At the start of the school year I began driving a bus route, picking up students in Washington, Iowa and transporting them to Hillcrest Academy where I taught for 32 years.
Driving to Washington brought back memories of the summers of my 2nd - 4th grade years. We lived outside of Kalona, and despite my grandma’s warning, “don’t go into the water until you know how to swim,” my parents signed us up for once a week swim lessons.
At the time I wasn’t a fan of being in water. To calm my anxiety on the bus ride to Washington, where the closest swimming pool was located, I would count fence posts. Telephone poles were an option for counting but they were too easy. Counting fence posts required intense concentration for the 14 miles between the two towns.
I never did learn to swim in the Washington pool, though later after a move to the Amana’s, I learned, joined the swim team and competed in at least one meet in the Washington pool.
The route of Highway One hasn’t changed in any significant way since it was authorized in 1839 by President Martin Van Buren. The road between Kalona and Washington is straight until you enter Washington from the north. It's relatively flat and frankly it’s a boring stretch of road. The shoulders are wider than they used to be and there are grooves cut in the median and on the shoulder to remind drivers to stay in their lane.
One change is the lack of fence posts remaining between the two towns. Except for small stretches, there is little to no fencing, meaning my anxiety-ridden 10 year old self wouldn’t have many fence posts to count.
Why no fences? The easy answer is farming changed. In the 1960’s most of the farms along Highway 1 included cattle, hogs, and maybe some chickens with the main crops being corn, soybeans, oats and hay. Now you seed corn and soybeans with an occasional hayfield mixed in. There are a few cattle, but you won’t see any chickens or hogs, at least not outside. They are kept inside huge confinement buildings, usually a half-mile or more off of the main highway.
When I checked the plat maps for Washington County it was interesting to note that many of the houses along the highway are divided into smaller parcels, anywhere from a half acre to 5 acres, and separated from the farmland around them. They are no longer technically “farmhouses.” The folks in them likely work in Washington, Kalona, or Iowa City.
According to the USDA report the average Washington County farm in 1969 consisted of 236 acres. In 2026 the data says the average farm size is 254 acres. But there is a difference between a “farm” and a “farming operation.” It's interesting to see the number of small farms, less than 50 acres increased from 1969 to 2022 as did the number of farms over 500 acres. Farms between 50 to 499 acres decreased by 570 dropping from 1176 to 606 farms.
In 1969 there were 6 farms in Washington County listed as being over 1,000 acres. In the 2022 report 48 farms are over 1,000 acre, With the focus on raising corn and beans over large tracts of land, fences became obsolete.
Now the farm operations have large sheds, office space, semi’s and trucking operations, grain bins and feed mills that are bigger than what private feed mill operations used to be. The biggest operations have websites describing their operations and farming philosophy. What they don’t include is the amount of federal subsidies they’ve received from the federal government, $24,839,564 in 2025. https://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=19183&progcode=total&yr=2025
