You could drive all over Iowa this summer and not see anyone walking soybeans. Partly because you’d be too busy texting and fooling with your iPod, but also because times have changed. 

If you’re a transplant to the Midwest and never got the opportunity to do this, walking beans involves trudging back and forth across large farm fields for hours on end in the blazing sun, chopping or pulling every single weed. It’s like trying to dust the Grand Canyon.

The practice faded when farmers decided that spraying expensive, toxic chemicals across thousands of acres was less scary than having young men wandering around with sharp tools.

For a business leader, this change brings up one essential question: Does Dennis Albaugh get to keep all of that herbicide money, or can I have some? No, wait, that’s not it. The question is: Are Iowans still growing up with the fine character traits that come from a childhood full of responsibility and hard work?

We still like to think of the Iowa worker as honest, industrious and loyal – a chump, basically. Assigned a task, this worker will persist until it’s completed. But young people are growing up differently now.

Kids who grew up in the country were constantly flinging bales of hay around, for some reason, and lifting cows to look for eggs, or whatever you do on a farm. Those of us in town weren’t as strong, but we worked hard, because every adult felt free to order us around, criticize our efforts and report any slacking to our parents. Remind me to show you the photographs of Vengeance Day sometime.

Times have changed, and fewer Iowans live on farms now that 24-row planters have largely replaced the pointed stick. The amount of land that once was sufficient to sustain a big family is now considered barely adequate to display a rusty plow, with hopes that an art collector will drive past and offer to buy it.

Modern childhood is defined by videogames and tanning sessions. Can you start from there and still fit into the workplace? 

According to one business consultant, an excellent place to work has these attributes: A clear mission and purpose for being. Forward-thinking, creative senior management. Meaningful work. Reasonable, understandable and uniformly enforced work rules. An appropriate blending of tradition and innovation. Open communication among all vested parties. Fiscal responsibility. 

Isn’t it amazing? How that almost perfectly describes a day of walking beans?

Your “purpose for being” was to do wearying, mind-numbing manual labor while the landowner drove to town and drank coffee at the grain elevator. It might have seemed unfair at the time, but eventually we learned that if we worked hard and saved for 40 years, the entire global economy would collapse and we would have plenty of time to drink coffee, too.

Senior management was not “creative” so much as “didactic,” but you had to remember that only a few years earlier they were piloting fighter planes over Europe, exchanging machine gun fire with the Luftwaffe. That might have taken some of the playfulness out of them.

Open communication? Yes. Unfortunately. A few hours of communication among young men with no adults in sight is like attending a meeting of the Taliban board of directors.

Clearly, Iowa and the workplace have been a good match until now. But when young adults bring different backgrounds to the workplace, it might mean the workplace will have to change, too.

According to an article in IAbiz magazine, today’s young workers want “flexibility, a more casual, open work environment, meaning dressing down instead of up or working from home from time to time.”

Fine. As long as they get the figurative weeds out of the figurative beans. 

Jim Pollock is the managing editor of the Des Moines Business Record. He can be reached by email at jimpollock@bpcdm.com