Midwest Farm Boy Brings Taste of Home to Iraq

By Stacie Turnbull, Ames, Iowa.
Reprinted from Country Magazine

YOU CAN TAKE a boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy, even in Iraq. Specialist Clint Turnbull recently brought a little bit of the Midwest to central Iraq, harvesting more than 350 ears of sweet corn for a homegrown feast.

Clint, a graduate student in agronomy at Iowa State University, was called to active duty with the Iowa National Guard in February, 2003. He hated the thought of missing a planting season, and was growing hungry for a bit of home cooking.

So he contacted his former employer, Tom Hoegemeyer of Hoegemeyer Hybrids in Hooper, Nebraska, about sending over some sweet corn seed.

Why sweet corn? “I’m from Nebraska,” Clint explains. “What else would a farmer from Nebraska think of?”

Tom checked the latitude of the area where Clint was stationed and found it was similar to southern Kansas. Then he researched growing conditions in that part of the world. “He had a reasonable chance to raise good sweet corn if he had enough water,” Tom decided.

Recycled Showers.

Unfortunately, Clint was stationed in the middle of the desert He wanted to plant his first crop in September. But the rainy season wouldn’t arrive until December and January, when 8 to 10 inches of rain typically falls. “That’s it for the year,” Clint says.

Then one day he noticed water running down the hill from the unit’s homemade showers - the perfect spot

for an irrigated garden. Clint and Specialist Tom Musick, who farms with his father in Clinton, Illinois, began planning and digging irrigation ditches.

“People only took showers at night, so we’d dig our ditches in the morning (after working the night shift) and come back later with flash lights to make sure the water was flowing properly;’ Clint explains. “We had to switch the water flow every day to different ditches?’

They tilled up the seedbed with the same shovel they used to dig the irrigation ditches. Their high-tech, dual-purpose corn planter was a tent stake they used to both poke holes for the seed and measure the distance to the next hole.

Temperatures at planting time ranged between 110° and 120°. “With all that water, I knew the corn would make it to tassel,” Clint says. But he also knew the tassels would burn up at much above 95° to 100°. “1 was hoping temps would cool down in the fall?’ –

Lots of Smiles.

As the corn began to grow, so did the weeds - mainly thistles and a relative of wild oats. So out came the trusty shovel, still their only gardening tool.

“People were very impressed that it was green and growing. But they still weren’t too sure,” Clint says. “They wondered if it would be edible. ‘Going to taste like soap, isn’t it?’ was always the comment?”

On November 29, the corn was ready for harvest. “We soaked it in water for an hour or so,” Clint says. “Then we put the ears on a barbecue grill made from a large oil drum, and turned them until the husks were brown all the way around.

“Finally, we packed the hot ears into insulated coolers, where the trapped heat finished cooking them.”

They split the 350 ears between 150 members of Clint’s unit. “There were lots of smiles and laughs and appreciation for helping them feel a little more at home;’ Clint remembers.

Along with the corn, Clint planted tomatoes, onions, carrots, radishes and jalapeno peppers. And he’s growing peas, beans, lettuce, bell peppers and other vegetables in peat pots in his tent for eventual transplanting.

When faced with the opportunity to bring a little bit of home to Iraq, this Midwest farm boy rose to the challenge. And home never tasted so good.

A TINY OASIS of green brightens the Iraqi desert, thanks to the determined efforts of Army Specialist Clint Turnbull.