Rooted in Place: A Cautionary Yet Hopeful View of Iowa’s Agricultural Future
Iowa is my home; this is where I was born and where I now work with my husband on our farm. As a child, I was sure that our family farm - with its woods, pasture and stream; barnyard with animals; garden and orchard; farm lane between fields of hay, corn, oats, and soybeans; numerous neighbors, friends, cousins, and grandparents, and a nearby thriving small town - was the most beautiful and nurturing place anyone could live.
In January 2021, Iowa State University’s Brunnier Art Museum opened the exhibit Compelling Ground: Landscapes, Environments, and Peoples of Iowa, aiming to build on the impact of the Museum’s 1995 exhibit, Land of the Fragile Giants. The artwork and accompanying published essays highlighted how changes that have occurred in the past twenty-five years have significantly affected the environments, landscapes, and people of this state.
Agriculture, not surprisingly, was a major theme.
As the goal of the curators was to engage communities to build paths forward in addressing the multiple issues Iowans face presently and into the future, I have posted here an edited portion of the essay I contributed to Compelling Ground, “A Cautionary Yet Hopeful View of Iowa’s Agricultural Future.”
Ask the Land for Forgiveness
In a well-choreographed dance, farmers have harvested corn and soybeans from about 23 million acres of Iowa’s farmland. Over just a few weeks each fall, combines, grain carts, and semi-trucks rumble across this land, stripping fields of their grain and shredding the remainder of the plants, dramatically changing the landscape.
While this harvest scene is considered an economic boon by this state’s politicians, industry leaders, and others who have a stake in the status quo, the immense harm of this intensive, extractive corn-soybean-CAFO paradigm is quite evident to many Iowans – and to many people around the world. I believe it is high time that we take a new look at agriculture and put an end to the notion that this type of farming is inevitable, simply a result of progress and new technologies.
… first, we need to ask the land for forgiveness.
Parity: An Economic Foundation for an Agroecological System
We farmers need to recognize that the promises of most farm economists and journalists have been based on an ideology, not the science of economics. This ideology glorifies “free markets” and promises freedom and liberty, as manifested in the notorious 1996 farm bill referred to as "Freedom to Farm." What this really means is unrestrained freedom and billion-dollar profits for multinational corporations.
Cost of production without parity vs. costs of production in a parity system
How these two terms differ is an example of why clarity on parity is so important.
Price support vs income support
Policy that says farmers should receive the cost of production, or a percentage thereof, or cost of production plus a “reasonable profit” is justified because farmers ought to receive “fair prices.” If this policy is implemented as a price support, where actual market prices are supported at this level (a price floor) and the purchasers must pay that price for the commodity, then the cost to the government treasury can be virtually zero. This is a big selling point for policy makers focusing only on “fair prices” for farmers.
Overhauling the world’s agricultural system through a radical, but just transition
With continued complacency and irresponsible political responses to the threat of global climate change, we can expect a lot more disasters for society, which brings more opportunities for disaster capitalism, an idea popularized by Canadian author Naomi Klein. Responsible policy should start with the foundation of any society, its agriculture, and the foundation of that policy should be a parity-supply management system. If ever there was a time to bring parity into mainstream discussion of addressing social and environmental problems and combating global climate change, this is it.
Old New Deal shows path to Green New Deal
One hundred years ago, English-born Catherine and Thomas Naylor, bought the farm we farm today in Greene County, Iowa. They built our house we live in that year, too, when prosperity from World War I markets gave them the courage to go in debt for the farm and house. This destination came after a Greene County coal mine shaft caved in on my grandfather’s tools, and hopscotching from farm to farm cast my family’s status as family farmers, which gave George, their only grandchild, the opportunity of becoming a family farmer. The Jochimsens, George’s mother’s parents, were always tenant farmers.
The History of Food Sovereignty and the Path to a Caring Society
Major concerns about the direction of “organic” must be on the minds of organic farmers day by day. Success as an organic farmer is not guaranteed in the best of times, but what kind of decisions by USDA and the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) will make success more or less likely? Recent decisions regarding hydroponic production and livestock welfare standards clearly threaten the chances for family farmers to pursue one of the few remaining opportunities for success as family farmers. Without rules preventing fake organic or vertical integration—or whatever destructive market forces result from “free markets”—the vision and fulfillment of that vision are at risk. How can we create a movement to motivate our society and government to respect farmers, not only for producing healthy food, but also caring for the land and caring for the consumer?
Five Steps That Won't Feed the World and the Solutions That Will
We are posting this essay by George written in May 2014 as it is just as relevant - perhaps even more so - today. World Food Day was recognized on October 16 with demonstrations and actions around the world while here in Iowa the World Food Prize with all its glorification of ‘feeding the world’ continued the corporate agribusiness narrative, explicitly and implicitly. Meanwhile, the number of food insecure people has risen to an estimated 821 million. Climate change, rural poverty, land grabbing, and peasants being pushed off the land are just some of the causes of this increase in hunger that are directly and indirectly related to the chemical and technology dependent agriculture system promoted by agribusiness.
The brief article, “A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World” offered by Professor Jonathan Foley in the May 2014 National Geographic magazine, clearly states the stark features of a global society on the brink of overshooting the capacity of the ecosphere. I highly commend Professor Foley and his colleagues for being honest about the depth of the crisis because in the general media, and especially the farm media, one wouldn’t know that anyone should be alarmed at all. Here in Iowa where the landscape is plastered with millions of acres of genetically modified corn and soybeans along with their poisonous herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and fertilizers polluting our lakes and rivers, our institutions deny that Silent Spring has arrived, let alone that anything needs to change.
Agroecology is the solution to a food and agriculture system in crisis
Our food and agriculture system is in crisis. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) finds that global hunger has increased to 820 million people – 1 in 9 – while malnutrition has skyrocketed to 2 billion people – about 1 in 4. Meanwhile, farmers globally face chronically low farm-gate prices, rising input costs and extreme weather linked to climate change.
Here in Iowa, family farms are experiencing the worst crisis since the 1980s, with farms under extreme levels of debt not seen in decades. Iowans are also suffering from poor water quality due to run-off, including from fields over-fertilized with manure from industrial hog operations (hogs outnumber people 8 to 1 in Iowa).
Excerpt: Food Movements Unite!
George Naylor, “Without Clarity…” Every country should be allowed to have food sovereignty, so that each country can democratically develop its own policy to choose the kind of agriculture its people want, and ensure its citizens’ food security and political sovereignty. With food sovereignty, a country can make sure that its food production is ecological and economically fair, and provides economic opportunity in rural as well as urban areas, so as not to be subject to the whims of global markets, global corporations, or the use of food as a weapon by more powerful countries. After all, why should a country and its people lose its sovereignty and security by having to import food from the “winners” who are willing to depopulate rural communities and pollute and destroy their farmland with pesticides and unwise production at any cost?