. Everything we had as far as machinery, storage, was geared towards corn and beans.
It’s not a crop rotation, it’s an alternation. And there are a lot of inherent problems with that, but it’s what’s paying the bills. You know, from a purely business standpoint, I did like it. There are things we could do. There are things we could manipulate to become more efficient. We recognized we were having trouble with water management.
We were having trouble with compaction. So we moved away from the tillage into no-till, which I liked that part of it. We saw some benefits there. We started to see better water infiltration. We also started to see our organic matter increase. But of course, when you move away from tillage in a production agriculture environment,
you’re going to rely more on herbicide. And I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that we were raising crops for an unknown audience. The corn would go to an ethanol plant, but you never see your end consumer. We were just raising as many bushels as efficiently as we could for some markets.
And there was no real personal connection to the crop, to the process, to the customer. And could also obviously see as we took out fence rows, took out trees, we started to see on our farm that fields pushing everything that wasn’t corn and soybeans to the margins.
And you know in your heart of hearts that you can’t just push the rest of the environment to the margins and not expect some sort of consequence. Really, I was not a spiritual person. We have a small Methodist country church that’s beautiful, and I liked going, but the messages never really stuck.
When I would go to church and listen to sermons about man’s dominion over nature, it just made me so mad. It’s like, well, that’s kind of a misinterpretation. I don’t think that was the original intent of the message. Yeah. And then in 2020, I think it was 2024,
through many months of ER visits and ICU visits through chest procedures, discovered fluid around my heart and figured out that it was lymphoma that was causing that fluid around the heart. And during that year, it was just one piece of bad news after another. It was just wave after wave after wave of really shitty news.
Like, I just couldn’t get a break. I’d never really addressed mortality or thought about mortality, and suddenly it was here. And the only thing I really knew how to do, especially when you get that call from the doctor with the cancer word, was just breathe. I didn’t know I was looking for anything spiritual,
But I knew that when I sat there and was breathing, I could at least function to some degree and started to discover the extremely spiritual side that farming can be. At the same time that that was happening, it just so happened that a year or two prior, we had established our first prairie strip.
When we first seeded those prairie strips, it was the second year and the big blue stem was eight feet tall, I suppose this was October, November, when things had turned kind of brown and the sun was coming up and it was just so golden.
Corn might be considered golden, I guess, but it’s pretty homogenous, it’s pretty unremarkable, but to see that prairie strip to be glowing golden with still, still all that life going on in it was just astounding. Sitting in that race trip, taking the time just to sit in the midst of a lot of crappy news and thinking,
you know what, if this is where I have to lie down and die, so be it. It really allows an acceptance, I think, of Not just your mortality but it’s this realization that our body really is just borrowed from many elements of the earth and
that sitting there it’s okay to let go of the eye of the john and it’s okay to return these borrowed elements back to this wonderful place this wonderfully peaceful place When you’re standing and you’re looking at a field of corn and soybeans, it can be satisfying, again, from that business standpoint, straight rows,
you know, clean fields, no weeds,
green crop, but really, you know, there may be some spiders out there, some bugs, maybe a bird or two, but Then you look over in a prairie strip and it’s just alive. It’s really, really alive. It’s not just a few things here and there. It’s just, it’s like, where have these insects and birds been?
Where have they been hiding out? Like they’ve just been waiting for an area in which to thrive. And I think that’s what really hit me was my spirit doesn’t thrive with corn and beans, but it does in prairie strips. And I think probably we could say the same thing about human spirit in general.
As we push Mother Nature to the margins, we also push our souls and our spirits to the margins. And that was certainly happening to me. You know, ultimately in my mind, I’m thinking, well, let’s just keep identifying areas where we can keep piecing these prairie strips together and see about being able
to make our acres pay in a different way, whether that’s birders or hunting. There’s different ways. And talking with our son, who was 16, I’ve told him, I said, I hope the farm will be here if you want it, but boy, think, think really, really, really hard about what you can do differently.
Do something different than corn and beans. Make this an oasis for your soul and for the community’s soul and for the world’s soul. Please do something different. When I’m driving down the road and I see a field that is badly eroded or entire trees or pastures cleared, I mean, I think they recognize the danger in that.
But it’s easy to not be mindful of the consequences and to treat an acre strictly as a production unit. There really are consequences for when you are treating your environment as we have. Even though I was trying to make improvements, it was still Not great. And that manifested not only in environmental health, but in my own health.
I can’t remember who said it, but said only until your last drop of water is poisoned. Well, you understand you can’t drink money. And I think that’s unfortunately where we’re headed.
I want to thank John Bakehouse for sharing his story and let listeners know his scans have all come back clear. And thanks too to PFI for partnering with us on this podcast. At the Iowa Farm Table is a production of the Iowa Food System Coalition,
a group of more than 60 organizations working to improve agriculture in the state. I’m Beth Hoffman author journalist and farmer please share this episode and tell a friend or two about the podcast we’ll see you again in September thanks so much for listening
