In today’s edition we pay tribute to one of our region’s biggest industries that literally puts food on all of our tables — agriculture. As a former 4-H and FFA member, this is something I get pretty excited about, and as a newcomer to the Big Horn Basin I’ve noticed a few striking differences to how farming is done here versus how we do it where I come from.

I grew up in Iowa, arguably one of the most fertile places on Earth for agriculture, where corn is king and the hogs out number the people.

Since moving to the Big Horn Basin from Rock Springs in April, I’ve noticed many similarities and some striking differences to how farming is approached. Most notably, irrigation and timing, since Iowa averages 35 inches of rain per year and has about 120 days worth of growing season, long enough to get a fourth-cut of alfalfa by October before the first frost typically hits.

When I first moved here, I thought I was being messed with when I was told the canal system was entirely gravity-fed. During my first time exploring the Basin, I kept my eyes peeled for a pump along the waterways and never found one, but I did notice a lot of pipes.

I quickly learned that most local farmers use flood irrigation, which was a foreign concept to me — “flood” was a four-letter word that was dreaded and all too common, thanks to the Mississippi, Iowa, Cedar and Missouri rivers that flowed through the seemingly endless flat farmland. Iowans often used sprinkler irrigation, just not to the extent it is here.

Rain fell so regularly in Iowa that you could almost set your watch to it. At about 4 p.m., an afternoon shower was almost guaranteed to blow in during the summer months. Sometimes it spawned a tornado, but usually it was just a short and heavy downpour.

On top of the steady supply of rain, or should I say beneath it, the soil was very different from what’s found in the Big Horn Basin.

When it’s wet, the soil here reminds me of peanut butter — it sticks to everything and seems to have a lot more clay.

The soil we dealt with in Iowa was more uniform, our fields were nearly identical to the ones in neighboring communities — black to dark brown in color, with a lot of nutrients and organic matter mixed in, about like what can be found in the bags of gardening soil sold in stores.

Although it was ideal for farming, the high amount of rainfall meant it was important to plan for preventing erosion during heavy rainstorms. It was not unheard of for a field to suddenly have a washout where nutrient-rich topsoil was sloshed over.

Another strange aspect to farming in Iowa was thanks to the plethora of large rivers.

To give some perspective on just how much water was within our vicinity, Iowa has about 27,000 miles of rivers and streams flowing through it, most notably the Mississippi River, which averages 593,000 cubic feet per second and maxes out at 3.06 million cubic feet per second.

By comparison, the Yellowstone River averages 13,773 cubic feet per second and and maxes out at 159,000 cubic feet per second. The Shoshone River averages 1,037 cubic feet per second and maxes out at 17,300 cubic feet per second.

My earliest childhood memory is the “Great Flood of 1993” that occurred when I was 6 years old. The nearby town of Fruitland was so flooded that the only visible parts of the low-lying neighborhoods were rooftops and chimneys.

A series of dams was built along the Mississippi; the nearest to where I grew up was No. 16, built in 1937. When those dams were built, they altered the flow of the river slightly and opened up some sandy, nutrient-rich and sediment-heavy area that was prime for growing watermelons, cantaloupe and honeydew melons.

Other fields had similar soil, leftover from back when the Mississippi was much larger. The closer farms were to rivers, the better their fields were for a seemingly unexpected crop.

The hot summers, heavy rainfall and former riverbeds turned into fields produced melons sweeter than candy and so juicy that a towel was needed just to eat them.

I haven’t lived there since graduating college in 2010, but I’ve yet to find melons on par with those — they remain a factor in deciding when my next trip back will happen.