They look uniform because what goes on inside is invisible from the street. What you remember when you leave is the simplicity of the buildings, the monotonous way that they fill the eye, not the complexity of the businesses within them. The same is true for farmland. From the roadside, it's impossible to see the obligations that pile up, like a hard winter's snows, on every acre of cultivated rural land. Some of those obligations are ethical and some are legal, the result of increasingly intricate licensing agreements with seed companies and contracts with giant meatpacking corporations.
Some obligation is raw debt, used to leverage the purchase of machinery or more farmland.
Nearly every farmer is enmeshed in a bewildering tangle of production credits, loan deficiency payments, and emergency federal appropriations. The history of American farming in the 20th century is, above all, the history of rural debt. Still, no one in Iowa expects to see 21st century farmers carrying rifles and shotguns, standing across a blacktop highway, blockading traffic, protesting their economic plight. Iowans pride themselves on politeness to begin with, and today's farmer understands all too well how completely his profit is tied to the upticks and downticks of the commodity markets, to price variations that depend on almost unquantifiable nuances of global weather and political and economic behavior. To put it another way, today's farmer understands that local protest is futile because he no longer has any local markets.