Iowa’s Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig toured Washington High School FFA fields and facilities Tuesday afternoon. Naig met with FFA members Leah Evans and Sophie Bell, along with advisor Trent Steinhart. The FFA members showed him some of the 60 acres that the land lab plants and harvests each year. The 15 students in the program harvested soybeans before the snow but they’re still working on corn.

Evans and Bell said the corn they’re harvesting now is at about 21.5% moisture. Naig says that’s a problem that hit all of Iowa at once at a time when there’s a shortage in propane to help dry the crop, “Storage was full within the state, we just went through it very quickly. The last 10 days of October into the first part of November was such a pull on the system that it just turned it completely over. We heard from several propane distributors that said they did two and three times their normal volume in those 10 days. Well, normally you’ve got a rolling start to harvest. Right? Somebody gets started early and we kind of, parts of the state kind of roll. Not this year, it was like we all started at once and it was all wet, it all needed to be dried, and then it got cold.” State legislators and local farmers Representative Jarad Klein and Senator Kevin Kinney were also in attendance. Kinney said he’s never before seen a harvest where he had to dry everything.

Students this year planted in the first week of June. Each student pays in $1,000, some of the supplies like seed and chemicals are donated by local businesses and farmers, and then the students harvest it. Profits are then divided among the students, so long as they’re has been money made.