9 Things Iowans Miss Most After They Move Away

Iowa’s average worker spends about 19.8 minutes getting to a job, according to Census Bureau data.

That’s more than seven minutes shorter than the 27.2-minute national average in the agency’s latest count.

But ask someone who traded that commute for Chicago or Dallas traffic whether it’s the thing they miss most, and it’s only one among many.

These are the things Iowans miss most after they move away.

1. Butter Cow at the Fair

Iowa’s State Fair sculpts a life-size cow out of butter every August, a tradition that goes back to 1911.

The sculpture takes about 600 pounds of pure cream butter, built over a steel frame inside a cooler chilled to 40 degrees.

They shape it by hand.

Only five artists have held the job since then, and the current sculptor, Sarah Pratt, apprenticed for 15 years before taking over in 2006.

Transplants who leave Iowa say no other state fair they’ve found comes close, and the butter cow is usually the first thing they bring up.

2. RAGBRAI

Iowa is home to RAGBRAI, the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa.

The ride bills itself on its site as the longest and among the oldest recreational bike-touring events in the world.

CBS News independently confirmed it as the largest ride of its kind, with tens of thousands of riders in some years.

Two Des Moines Register employees started it in 1973 as a bet between themselves, and about 300 riders showed up for that first ride.

That bet grew fast.

Riders dip a rear tire in the Missouri River at the start and a front tire in the Mississippi River at the finish.

The ride in between covers a week and roughly 500 miles.

Iowans who’ve since moved away say nothing else shuts down a whole state’s highways for a week, and few rides anywhere match the scale of watching it roll through town.

3. Hawkeye Wave

Iowa football fans started the Hawkeye Wave in 2017, and it hasn’t stopped since.

Nobody planned it that way.

At the end of every first quarter, fans inside Kinnick Stadium turn away from the field.

They wave up at the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, where kids and families watch from the windows.

USA Today readers voted it the country’s best tradition in college sports in 2024 and again in 2025.

Transplants who now watch Iowa football from a bar in another state say no other program’s gameday tradition has come close to matching it.

4. Detasseling Corn

Iowa’s seed-corn industry has hired teenagers to detassel corn by hand every summer for generations.

Crews walk miles of rows before sunrise, pulling the tassel off every stalk before it self-pollinates.

It’s a rite of passage.

It was also many teens’ first paycheck, riding a bus out to the fields the way their parents and grandparents once did.

Grown adults who’ve since left Iowa still trade detasseling stories at reunions, missing the crew from that bus more than the early mornings ever bothered them.

5. Maid-Rite Loose Meat

Iowa gave the country the loose meat sandwich, and it happened in a Muscatine butcher shop in 1926.

Fred Angell built the sandwich from seasoned ground beef cooked loose instead of pressed into a patty, then piled it on a steamed bun.

As the story goes at the shop today, a delivery driver’s offhand compliment gave the sandwich its name, and Angell shortened made right to Maid-Rite.

Loose is the whole point.

Iowans still order it the same way today, sloppy, loose, and never squeezed into a patty.

Ask a transplant which sandwich they can’t find anywhere else, and Maid-Rite’s loose meat is usually the first answer.

6. Loess Hills

Western Iowa holds a landform found in only one other place on Earth, the Loess Hills.

Wind-blown silt piled up to 200 feet deep along the Missouri River valley after the last glaciers melted, some 25,000 years ago.

China's Yellow River valley is the only other spot on Earth with loess that deep.

Nowhere else compares.

Driving that ridge at sunset is a view Iowa transplants describe to disbelieving new neighbors for years.

7. Between Two Rivers

Iowa's entire eastern border is the Mississippi River, while its western border runs the Missouri and the Big Sioux.

That combination is rare enough that WorldAtlas calls Iowa the only state with two parallel rivers marking its borders instead of a straight surveyor's line.

A bridge is never far.

Leaving Iowa means crossing one of those rivers no matter which direction the road points, a fact that never quite registers until you're the one driving away.

8. Eight-Player Football

Many small Iowa towns keep football alive by playing eight players to a side instead of the traditional eleven.

The format spread through rural schools too small to fill an eleven-man roster, and Iowa still runs a full eight-player state playoff bracket today.

Everybody shows up Friday.

The whole town packs into a stadium the size of a backyard, and nobody stays home.

Nate Meier, a Fremont-Mills alum from Tabor, Iowa, scored 100 career touchdowns on an eight-player field before starting on the defensive line for Iowa's Big Ten teams.

Iowans who move to a place where football only comes eleven-a-side say the smaller game was never a downgrade.

It's one of the things they wish they could still watch every Friday night.

9. Short Commute Home

Iowa's average commute runs 19.8 minutes, according to Census Bureau data, compared with 27.2 minutes for the average American worker in the agency's most recent estimate.

Multiply that gap by two commutes a day, five days a week.

That adds up fast.

The savings come to more than an hour every week that a big-city commuter spends sitting in traffic instead.