Rurals, Urbans, and Jimmy Hoffa...
...and throw in a little Adlai Stevenson and E.B. White
The Flatwater Press in Nebraska ran a story this week documenting water pollution associated with hog operations owned by the state’s governor, Jim Pillen. While the total number of hogs owned by Mr. Pillen (and his family’s companies) is uncertain, they do own 108 hog CAFOs which in a modern hog production scheme would mean they own and/or manage somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million hogs.
After barely winning the Republican primary with term-limited and outgoing governor Pete Rickett’s endorsement, Mr. Pillen was elected in a landslide in the 2022 general election, carrying a Kim-Reynolds-like 91 of 93 counties, the exceptions being Nebraska’s urban counties of Lancaster (Lincoln) and Douglas (Omaha). Mr. Pillen then appointed Mr. Ricketts to a U.S. Senate seat made open by Ben Sasse’s resignation so that he (Sasse) could become the President of the University of Florida. Interestingly, Mr. Pillen has also dipped his cloven hoof, oops, I mean toe, in academia, having served on Nebraska’s Board of Regents before becoming governor.
As to Pillen’s pollution, you’re better off reading the Flatwater article than a rehash by me, but to summarize: monitoring wells around Pillen’s operations have had nitrate levels high enough that the water would make your lawn look greener than the Wrigley infield. 400 ppm high (drinking water standard: 10). The town near one Pillen operation, Platte Center, has had to construct a new well at a cost of $500,000 because of nitrate pollution. Half of that cost is shouldered by the town’s 331 residents ($1500 per); the rest is being shouldered by you, if you’re a federal taxpayer. Mr. Pillen’s net worth: $221 million. Platte County, where Platte Center is located, gave Mr. Pillen 82% of their votes in the gubernatorial election.
Of course we have our own Pillenesque ag titans in Iowa and one is Bruce Rastetter. According to his LinkedIn page (I know, right?), he founded Heartland Pork and built it into a 1.2 million hog company (that’s hogs, not dollars) and his current hog interests include several hundred thousand animals that are part of Summit Agricultural Group, whose assets exceed $3 billion, according to the company’s website. BRast is Executive Chairman and Founder. One of the company’s listed advisors is Dermot Hayes, “the Pioneer Hi-Bred International Chair in Agribusiness, professor of economics, and professor of finance at Iowa State University.” Since 1995, this public employee has also “been a consulting trade economist for the National Pork Producers Association.” Rumor has it that Dermot is releasing a book titled Who Says Getting a PhD Isn’t Worth the Time? He’s a real inspiration to those struggling ISU assistant professors trying to come up with a down payment on that 1200 square foot ranch in north Ames, and the newly tenured professors trying to afford the McMansion in the nearby town of Gilbert. Another of the company’s advisors is Harry Stine, Iowa’s richest person, its only billionaire, and the state’s largest landowner.
Like his Nebraska counterpart Pillen, Rastetter also enjoyed a stint as a Board of Regents member (also BOR president), overseeing the goings-on of Iowa’s state universities. Being a BOR member apparently is a PhD substitute for intellectually-insecure rich guys. “Dr. Rastetter, I presume? No, but I was the boss of some PhDs and they enjoyed kissing my ass.”
Rastetter was integral in bringing controversial UI President Bruce Harreld to that position, and lauded his job performance, even after he was deemed “least qualified” of the applicants. It should not be surprising that the state’s two largest institutions, Iowa State University and the University of Iowa, have been eager purveyors of Ag Industry propaganda.
It's well known that Rastetter has a been a generous donor to political campaigns, including those of Republican Governor Kim Reynolds, Iowa House Majority (R) Leader Jack Whitver, and Iowa House member Pat Grassley, grandson of Iowa corn farmer Chuck Grassley. The fact that Chuck can still farm at age 89 while still holding down his gig in the U.S. Senate should tell you how hard it is to make money growing corn in Iowa. Not hard at all. To be fair, it might also say something about the physical and mental demands that come with being a U.S. senator.
Rastetter has contributed over $2.4 million to political campaigns and has given Kim Reynolds’ campaigns $166,000 since 2015. It probably wouldn’t surprise you then that the commission-squashing governor actually likes commissions that might help BRast make more money that can then be used for more campaign contributions, notably the Carbon Sequestration Commission. You might have heard that Summit Carbon Solutions wants to build a CO2 pipeline from Iowa to North Dakota where the gas can be used to displace recalcitrant petroleum from oil wells. Now that’s what I call a climate solution! If you want it to further warm up the climate, that is. And you get to help. The U.S. Government will provide $85 per carbon ton tax credit to BRast and his cronies for this Climate Change Kabuki theatre.
Like Nebraska, it’s well known that crop and hog production in Iowa has polluted our water. About everybody has heard about the Des Moines drinking water situation—world’s largest nitrate removal facility, the lawsuit pushed by the late Bill Stowe, and now current Des Moines Water Works CEO Ted Corrigan planting corn and soybeans in Water Works Park, presumably to show the legislature and the BRast wannabes that the lawsuit was just a big misunderstanding.
What we rarely hear about is how this pollution has affected the rurals—nearly 7000 private wells in Iowa contaminated with nitrate and thousands more wells with fecal bacteria. The economic hardship of agricultural pollution clearly hits rural people hard, maybe (probably?) harder than urban people. Des Moines has the capacity to cope with these issues. An educated guess is that more than half of Des Moines Water Works customers know little or nothing about nitrate (I worked there). On the other hand, when your town of 300 needs a new drinking water treatment plant at $1500 a pop (through increased water rates and other funding mechanisms), by god, everybody knows it.
It goes without saying that it’s easy to become bewildered by the politics of this stuff. Nebraska has the second highest pediatric cancer rate in the country, and Iowa the second highest overall cancer rate, along with the highest rate for head and neck cancers. Iowa kids attending schools near CAFOs have higher asthma rates. CAFO hogs are responsible for antibiotic-resistant staph infections in rural areas. None of this is new. Some of it, we’ve known for a generation.
As rural hospitals go by the wayside, and rural schools disappear (42 out of 99 Iowa counties have 2 or fewer school districts), and rural land, water and air is polluted so the titans can pillage and plunder the countryside, why do its inhabitants so tenaciously align with their politics?
The easy answer, if you listen to the pundits, is guns, gays, trans, race, naughty books, abortion, elitism, or some combination thereof, with Hunter Biden’s penis thrown in for good measure. How this stuff trumps your kid getting brain cancer from drinking polluted water, I have no idea. Call it the Fox News Addiction Theory, I guess. The theory may indeed hold water, but an unacknowledged truth is there is a long tradition in this country, going back to before we ever were a country, of the aristocracy using the rurals to further their aims.
A common notion is that the Revolutionary War was a grassroots uprising against British tyranny. This clearly was not the case. Prior to 1776, most of the resistance was drawn from the middle and upper classes (1) who felt unfairly burdened by British taxation. The founding fathers were largely aristocrats who, along with other aristocrats, could avoid fighting by paying a common person to fight in their stead. Even George Washington, who obviously was part of the fight, was an aristocrat—he was the richest person in colonial America (1). Sixty-nine percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had held colonial office under England (1). Victory was made possible by the new American aristocracy agitating the already-armed peasant population.
Likewise, the Confederacy was not soldiered by wealthy slaveholders in the Civil War. Rather, poor white dirt farmers, fearing displacement by freed slaves, gave their limbs and lives for the lost cause of the wealthy plantation landowners, who needed the free labor slavery provided to make the system work profitably (2).
It’s not hard to see that the monied aristocracy in the modern day needs not the limbs but the votes of the rurals to maintain their place. Their lives, however, and their kids’ lives, may be collateral damage.
To criticize the system, and people like Pillen and BRast, brings accusations—the worst being you (or I, in this case) hate farmers. Pillen and Rastetter are farmers no more than Jimmy Hoffa was a truckdriver, but of course a lot of truckdrivers thought Hoffa was one of them.
Adlai Stevenson, who, like Donald Trump, is one of only six people to lose the popular vote for president more than once, said this about criticism: “It conjures up pictures of insidious radicals hacking away at the very foundations of the American way of life. It suggests nonconformity and nonconformity suggests disloyalty and disloyalty suggests treason, and before we know where we are, this process has all but identified the critic with the saboteur and turned political criticism into an un-American activity instead of democracy’s safeguard.” Here in Iowa, pollution “is” a foundation of the way of life. It’s a necessary part of rich people being able to make more money. And yes, I’m disloyal to that concept, and if it means being called a saboteur, then go ahead and call me that.
So yes, it’s true that I hate that our state has been polluted like almost no other. Hardly a square inch of it remains unbefouled by modern agriculture’s pollution. What’s been done to our streams—the straightening, the water pollution, the continued pillaging of the riparian corridors—is grotesque. There’s hardly another word for it. The callous poisoning of our aquifers so a few rich people could become richer—also grotesque. Their capture of our politics and our public institutions so they can continue their unabated plunder—yes, grotesque, but also, in my opinion, evil on some level. Yes, evil.
How is this all to change? I’m ashamed to say that I’m exhausted, painfully, by this question when I speak to groups. I try to make sense of it all through reading and writing, which provides only temporary and superficial relief. Clearly a solution will require unity between the urbans, who tend to abhor the pollution and the diabolical politics that keep it entrenched, and the rurals, who, at least for the time being, seem able to tolerate it for reasons we can only speculate about. Perhaps they tolerate it for the sole reason that the urbans hate it. I hope not, but that seems plausible to me.
E.B. White, he of Charlotte’s Web fame, was an excellent writer of essays about both life on the farm and life in New York City. I’m not sure anyone else could claim that sort of range. White said that “…justice, which is the forerunner of peace, will never be pulled out of a hat. Justice will find a home where there is a synthesis of liberty and unity in a framework of government. And when justice appears on any scene, on any level of society, men’s problems enjoy a sort of automatic solution, because they enjoy the means of solution. Unity is no mirage. It is a distant shore. I believe we should at least head for that good shore, though most of us will not reach it in this life (3).”
My view is the solutions are not a mirage and are indeed on the distant shore. The solutions can’t be ‘pulled out of a hat’; they won’t happen on their own, just because they’re just. Change requires courage and courage requires risk, and change will happen if a few can summon some courage.
Zinn H. Tyranny is Tyranny, in A Peoples History of the United States.
Zinn H. The Other Civil War, in A Peoples History of the United States.
White, E.B. Essays of E.B. White, Harper and Row, New York, New York, 1977.
About my book: The Swine Republic is a collection of essays about the intersection of Iowa politics, agriculture and environment, and the struggle for truth about Iowa’s water quality. Longer chapters that examine ‘how we got here’ and ‘the path forward’ bookend the essays. Foreword was beautifully written by Tom Philpott, author of Perilous Bounty. Get a free copy of the book with an annual paid subscription to this substack ($30 value).
What to say, but Holy Shit!! This writing is a expose of a millennium of frustrating bad Ag policies wrapped around self indulgent myths of the American Farmer. Hard to blame the landowner who is fighting to hang onto land and needs enemies to blame for the system that mandates larger and larger corporate “farms”.
When a “rural” state like Iowa is required to import 90% of its citizens food, while at the same time contributing over 50% of the dead zone in the gulf, things are maybe not aligned. Water is taken for granted, due to our seemingly profuse but polluted streams, and is handled like an inexhaustible commodity by our political leaders.
Hopefully someday citizens will once again cry out against corporate Ag and develop meaningful legislation that provides for and protects the family farm. We may be too late!
Thankyou Chris for so clearing exposing the wizards behind the curtain. I had to read this twice because it's mind-boggling. Pillen's story alone but the the historic backstory and the heartbreaking fact that rural America is voting for the very people that are polluting thier wells and sickening thier loved ones.
Thankyou, thankyou for writing this. Knowledge is powerful and healing.