Affordable Iowa Farm For Sale

Bargain hunters Dream

For those of you who are following this blog because someday you would like to take the plunge and become a farmer too, here is an affordable farm that would make a great little farm for a beginning farmer.

Looks like the perimeter is already fenced in.

This farm is in Lucas county Iowa and is almost 8 acres with a house and farm buildings already in place and priced at only $54,900. Iowa farm ground is a great investment and you can’t go wrong with this farm. As I heard someone once say, ”The good Lord isn’t making any more of this stuff.” The house needs work inside and out but with some sweat equity you can make this investment grow.

Barn and farm buildings

The barn and the other farm buildings need some work, but can be restored for a great little homestead.

Back of House

Front driveway leading to the house

This 4 bedroom and 2 bath farm is just a few miles north of our farm and is just a quarter mile off of highway 65, a paved road, and would be about a 45 min. commute to Des Moines.

Brick Fireplace with lots of natural light in living room.

If the septic system is in good shape that is worth 10,000 by itself.

The listing says it had a new foundation not long ago.

It has the original wood trim and floors that could be refinished.

If interested in this property, click here for the listing. These affordable places don’t come up often and this one won’t last long. Below are some more photos of this farm.

Let it Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

Looks like we have at least of foot of snow and its still snowing. With temperatures expected to drop well below zero tonight it should be interesting how our trains will run tomorrow. There is something about sitting in a nice warm house with the smell of a chicken and rice dish in the oven and a bottle of good wine to make a person fill nice and snug with the weather being like it is. Hope you all are feeling the same.

Growing A Farm

A picture of our north pasture after we mowed it.

Awhile back one of my readers made a comment about our farm growing and at that time it occurred to me that we are growing a farm and our farm is like a seed we have planted and it is slowly emerging  from bare land. When we were on or vacation in October working on our farm, we saw it grow a little more. I have all ready posted about having our farm pond dug out, but we got  a lot of other work done In spite of being bitten up by chiggers and having the flu while we were there. We were able to use our new mower and mow a lot of our pasture ground to keep all the willow trees from taking over the pasture.

When we were there last year in October we noticed there was thousands of grass hoppers in the tall grass, but this year we only saw a few. I was wondering what happened to them but when we started mowing the pasture we spotted the predator that was keeping the grass hoppers in check. In our tall grass were hundreds of praying mantis that kept flying up as we were mowing. They were huge and we felt bad about cutting down all the grass and taking away their habitat were they had layed their eggs for next years crop. We were also surprised by all the birds who were also living in the 4 foot tall grass. We are trying to make our farm a permaculture  and in our farm design we want to include the birds and the helpful insects that help control the harmful ones. We have decided from now on we will not mow the whole thing at once but rotate the mowing so parts are only mowed once every two years. This way there will always be some tall grass for the insects and other animals can over winter in. We did leave about five acres in the back forty that did not get mowed this year.

Our neighbors cows stopped by to say hi. They have a beautiful Hereford bull that you can see on the right of this picture with the white face looking at us. If you click on picture to get a closer look.

We also planted some more trees while we were there. We added two Honey Crisp apple trees. This gives us 5 apple trees altogether now. I hope by the time we move there in 2 years some of the trees will be bearing fruit.

These are our 2 new honey crisp apple trees we planted in October.

Apple trees we planted 2 years ago.

Remember the 2 cherry trees I said were dead from the drought in my last farm report. They are not dead, I noticed new growth on the bottom of the trunk of the trees. I don’t know if they will make it but I am hoping they do. I don’t know what caused them to die back and will do a better inspection the next time we are there.

Blaze Red Maple Tree that we had grown from seed from trees in our current neighborhood.

We also planted a bunch of baby trees that I had planted in our garden a year ago last fall. I went around in our current neighborhood and found the most beautiful trees with the most brilliant fall color and gathered lots of their seeds. I gathered some brilliant red and yellow maples and some thornless honey locust seeds.

The baby red and yellow maples and thornless honey locust trees after I dug them out of the garden.

We planted several of the maples up by our building site and the rest along with the Honey Locust down on the bottom ground. We like the honey locust because our cattle will eat the sweet seed pods when they drop in the fall along with the wild life that make our farm their home.  We protected these baby trees with a wire cage around them.

Some of the trees I got seeds from.

The Yellow maples are Sugar Maple

This concludes this farm report.

Earth Tubes: How To Build A Low Cost System To Passively Heat and Cool Your Home For Free

When we build our pole barn house we know we want to put in Radiant floor heating to heat our home but haven’t decided on how we want to cool the house. So I have been researching the best option for keeping our house cool in the hot humid summers of Iowa and I came upon a an interesting concept that we might consider incorporating into our building design, Earth Tubes. In this post I will explain what they are, how they work, some of the draw backs, and how I would build a low-cost design.

What Are Earth Tubes

Earth Tubes are a passive heating and cooling technique that uses tubes that are buried at least 6′ feet  in the ground that has air passing through them and uses the constant temperature of 50 degrees of the earth to cool and dehumidify air in the summer and warm air in the winter before entering the building envelope. They are often used as a supplement to conventional central heating or air conditioning systems. They work best in extreme climates that have high heat in the summers and very cold temperatures in the winters like Iowa.

Earth tubes are sometimes not installed correctly because they are poorly misunderstood and are somewhat experimental but are nothing new. They were was first used by the Romans a couple of thousand years ago. They also gained popularity again in the 70′s and 80′s but many failed because of improper installation that caused water  (from condensation)to collect in the tubes and after a few years developed mold or bacteria and the air coming from the tube was then unhealthy to breath.

How They Work

In the summer hot humid air enters the tube from the outside and as it goes through the tube, the earth surrounding the tube cools the air and causes condensation to build on the inside wall of the tube. This cools and dehumidifies the air before it  enters the house.

In the winter cold air will enter the tube and the earth at 50 degrees will warm the incoming air before entering the house. This will especially work well with a wood stove or fireplace because they consume lots of air when used and usually cold air is pulled from under your doors and around your windows as well as other places that leak air in the building envelope.

The Drawback of Earth Tubes

There are criticisms of earth tubes and the biggest are the high cost to install a system for something that just supplements your heating and cooling needs and the condensation that forms in the tubes in the summer. The systems that are most cost-effective I have researched calls for a wide trench at least 8′ feet deep with several inches of gravel at the bottom and then several tubes at least 6″ to 8″ diameter and around 80′ long with a continuous slit on the bottom so condensation can drain out and then they must have some type of land scape fabric or sock put over the tube so no bugs can enter the slits in the tube. You can see where this would cost thousands to do. But with this system there is still a concern with Radon entering the tubes from the ground and getting into the house.

a continuous slit in tube to allow condensation to escape.

How I Would Do It For Less

I think I have come up with a less costlier solution for doing earth tubes and we hope to  incorporate them into our home design if I can get it done at a low-cost. Sometimes the best plan is the most simplest one and mine is very simple.

Our Hillside and Pole barn house

As you can see from my wife’s drawing above of our hillside how I would do our earth tube design. My earth tubes will follow the natural curve of our hillside 6′ 1/2 feet under ground and will not have a slit until at the bottom of the hill where the last few feet will have a slit and a fabric sock to allow the water to drain from condensation and to keep insects out of the tubes. Only the last few feet of the earth tube will have gravel under it with another 3″ pvc perforated pipe imbedded in the gravel that goes to daylight to drain. This cuts cost and also stops all worry about Radon Gas getting into the system. I plan to use two 100′ rolls of 6″ non-perforated plastic drain pipe that you can buy at McCorkels in Columbia Iowa for 99 cents a foot and it will be in a straight line, not serpentine like the photo at the top of the page.

100 ft rolls of 6″ non-perforated plastic drain pipe at MCCorkles in Columbia Iowa for 99 cents a foot.

The reason I chose 6’1/2 feet for the depth of my tubes instead of the recommended 8′ is lots of people do field tile in the state of Iowa and most of their trenchers can go down to almost 7 feet, so I think I can get it done for a reasonable rate. I think it will still work at that depth, any less depth will not have a stable enough temperature during extreme heat or cold to work properly. The whole key to this design is to have the earth tube slopped like on a hillside to a place where this condensation can drain out to alleviate the mold problem. At the bottom of the hill where the earth tubes come out on the hillside will look something like the photo below.

It will come out of our slab in the pole barn house like in the photo below.

I would also have a door on ours so I can turn it off if not needed. We would probably only use the earth tubes in extreme weather.

There is some argument whether you need a fan to move air through the tubes. I think in the winter no fan will be needed as the cold outside air enters the tube and it starts to warm from the earth, it will rise naturally like in a chimney, especially with the fireplace going will help pull the air into the tube. The summer is when I think you will need a low velocity fan to pull the heavy colder air up the tube and it maybe something as simple as below.

If we do earth tubes we will have them installed and in place before our pole barn house is built. I think the best place is on either side of a wood stove or fire place, or by your cold air return if you have a conventional heating and cooling ducted system. Another advantage of this design is you could flush these out once a year to get rid of any dust or dirt by sticking a garden hose in the earth tubes from inside the house.

As you can see my earth tube design is a simple design with a simple concept and will not cost much to do. I will let you know more when I find out what it will cost to have the two trenches dug. I think with all the hills in Iowa this design will work for a lot of homes there. I am interested to hear what many of you think of earth tubes and if you think my design will work?

Update

I have talked to one person that does field tile in Iowa and he said he can do it with tube and trench for 2.00 a foot. So if I do 200 feet of earth tube it will only cost 400.00. Now he did say that since it was such a small job they may charge an additional 300.00 just to come out and set up. So I think I can get it done for 700 bucks. Now this has got me thinking, if I do 4 earth tubes which will bring my total to 400 feet, will that still be considered a small job and would they still charge me 300 for setup? If I could get 4 tubes done for 800.00 it would be even better.

The two pictures above and below are from a house in Missouri. The owner of this house said the earth tubes did not work. The tube is 2ft by 80 feet long. This system failed because the tube was only buried a few feet under ground and the fan he used to pull the air from the tube was a high volume fan. This system would have worked if the tubes were buried at least 6 ft and it would have been better to use four 6 inch  pipe instead of one 2ft pipe.

Chiggers, A Hard Lesson Learned

Learning about farming and country life, getting new mowers and building ponds have been fun for us but everything we learn on this adventure to becoming farmers isn’t always fun, case in point, finding out about chiggers.

Since my wife and I have spent the majority of our lives living in the city we knew nothing about chiggers. But while we were there, working on the farm during our vacation in October, we were rudely introduced to these mites and it was a hard lesson learned that won’t be soon forgotten.

The first day back to the farm I had repaired our old Mott flail mower and I did it out on the grass lying on my back most of the time. After about an hour I started getting these big red welts on the back of my neck and back that itched like crazy. I didn’t know what it was, thought maybe it was fleas. I didn’t see or feel anything bite me. We went back to the motel that night and I got some Benadryl cream  that helped with the itching. I took a shower and went to bed.

The next morning my wife noticed she had gotten bitten. Chiggers can be passed to other people by bed linen or close shin contact.  This happened every morning, we woke up everyday with new bites and believe me we were quite troubled by this whole ordeal because we didn’t know what was happening. We thought maybe it could be bed bugs and looked all around the motel room but couldn’t find any trace of bed bugs. Needless to say we had a bad week and didn’t sleep well at all. The motel didn’t change our sheets the whole time we were there so we kept finding new bites each morning.

We didn’t find out what they were until we got home and I did some research on the internet and found out about chiggers. Chiggers are invisible to the naked eye. After chiggers feed on you they fall off or just hang out on your body until they get hungry again. The way to get rid of them is to take a very hot shower and use a loofah pad to scrub your body very hard and this well help to dislodge them and then wash all your clothes and bed linen’s in very hot water and dry them very well. We then wore Deep Woods Off on us all day and night, even at bed time and that seemed to do it. It seems that the state of Iowa is one of the states that has lots of chiggers.

Needles to say, I won’t be lying down on the bare grass in Iowa ever again, unless something is between me and the ground. I told my friend Tom who lives by our farm about our run in with the chiggers and he said ” Welcome to the country”.

So after our ordeal with chiggers and me having the flu when we went back to the farm to see the finished pond, I was thinking, as I was lying in bed at the motel with a 103 temperature, do I really want to do this farming thing? I have to be honest with you, at that moment I didn’t want to do it anymore. But now that I have recovered from the chiggers and flu, my answer  is yes, I still do, even though the hard part of this journey is yet to come. No one said it was going to be easy.

The New Gander Hill Pond

View from our building site of the new pond. From this view, you can’t see the true size of the pond.

We drove the 6 hour drive this past weekend to Iowa to see the new pond that was just finished on our farm and we are happy the way it turned out.

A closer view shows you just how big the pond is now. It covers close to 4 acres by my guess.

My cousin Swede who was the bulldozer operator and is 81 years old did a very good job and moved a lot of dirt around in 5 days.

View from top of Gander Hill where you can see our building site and our pole barn we finished last summer.

He built us a small dike so we can reach the pond even during wet times where we couldn’t before. I don’t think we have to worry about it drying up now and the pond will act as a big reservoir for our livestock watering needs and will provide some nice views from the building site of all the wildlife who like to use this pond when water is in it. We didn’t make this pond a real deep pond for fish because this whole bottom ground floods at least once a year. If we were to stock fish in it, the fish would escape when it would flood. That doesn’t mean we won’t be able to fish in it. White Breast Creek which flows into Lake Red Rock is only about fifty yards away has fish and I think fish will get into it when it floods and fills up our pond. There was probably fish in our old pond, I know we saw fresh water clams in there and lot of Raccoon tracks when we walked around it when it was dry.

The pond is only about 5 feet deep in the deepest part.

We would have liked for it to be much deeper, but with our budget we opted for the larger less deep pond instead of a smaller deeper one.

We think once the pond fills up and we get the banks planted with a pasture mix, it will really look great.

The plan was to see the new pond and get some more work done and to plant a tree on top of the hill before water started getting into the pond, but I became really sick and it was the flu that has been going around that others had told me about. I stayed in our motel room from 2:00pm Saturday afternoon until 8:00am Sunday Morning. I had a very high fever  and almost had my wife take me to the hospital. I know my wife thinks men are pansy’s when it comes to being sick, but this was no joke. I hope none of you get this strain of flu virus.

That’s it for now, I will try to get out the next farm report next week.

Building Gander Hill Pond.

The first scoop of dirt from the pond site

The bulldozer operator is Swede Hamilton who is 81 years old. He is a cousin of mine.

As I told you in my last farm report we wanted to get the pond that sits on our farm dug out deeper. I am happy to report that is what we are now doing. We were thinking about doing it next year but thanks to a suggestion by one of my readers and fellow blogger, Langela, at Iowa Farmerz Wife we decided to do it this year while it is still so dry. We want it deeper so we can use it for watering our livestock so it won’t dry out like it has the past two years.

The current pond was put in by the DNR in 2003 as a wetlands pond and is only about 2 feet deep. The contract expired in September and we decided we didn’t want to renew it. This is exciting and anxious all at the same time. We are so happy to see this going in but anytime we spend thousands of dollars I feel nervous about it and I have a hard time sleeping. Whenever we get ready to spend lots of money my wife always ask me if this is going to keep me up at nights and I always say no, but it does every time.

We had to drive back to our home in Illinois the first day the pond was started, and it won’t be done until Tuesday of this week. The size of the pond will be less with the new pond, we don’t have the budget to dig out the whole 4 acres that it is now. What ever they can do in 5 days will be what size it ends up being. We plan to go back soon after it is done and see what it looks like and I promise to have pictures and a complete update during the next Farm Report.

We got delivery of our new mower this past time we were at the farm.

On top of spending money for the pond we also got delivery of our new Land Pride RCF 2060 mower. Needles to say with all this money we are spending I have not slept that well lately. We bought this mower to start taking back our land from invaders.

The new mower cuts down the willows and tall grass with ease.

Willow trees have been slowly taking over our bottom ground and if not cut down before they get to be too big then our new mower won’t be able to do the job. Our old Mott flail mower couldn’t handle trees like the new one can. So for the last two years the willows have been growing like crazy. My wife who does most of the mowing when we are at the farm loves the way they new mower clears the land and our 30 horse tractor handles it easily.

We were at the farm all of last week and got a lot done with the new mower and the next farm report I will get you up to date.