A Corn Desert

with only ethanol to drink

Sep 21, 2024

Please forgive me but I’ve been away from civilization for a while and have rediscovered that much like beer and sex, you can function quite nicely without the internet if you have to. On the whole is our species better off with it (the internet, that is)?—count me as skeptical. But alas I wouldn’t be forcing these words upon you without it, which, to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, shows that rationalizations are more important than beer, sex and the internet.

Recommend

The bulk of this post will be my September 8th guest editorial published in the Des Moines Register. A piece authored by Tom Harkin and Jim Merchant was published that same day that highlighted the human health and environmental consequences of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) outlined in the book Industrial Farm Animal Production, the Environment, and Public Health. I contributed a chapter to that book.

In my own Register piece that day, I tried to articulate a vision for water quality improvement within a larger backdrop of rural revitalization. I do wonder if my temerity to write such things is deserved. But when I travel around Iowa speaking to groups, I’m often astonished at how many people are more frustrated (and more emotional) than myself at the failure of the state’s leaders to affect change on these issues. It’s the norm for some in the audience to be teary eyed about this. It really is. When they scan the corn desert for an even a mirage of a vision from Iowa’s political establishment, they don’t see much beyond leadership tethered to the Big Money interests of Big Ag. I myself don’t even see what amounts to a cohesive idea from political leadership. I do however see an untapped energy for change that is being ignored and squandered by Iowa’s political leaders.

I haven’t spent much time criticizing Republicans on water quality and environment because, well, why bother. They suck, they know suck, and they proudly don their suction more often than Don dons a red necktie. There’s no point in me telling you something you already know. But when somebody like ex-Republican Congressperson Steve King sounds reasonable on issues like the Summit CO2 pipeline, you know how detached they really are.

Here’s some gratuitous lampooning of Iowa Republican leadership, just so Iowa Democrats won’t think I’m picking on them too harshly. 1) Ken Rozenboom; 2) Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig; 3) Dan Zumbach who lost to Naig in primary for sec of ag; 4) Gov. Reynolds; 5) Steven Holt 6) Ray Gaesser who also lost to Naig in the primary; 7) don’t know; 8) don’t know.

I do criticize Democrats because while most of them also suck on water quality, they may or may not know they suck depending on their level of self awareness and their status in the party’s hierarchy. Those who know they suck on this issue often try to hide it like a bad habit or else rationalize (there’s that word again) it with some extenuating BS. You can look very long and very hard and not find a Democratic Party leader whose vision on water quality and environment could not also have once been ear wax lost from the noggin of Republican Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig. I’m fairly well convinced that if Naig miraculously decided to switch teams and run as a Democrat, their party chair Rita Hart would run singing through her Eastern Iowa farm like she was Julie Andrews prancing through a Swiss Alps meadow to begin The Sound of Music.

The drivers of Iowa’s water pollution have been well known for decades, and the solutions are not lying in some mysterious technological back corner awaiting discovery. We know what they are. It’s true enough that Republican leadership is chronically dishonest about this and cares little about solving the problem beyond how much it might imperil the industry’s image and ability to make money. As for Democrats, pollution and overall rural decline ought to be bread and butter people issues but their messages have been maddeningly scripted to avoid offending the fragile sensibilities of the kingpins and institutions polluting your water and depopulating rural Iowa. Unfortunately for all of us, most rank and file elected Ds have misguidedly washed their hands of water and other environmental issues to the point they don’t even know what to say about it and thus are forced to pick the least rotten of Republican cherries for their talking points and behaviors. The problems have now become so entrenched and Republican power now so absolute that it’s convenient to slip into a “we’re powerless” excuse. Democrats could use the bully pulpit to courageously speak truth to power for an issue that affects *every Iowan*, but no. That they repeatedly step over and around this issue invites one to think the worst about them.

Most Iowans I know, and the thousands I have met over the past couple of years, want clean and safe water, parks, nature, and a rural countryside that offers prosperity to people other than agribusiness titans and the landed gentry. I can only wonder if it will ultimately take a third political party to effectively give voice to these issues in Iowa.

I’ll let my Register piece carry the water from here to the end.

Register editorial:

I’m happy to see the Register continue to highlight Iowa’s degraded water quality (Lucas Grundmeier, 9/1/24) and call out the mendacity of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources in contributing to it. I’ve observed both firsthand. I speak regularly to groups interested in water quality and regularly call for more regulation of the corn/soy/CAFO production system that continues to trample the natural resources of Iowa.

Abundant are the naysayers when it comes to the potential of regulation to produce better water. The Iowa livestock industry especially has been allowed to expand into a menacing behemoth so large that the challenge of reining it in seems monstrous. But this is hardly an excuse to not try.

It’s a certainty that zealous enforcement of existing regulations will need to be accompanied by a reworking of the existing frameworks that inevitably produce the pollution in the first place. I was at Backbone Lake on Labor Day weekend, one of a few times this summer that the beach was not posted for unsafe swimming. I never saw more than five swimmers and bathers on the beach at any one time (Saturday), this after a week of stifling heat. The park is less than one hour from the population centers of Cedar Rapids, Waterloo-Cedar Falls, and Dubuque. Decades of polluted water postings at Backbone have taken their toll with the public. About 70,000 acres of farmland receiving manure from dozens of CAFOs and many thousands of hogs drain to Backbone Lake. It’s absurd to think the lake will ever be unpolluted until we rethink how many livestock the landscape can endure while allowing tolerable water quality. The same goes for Lake Darling, Big Creek Lake, and many others that have been constructed and repeatedly restored at taxpayer expense.

A recent Register piece also highlighted Iowa’s continuing brain drain. So few in Iowa’s establishment connect the dots between the loss of our young people, the depopulation of rural Iowa, and the Big Ag rampage on Iowa’s human and natural resources. Schools, hospitals and medical clinics, auto mechanics, grocery stores, hairdressers, and entertainment are now many miles away from many thousands of Iowans. Iowa currently has 328 school districts, down from almost 700 in 1959. Eight counties—Polk, Linn, Dallas, Scott, Woodbury, Black Hawk, Johnson and Story are home to 62 of those school districts, leaving 266 for the other 91 counties. Meanwhile, the Register reports (8/22/24) a net loss of 250 health care facilities across Iowa since 2008.

I’m convinced that restoring the integrity of our natural environment, and especially, cleaning up our polluted water, could be a powerful lever for rural revitalization. Lord knows we’ve tried the opposite: continued exploitation of natural resources for more hogs, more chickens, more ethanol, and, more pollution. That approach has failed rural Iowa, except for a tiny minority of landed gentry, multi-millionaire agribusiness people and political cowards of both parties, many of whom live in the city. It’s beyond shameful that we’ve razed the best place on earth to grow things for what amounts to luxury economic activity.

How do we build that lever? We need diversity in rural Iowa—diversity of crops, diversity of people, diversity of economy. We need a USDA secretary not married to Big Agribusiness. We need land reform--$25,000 per acre for farm ground to produce fuel ethanol is perverse. We need onerous tax and conservation policy that forces crop landlords sitting in offices in Minneapolis, Des Moines, and Chicago to divest, making land available for people that want to work it sustainably. We need to get crops off marginal land—steep slopes, floodplains, poor soils, and put some in natural cover and some in pasture. We need more parks and tranquil places that offer refuge from the sights and smells of people and pigs. And until we get there, we need zealous regulation of the existing pollution such that practitioners of agriculture are inspired to adopt alternative and less polluting systems.

Iowa Writers' Collaborative

The Swine Republic

Discussion about this post