Thank You for Coming Home

COLUMBUS, Neb. – When I found out John Hannah served his nation in Vietnam, I said, “Thank you for your service, John.”??

John said, “Don’t thank me for my service.? Thank me for coming home.”

Thank you for coming home John Hannah.? There are many reasons to do so.? I know you are not alone amongst the Vietnam veterans who feel guilty about coming home when so many did not.? We’re certainly glad you did come home though because you have made such a difference in the world, and you have many more contributions to make.? That is why I wanted to interview you.??

John Hannah’s story . . .?

John Hannah grew up in Southeast Iowa near the little Quaker town of Salem.? He was the son of Ben and Jean Hannah. Ben was tragically killed in a truck accident when John was just six years old.? When he was in sixth grade, his mom would later marry a kind, hardworking, Swede farmer named Hjalmar Monson.??

“I am from the last generation you know, to hand pick corn, the last people to live like it was in the 1900s.? I am among the last that had to run out and pump water in a bucket at the well and use an outhouse full time,” Hannah said.? “My age group, we’re the last of that bunch.”??

“Dad was killed on Valentine’s Day in 1951,” Hannah recalled.? “When I was young, we lived on the family farm.? Mom, who is 99 years old now, always said the farm was kind of a bad deal.? It was rundown and such and dad had to fix up all the fences, buildings, house, and this and that.? But it was going to be split up with all his brothers and sisters and we weren’t going to get anything in an equitable manner, so dad ended up getting a job driving a gasoline semi instead.? My dad was away a lot. He had three kids under five years old and was doing everything he could to earn money.”

Five years later, when Hannah’s mom remarried, it was back to farm life for the family, “My stepfather made it on the farm from the beginning of their marriage to me going to college. But, when I went to college, he had to get out.? That’s when he started working as a paint supervisor at a school bus plant that came into Mt. Pleasant Iowa from Georgia.? They were slave drivers, there’s not a better way to say it.? He was also a heavy smoker and WWII veteran.? He was in the Army and landed on the Philippines when McCarthur invaded.? From there he went to Okinawa.? He never really talked about it much, but I eventually pieced some things together.”??

?When Hannah was in college, he met his wife, Pamala Franks.? Pamala’s dad was a Marine in WWII, serving in the Pacific, including the dreaded island of Peleliu, “Every Marine knows about Peleliu. When landing on the Pacific Islands, everyone on the first ten boats were likely going to die.? Bob Franks was the first guy off the second boat.? But he made it.”

“Bob also ended up making the original landing on Okinawa.? He spoke of traveling across a mile of grass and then coming across a runway.? Up in the hills there, east of the runway, they got pinned down and literally dug foxholes to keep safe.? For a month, they could not stick their head out of the holes, or they were dead,” Hannah said.? “If you stuck your hand out, there was a good chance you could lose your hand.? He survived though.? They had no water or food to speak of, but it rained every day, so they would take their ponchos and put it on the edge of the foxhole and the water would run down and collect in their helmets.”

Years later, Hannah figured out that his stepfather’s Army unit had probably relieved his father-in-law’s Marine unit.? Neither one of them ever knew that because they never talked about the war, he added.?

Hannah started college at Iowa State University in 1962, majoring in entomology.? In the spring of 1966, when money for tuition ran out, he joined the Army as a weather observer, serving in New Mexico, and later in Vietnam.? After his military service, Hannah earned a B.Sc. in entomology in 1971.? For the next 12 years, he worked in nursery production as a plant propagator.??

Among his many interesting experiences, was a summer at Pharr, Texas in 1964 working on a screwworm eradication project at the WWII Air Force base there, “In WWII, after they came up with the atomic bomb, they had all these radioactive products they were trying to find uses for.? Well, a researcher/entomologist came up with the idea that you could use radiation to sterilize insects. Then you could grow the sterilized insects and drop them in an airplane and eliminate the unwanted pests.”

The eradication project eradicated the screwworm that was wreaking havoc on livestock all across the nation to the tune of $15,000,000 a year in the U.S. back then, “If an animal had a scratch, the screwworms would find it and lay eggs that would hatch and eat a fist-sized hole in the host.? My work was to come up with genetic markers that would allow the project to distinguish wild flies from sterile flies.”

“Sterilized pupae were air-dropped all over the United States for many years after the project began,” he went on to explain. “After a decade or so, the project had eliminated screwworm flies in the U.S. and saved billions of dollars for the country.? The U.S. had also helped to get rid of screwworms in Mexico, Panama, and the Caribbean.? This all took 15 years or more in the U.S. and was actually a huge government success story no one knows about.”

Hannah’s career would also take him into seed sales in eastern Iowa in 1983. For 20 years, he then sold seed at wholesale and at other times agronomy product lines at retail.? Hannah was later appointed to the Lower Platte North Natural Resources District (NRD) board in 2003 and served for 18 years, including chair of various committees and Chairman of the board of directors.? He has also been a part of the Shell Creek Watershed Improvement Group and made farm calls on almost all of the operators in the watershed promoting the adoption of Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and NRD projects.

Four years ago, Shell Creek became the first watershed in the nation to be delisted for atrazine contamination and still is the only watershed that has been restored.? In 2003, Hannah also started Cropdoc, an independent crop consulting business that he has successfully operated to the present.

Hannah is deeply passionate about insects, plants, and all life.? He explained why he found a love for entomology during his formative years, “Back when my dad died, my grandad was a well-known carpenter in Salem, Iowa.? My grandfather had bought a property in Mt. Pleasant and started building spec houses.? When dad died, he had one of those spec houses almost done and we moved into the house which was right next to the country at that time.”

“A block away from us there was a barn that used to be the farm,” he remembered.? “As soon as we got there, I got interested in things that creeped and crawled.? I would be excited about everything I saw.? I would study the land snails and think, ‘Oh this is so cool.’? Back in the day, people had way more diversity in their lawns, different sorts of plants and such.? There were gardens on nearly every property, lots of flowers, and many trees.? Sometime during the fourth or fifth grade, I was really into collecting cool caterpillars.? Mom always had dill back then with black swallowtails all over it.? I would collect the larvae and hatch them indoors, feeding the things and watching them pupate and make a beautiful chrysalis and then change color and the butterfly would pop out and spread its wings.”??

“You have to be one heck of a plantsman to be an entomologist. Almost all those little buggers eat plants,” Hannah said. “My first job out of college was making baby plants as a plant propagator. Over the years, people came to me often to identify insects or plants.”

Hannah can find rich diversity almost everywhere, even at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the Chihuahuan Desert, “Down there, there’s all these plants.? They are really specialized, nothing like we have up here. I enjoy watching insects and their strange behaviors and life stories.? It’s fascinating what you see, even in the desert.”

“When we moved to Nebraska, I could sniff out a prairie a million miles away,” he said.?

Today Hannah is concerned because so much has changed, “Here I sit today in Columbus, Nebraska and you can look clear out on the horizon in many places, like it’s an ocean. There may be an elevator out there like a ship on the ocean, but there’s not much plant and insect diversity anymore.? It’s like being in the worst desert imaginable, worse than the sandiest spot in the world, in Saudi Arabia or the Sahara in many ways.”

“We have taken out all the fences where there used to be chokecherry, elm, locust trees, plum thickets, and even wildflowers.? Most of the fritillaries, a beautiful butterfly species, are gone along with other butterflies and insects.? The predominant plants are corn, soybeans, and brome grass and not much else. So, I look at how much things have changed, and I think to myself, ‘This is an abomination.’? Human beings are becoming an unfit species by letting our natural systems collapse.?We are like dinosaurs in that way, waiting for a meteorite to finish the job.? They apparently became an unfit species and were in decline millions of years before their extinction.? If we don’t recognize what is happening with our environment and make adjustments, we will earn the same fate as dinosaurs.? And buying more air conditioners is not the solution.”

“What I am saying is, there are other ways out there and life will be better if we change,” Hannah said.? “We have the warning signs, plenty of them.? We’re essentially ‘crapping in our own nest.’”

Hannah believes there is hope if farmers start changing and only they can lead the way he said confidently, “We’re not moving the needle enough.? Our water nitrate issues are getting measurably worse, not better, in many areas.? I know this for a fact in the Lower Platte North NRD.? And there are soil erosion issues almost everywhere.”

He thinks it’s going to take sweeping agricultural practice changes like no-till and other regenerative approaches that save, preserve, and renew the soil and water resources, “Where’s the hope?? The hope in the story is that I do know there are at least an embarrassingly few farmers who are really doing it right.? Their land is not losing any soil or water and they are soaking in every inch of rain, even if they have a five-inch downpour.? There are people out there doing it really right, but there aren’t as many as there should be or needs to be.”??

Hannah compliments the ones doing the right thing. But, he said, so often they have to watch their neighbor’s soil wash away in gullies, “So often farms literally right next to each other are in stark contrast – one farm with water sitting on top of it and running off and the other farm soaking all the moisture in.”??

“It’s going to sound harsh, but if we’re really going to have hope, we have to look at the biological side of things and work with that. We have huge carbon storage potential in our farm soils.? We should not tolerate nitrate and chemical levels increasing in our groundwater given the present concern for impacts like cancer rates,” he noted.

“We need more pollinators unless we plan to eat porridge the rest of our lives,” he added.? “Present subsidies encourage people to do the wrong things.? Subsidizing ethanol favors one crop over another, leading to supply distortions.? Subsidizing crop insurance gives incentives for plowing up the few remaining prairies, pastures, and wetlands.? We need to get animals back on the land and graze them instead of concentrating them as a pollution source.? We should conserve and build our soil resources.”?

Hannah relayed a recent story he read about the west coast of Ireland where there is an area with just a little skin of grass atop rock, “Archaeologists have discovered that area used to be farmed 6,000 years ago.? The farmers created soil loss, just like we are doing in the United States today.? The soil disappeared along with the farmers and today, 6,000 years later, it is one of the largest wilderness areas in Ireland and still not farmable.? The area became completely vacated, never to be farmed or populated again.”

“We don’t have to get to that point,” Hannah said adamantly.? “We have the information and examples to do better than that and a lot of that is in the idea of regenerative agriculture.”

Thank you, John, for coming home.? Thank you for making a difference and being a voice of reason in a world that is losing its soil and freshwater resources by the second.? As you state, the hope is, we absolutely can build soil again and, as a result, bring back the bugs, butterflies, grazing animals, families, and all life.? We’re not done hearing from Mr. Hannah and his network either.? He is going to connect us to a farmer friend or two he knows that is doing the right thing.? We can’t wait to keep learning.? That’s what the Graze Master Group is about, learning, from each other and Balancing Nature & Profitability.? We absolutely know we can do this after talking to people like John.???

Learn more at:? www.grazemastergroup.com or contact (call or text) co-founders:?

Kerry Hoffschneider at (402) 363-8963

Del Ficke at (402) 499-0329

Copyright? 2023 All Rights Reserved, Kerry Hoffschneider

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