On Thursday the 19th , my host father proposed to me to visit the farm of his uncle and aunt. I accepted with pleasure, because I know that farms are very important for Iowa economy and culture and I really enjoyed to visit the building I saw everyday on the way back from school. So I feeded calves with a big bottle of milk and tried to milk a cow once. We made a tour of the farm and I enjoyed looking at the farmer milking the cattle : there is a special technique to do it, and he had to clean the udder before milking to be sure that it would not infect the milk.
The Iowa farms are very different from French ones. In France we have not really typical style of farms that we coulf find everywhere in a area. However, there often are long and narrow buildings. Iowa farms are often all red, and are composed of a main building sheltering animals, and of silos (some farms have only one but others have two and sometimes three silos, according to their size). The silos are used to contain food for the cattle and all these stuffs like that. They make the area very famous for that. Those farmers have a very rude life because they are used to wake up at 5 in the morning to milk the cows...The only bad thing was that it smells very strong and unpleasant, and after one hour spent in the farm our clothes and hair were impregnated by the smell of farm !
