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Next Thursday, on Aug. 27, Bill and Nancy Couser, who live north of Nevada, will host a visit of the "Khrushchev In Iowa" four-day commemoration tour's participants.
Couser said the opportunity was offered a few months back when Jerry Perkins, former Des Moines Register farm editor, called and asked if the Cousers would be hosts. Bill said he remembered when Iowa's Garst family did the same 50 years ago. "What an honor," he said.
"We're going to show them Iowa hospitality," said Couser, who will host the visitors at his cattle feedlot. "We're going to give them steak sandwiches, corn on the cob, homemade potato salad and homemade pies with ice cream from the famous Methodist Church ladies. It's a community effort," he said. Couser adds that he's even bringing in Iowa beer from Des Moines - "beer that's made right here in Iowa. Everything we're doing is made here in Iowa; everything we're eating is homegrown."
The Nevada High School FFA chapter has been invited to help out at the event. Chapter members will serve food and direct parking.
One of the highlights for visitors to the Couser feedlot will be the opportunity to view a state-of the-art, new technology, monoslope cattle building facility that is being built there, which meets environmental compliance efforts. The visitors to Nevada will also tour the city's Lincolnway Energy ethanol plant, and they will have a drive-by tour of the windmills in the eastern part of the county.
Couser said this is an opportunity to showcase what Nevada and Story County have to offer. "We are showcasing ... why it's so great (here) and why the people of the world continue to come back here - it's because of the progressiveness, because of the community spirit, because of what we have here. They want to see why a community works. We have something so special here."
A four-day event in Iowa
(The following information comes from a press releases issued for the event.)
More than 30 organizations will be involved in the commemoration event, which goes back to September of 1959, when Nikita Khrushchev came to Iowa in an effort to allow Iowans to showcase the power of agriculture, trade and citizen diplomacy, and to reach across borders and thaw the Cold War tensions.
Iowa farmer and seed corn pioneer Roswell Garst and Khrushchev forged an unlikely friendship built on their mutual interest in agricultural technology and in growing food for hungry people.
This relationship was the start of more than 40 years of citizen diplomacy, carried on over the decades by Roswell, Roswell's sons and his nephew, John Chrystal, an Iowa banker, who traveled to the U.S.S.R. dozens of times to advise the Soviets on agricultural issues - right up to his death in 2000.
"Khrushchev in Iowa" is designed to commemorate this unique history and rekindle and revitalize Iowa/Russia citizen exchanges, technology transfers and trade.
Participants of the tour will include Sergei Khrushchev, who accompanied his father in 1959; Khrushchev's Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer William Taubman; U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack; U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley; Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador; Georgy Efremov, the deputy governor of Stavropol; and approximately 40 Russian agribusiness leaders.
State-level hosts include Gov. Chet Culver and Lt. Gov. Patty Judge; Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey; Mike Tramontina, director of the Iowa Department of Economic Development; and the approximately 30 organizations that make up the statewide planning committee, which is chaired by the Iowa nonprofit organization, Creating Great Places, located in Coon Rapids, specifically by Great Places Director Rachel Garst and event consultant Sandi Yoder.
In addition to Nevada, the tour will include stops at more of Iowa's most cutting-edge farms and facilities, and will enjoy a public "Agricultural Progress Day" festival in Coon Rapids and at the Garst Farm, cradle of the hybrid seed corn industry;
