What farmers do in the Midwest has a huge impact on local cultures and festivals. Many small towns region wide have yearly festivals, parades led by tractors, and niche events like the Chatham Sweet Corn Festival. This culture has made its way beyond small Midwestern towns to the big screen in Hollywood. Winter provides a good opportunity to explore some examples highlighted below.
Field of Dreams
The collaboration of America’s Pastime and vast Iowa cornfields led to the inception of Field of Dreams, a movie filmed in the small town of Dyersville, Iowa. Released in 1989, it stars Kevin Costner, who plays Ray Kinsenella, a farmer from Iowa who had a troubled relationship with his father. While walking through one of his farm fields, Ray hears the famous words, “If you build it, he will come.” Ray decides to utilize a portion of his field to build a baseball diamond. In baseball circles, the location has been idolized, and it has hosted two MLB games, in 2021 and 2022. For baseball fans and farmers alike, this is one movie that cannot be missed.
Children of the Corn
In the 1984 horror film Children of the Corn, agriculture plays an important role through symbolism. The movie is set in the fictional small rural town of Gatlin, Nebraska, where fields of corn provide the backbone of the community. These cornfields are not only important to the local economy, they also serve as the chilling backdrop to the plot. The expansive fields are used as a metaphor for isolation and control. The children within the town are led to believe that they must sacrifice all the adults to a mystery figure that lives in the corn. Throughout the movie, the fields continue to represent what the community used to be and what the children turned the fields into.
Interstellar
Agriculture helps to shape the dystopian society portrayed in the 2014 movie Interstellar. The film is set in the near-future Earth, where crop blights and dust storms have decimated the planet’s ability to sustain life. The protagonist, Cooper, is an astronaut who turned to farming. Cooper finds farming difficult due to the depleting agricultural climate. Corn becomes a symbol of hope and desperation, as it is one of the few crops that can still grow. As the movie continues, Cooper and his team race to find a new habitable planet to save the human race, using agriculture as the base for new life.
Superman
Hailing from the Southern Kansas town of Smallville, comic hero Superman is seen in the Midwestern ag scene time after time. In fact, Clark Kent, who was adopted by farmers, has squarely rural Earthly roots. The infant Superman’s pod crashed on farmland that had been in the Kent family for generations. Clark Kent grew up on the family farm in Kansas, and then eventually moved on to residing in Metropolis. While Metropolis is generally thought to be a fictional large East Coast city, the small Southern Illinois town of Metropolis was declared to be the “Home of Superman” in June 1972. Metropolis, Illinois now boasts a giant Superman statue, a museum, and an annual celebration dedicated to the Man of Steel. There are numerous movies and deviations in the Superman series, but agriculture consistently plays a role. Famous scenes include Superman rescuing young Rickie from the path of a combine head in a Kansas wheat field and sharing a moment with Lois Lane in an early summer cornfield. Midwest corn and wheat fields are recurring throughout the Superman franchise and are a testament to his rural Kansas upbringing.
The Informant
The Informant is a 2009 biographical movie starring Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre, an employee turned mole in a criminal investigation of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), based in Decatur, Illinois. Agreeing to cooperate with FBI agents out of the Springfield office, Whitacre works to uncover a price fixing scheme from the inside of ADM. Dealing with lysine and corn processing, the comedy film reveals much about the back end of agricultural production in the Midwest. Scenes were filmed at Illini Country Club in Springfield, adding to the local connection.
Transitioning from the big screen to the small screen, a number of notable members in popular culture have revealed themselves to have deep ties to Midwest Agriculture. Take Brock Purdy for example, hailing from Arizona but becoming a fan favorite at Iowa State in college. Purdy went on to become “Mr. Irrelevant,” selected with the last pick in the 2022 NFL draft by the San Francisco 49ers. Ultimately, he became a starting quarterback, winning playoff games and leading the 49ers to Super Bowl LVIII, where they lost to the Kansas City Chiefs. Purdy went viral in ag circles when a video circulated of him combining corn on his girlfriend’s family farm in Iowa on his bye week. He has since gone on to represent both John Deere and Pioneer Seeds in advertisements.