Garst Farms: A Legacy of Innovation

Yes, the conservationists are most definitely capitalists. They’ve been that way since the day Garst invited the Khrushchevs to travel from Moscow to Coon Rapids to enjoy a farm lunch of fried chicken, stuffed tomatoes, and apple pie. And, just maybe, to buy a whole lot of his hybrid corn seed.

The patriarch — Roswell “Bob” Garst — was chock full of wild ideas. Wild for the times, anyway, yet notions that eventually would help transform how America farms.

Before all that, Garst was selling real estate in Des Moines when the Great Depression leveled the country in 1929. He quickly teamed up with Henry Wallace, a fellow big-thinking businessman from Iowa.

For several years, Wallace had been producing and selling a high-yielding hybrid corn seed he named Copper Cross. Wallace, who later would become President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture and his second vice president, had learned the science of hybrids from George Washington Carver.

As the Depression deepened, Garst returned to his hometown of Coon Rapids and began selling Wallace’s hybrid seeds throughout Western Iowa. In 1931, he cofounded his own venture, the Garst and Thomas Hybrid Seed Corn Company.

“Hybrids were the magic change agents,” his granddaughter Liz Garst says. “Before then, you saved your own seeds, the only fertilizer was manure from your own farm animals, and the only power came from your own draft animals.”

Hybrid corn grows faster, is more disease resistant, and produces higher yields. In 1933, just 1 percent of Iowa farmland was planted with hybrid seed. By 1943, almost all the fields were hybrid. Roswell Garst had helped spread the gospel of hybrids to farmers across the Midwest. He also got rich selling his seeds.

He began buying dying farms and reviving them by restoring the soil. He graded the ditches, seeded the waterways, and converted some land back to pasture. He raised calves and cows by feeding them corn cobs and stalks. He championed nitrogen fertilizer and mechanization to plant and harvest his crops. His conservation boosted the yields — and it ultimately became a family religion.

When Roswell’s son Stephen later farmed the family’s land outside of Coon Rapids, he continued using terraces, seeded waterways and headlands, and he became an early adopter of no-till practices. He refused to break up the soil in spring and fall, blocking erosion and building organic matter in the ground.

By the mid-1950s, Roswell Garst was still hawking corn seed, and he had his eyes on a potential new market, the Soviet Union. At the same time, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was gazing longingly at Iowa, proclaiming that the fatherland needed its own version of the Iowa Corn Belt. Khrushchev was desperate for a homegrown bounty of meat, milk, and eggs for his people.

The editor of the Des Moines Register read that comment and published a letter to Khrushchev, inviting him to Iowa to learn how they grew food in the Hawkeye State. In 1959, the Soviet premier arrived for a US tour. Along the way, he ventured with his wife to Roswell Garst’s farmhouse, followed by a gaggle of journalists.

Roswell had two motives for the visit. First, to make money. Second, to throw a small amount of deicer on Cold War tensions by helping Khrushchev feed his nation. Roswell believed that hungry people were dangerous people, and that the Soviets wouldn’t be good global neighbors until their bellies were full.

“I think from our own selfish interests,” Roswell Garst subsequently wrote, “we cannot afford to have one-third of the world possess the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb and nothing else — and to be hungry at the same time. That’s too great a temptation.”

Under a circus tent in the backyard, the men feasted on fried chicken. In the nearby corn rows, they talked farming. The two realized they had much in common. They each saw themselves as peasants. They each appreciated fertile soil. They liked each other.

Liz Garst, then 8, still speaks fondly of that unlikely bond and the warmth of the moment. “I remember sitting on Mrs. Khrushchev’s lap and liking her. She smelled good and didn’t hold me too tight. It was a great day,” she recalls.