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A field of dried soybeans ready to be combined.

Although “that time of year” in corn and soybean country is a few weeks late, it has finally arrived. Whether starting up their new $300,000 capital investment for the first time or pulling out their trusted and infinitely tinkered-with machine, farmers are taking to the fields in one of industrial agriculture’s greatest creations: the combine.

Last week I got to go along for the ride as Jerry, a conventional corn and soybean farmer in North Central Iowa, harvested soybeans in his John Deere contraption.

By today’s standards, Jerry plays in the minor leagues. His combine, which he bought used in the mid-’90s, is a 1982 model. It has the capacity to hold about 225 bushels of grain and can, on a good day, combine 50 acres of corn. A top-of-the-line John Deere combine these days costs upwards of $300,000 (without value package configurations), has a 300-bushel grain tank, and can harvest 200 acres of corn per day. For harvesting soybeans, Jerry uses a 20-foot header (the piece of equipment attached to the combine that cuts and collects the plants), which he also bought used; a new 30-foot header costs about $30,000.

All combines are not created equal, but they all get the same basic job done. Mesmerized, I watched as the machine engulfed thousands of soybean plants, removed the leaves, stems, and pods, and spit out individual soybeans into the grain tank. Going a steady 3.6 mph, we filled in a short time the 225-bushel grain tank and had to go unload the booty into the grain carts that Jerry had parked at the end of the field. As we went, tracking devices displayed the moisture and yield of the harvest, as well as the conditions of the field and combine speed.

A John Deere combine.

As he gracefully maneuvered the soybean-filled behemoth, Jerry wondered out-loud what his father, a farmer who grew up in the earlier half of the 20th century, would say about the use of these contraptions.

In his father’s time, about 12,000 corn plants would grow on an acre, and on a good day, they could harvest 100 bushels. Jerry now crams 35,000 plants on an acre and can harvest 9,000 bushels a day (with newer equipment, that number can reach 30,000 bushels per day). Do the math, and we have the ability to harvest as much as 300 times more corn on the same amount of land and in the same amount of time as they did a century ago. Combines have replaced a significant amount of labor; Jerry only spends 130 hours a year — a little over three work weeks — harvesting 500 acres.

Conventional agriculture depends upon the substitution of labor with machines and chemicals to produce the high yields that are at the base of the cheap and abundant food supply in this country. And some of the substitution is good; harvesting grains by hand like Jerry’s father did when he was younger is tedious work that few would choose to do.

But this trade-off has come back to bite the behind not only of the people who eat cheap food, drink pesticide-laden water, or live in dying rural communities, but also the conventional farmers who are sowing the seeds of their own demise.

As the combine shaves the soybean plants off of the fields, Jerry wonders whether his 28-year-old son, Kyle, will be able to make it as a farmer. Jerry has been able to be successful thanks to a mix of factors — adopting no-till practices, finding reasonable rent rates for land from neighbors, and having a knack for fixing large machinery — without following the trend of getting bigger, buying more land, and owning larger and larger machines. (The average farmer around here farms at least 5 times the amount of acres as Jerry and boasts the latest John Deeres.) And for several years, of course, Jerry had an off-farm source of income.

Filling up the grain tank.

But to stay in the farming game, Kyle will have to upgrade his machinery and find more land to buy or rent, at quickly increasing prices. To cover the high input costs (machinery, chemicals, seed, land), farmers have to squeeze as many bushels as they can as quickly as they can from an acre. To do so, they have to buy the highest-yielding seed technology, the fastest combine, those extra acres of fertile Iowa ground — to then have to squeeze even more bushels off of the land to cover the new costs. It is a vicious cycle, aided by farm programs that reward farmers for high yields of a handful of commodity crops.

Jerry shakes his head. “He wouldn’t call this farming,” he says, referring to what his father would say to the use of large, powerful machines to harvest acres upon acres of corn and soybeans.

These machines, not the farmers, control farming and are often times in commodity production the difference between a farmer who breaks even and maybe makes some money, and one who continues to go into debt.

The next generation of combines doesn’t even require a driver; using GPS systems and computer systems, farmers are and will be able to program machinery to do the job without them at the wheel. Many would view this just-about-complete removal of human labor from farming as the natural progression of our industrial food system and as the great benefit of a production system that so ravages our environment, health, and communities.

But have we gone too far and become slaves of a system we created? Ostensibly designed to support new and aspiring grain farmers, high-production farm technologies actually undermine their ability to work the land.

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A trailer load of chickens.

Photos: Ariane Lotti

In the cold and dark that is 5:30 a.m. in North Iowa these days, I go out with Jan and Tim of One Step at a Time Gardens to load 129 sleepy and reluctant chickens out of their pasture pens and onto a make-shift chicken trailer. At nine weeks of age, the chickens are about to make the hour-long trip to Martzahn’s.

At 7:30 a.m., Tim and I pull up to Martzahn’s Farm Poultry Processing in Greene, Iowa (where the King Corn guys grew their acre of corn), with a trailer of now wide-awake and squawking birds. One of the few small poultry processing facilities left in Iowa, Martzahn’s processes approximately 300 hundred birds per day in a “facility” the size of a small house with the equivalent of a garage space as the kill floor.

Ardy, the co-owner of Martzahn’s, greets us as we load chickens into the cages where they’ll wait until the seven-person crew is ready for their second batch of the day. I don’t catch much of what she’s saying as my full attention is devoted to moving these five-to-seven-pound Jumbo Cornish and Rocks cross-broilers without getting splattered by the liquid excrement the birds release after a bumpy ride in the trailer.

Martzahn’s Farm Poultry Processing facility.

With our task done, the chicken processing can begin. Tim and I watch as the man who slits their throats sharpens his knives, takes a chicken from the cages (turkeys are too big for the cages, so killing them requires catching them first), and puts it in a restraining cone. He slits the throat, the chicken bleeds, and the corpse is put into a scalding bath to prepare for plucking.

With the pores now open from the hot water bath, the corpse is placed in a hands-free poultry plucker. When a handful of corpses is in the plucker, a series of rubber “fingers” spin around the corpses and pluck them clean. (A note about this fine piece of equipment. I have plucked and gutted chickens, and have had to overcome considerable natural instincts telling me not to pluck — or even touch — a moving headless corpse. These mechanical poultry pluckers increase efficiency by decreasing time spent fighting mental objections and avoiding stomach queasiness. And they get the job done in 30 seconds.)

The corpse gets passed to the state inspector of the facility, and before removing the legs and the head, he makes sure the bird doesn’t have any deformities or bruises. Between him and the ice water bath, the corpse will pass through five more sets of hands that gut (including with a vacuum-type apparatus — another huge time saver and queasiness avoider), clean, and inspect it.

Restraining cones.

Despite several invitations to join in on the processing, Tim and I go to downtown Greene to eat something. We return to Martzahn’s several hours later, after the corpses have cooled in an ice bath for a couple of hours. Loading processed chickens into coolers is a lot easier than moving live birds, and I listen as Ardy talks about the summer slow down.

Normally open five days a week, Ardy has only had business enough for two days a week. People just aren’t raising chickens anymore, she explains. She thinks it is related to high corn prices and the going-out-to-eat culture that now defines a large part of American eating rituals. She wonders out loud whether next year will be more normal, but is clear on the fact that if there is not enough demand for a small-scale bird processor in rural Iowa, then she will close the business.

Jan and Tim have a vested interest in keeping Martzahn’s open; without Martzahn’s they would not be able to process the 900 birds they raise on pasture every summer and sell to their CSA members and to customers at farmers markets. They easily sell all of their chickens to people who want to eat meat that is sustainably and humanely raised and processed and that does not come from factory farms that treat animals like machines, the environment like a garbage disposal, and rural communities like petty annoyances.

Places like Martzahn’s are crucial components of the infrastructure that supports an alternative, sustainable food system. Jan and Tim raise far too few birds to have them processed in a larger, industrial facility, let alone having objections to how animals are treated in those facilities. According to the U.S. Census Bureau [PDF], there were only three poultry processing facilities in Iowa with fewer than 20 employees (Martzahn’s has seven) in 2002. Of the over 9.5 million broilers that were sold in Iowa that year, only 100,000 — about 1 percent — came from farms like Jan and Tim’s that sold fewer than 2,000 birds, according to the 2002 Census of Agriculture. Without places like Martzahn’s, that percentage will be even smaller.

The hands-free poultry plucker.

But there is hope. The 2008 Farm Bill now allows the shipment of meat and poultry from small state-inspected processors such as Martzahn’s across state lines, which should help farmers that raise livestock on a small-scale to meet demand from online businesses and other out-of-state markets, and create more business for processors. Guides and how-to books for processing, such as the Iowa Meat Processors’ Resource Guidebook [PDF], help entrepreneurs start up new processing businesses.

Short of raising and killing chickens on your own (which really only takes some feed, a patch of grass, an ax, and some strength of stomach), you have a vested interest in keeping places like Martzahn’s up and running. Because without small- and mid-scale processors, distributors, and equipment, there won’t be the small- to mid-sized farmers who produce the locally-grown vegetables, vine-ripened heirloom varieties, grass-fed beef, and pastured-raised poultry that underpin a sustainable food system.

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One Step at a Time Gardens is a model of agricultural sustainability. Over 50 varieties of vegetables grow in rotation on six acres of fine Iowa topsoil that receive no synthetic chemicals. Compost, cover crops, and chicken manure feed the soil. Pests and weeds are kept at bay through the use of physical barriers, biological products, and cultivation. The crew is made up of members from the community and a couple of non-local folks, such as myself. The farm provides produce to supply a local food system.

More the merrier? A typical confinement holds 2,500 hogs.

Yet when the wind blows from the northwest over One Step at a Time Gardens just east of the town of Kanawha, Iowa, visions of agricultural sustainability quickly fade as the sweet stench of pig manure from the local Confined Animal Feeding Operation or hog confinement, as they say around here, envelops the farm. The Kanawha CAFO consists of five buildings that can each house up to 2,500 hogs. Behind the buildings lies the lagoon, the source of the stench, where all of the manure and waste (dead hogs) are dumped.

Factory hog farming now dominates certain counties in Iowa, the nation’s number-one hog-producing state. But it wasn’t always so. The practice didn’t really take off until the mid-1990s, when state law governing CAFOs changed. The Kanawha CAFO played a significant role in that change — and Jan Libbey and Tim Landgraf, who now run One Step at a Time Gardens but then worked as a county naturalist and a metallurgical engineer, respectively, battled the Kanawha CAFO from the start. The fight against the CAFO is what inspired them to start their farm in the first place.

The negative effects of CAFOs on the environment, human and animal health, and rural communities have been well-documented and often drive people away from rural areas. Air and water quality plummet as manure seeps into the surrounding air and watershed. Residents on the farm and in the nearby area can develop respiratory problems as well as neurobehavorial issues. Animals are prone to disease, can develop antibiotic resistance, and are often treated inhumanely. People leave rural areas as the environment becomes polluted, real estate values drop, and community relationships erode as outside investors gain more control over the local economy. And it stinks, especially on summer evenings when the humid air does not move, trapping the pig manure stench in and around homes.

Back in 1993, Jan and Tim first got wind that one of their neighbors, let’s call him Bob, who raised hogs was going to build a hog confinement through a contract with Land O’Lakes. Soon after learning about the Kanawha CAFO plan, Jan and Tim began to meet with other neighbors and organize to oppose the construction of the CAFO. In the early 1990s, counties in Iowa had zoning ordinances and each had its own zoning committee. This system had been set up to preserve farmland and stop it from being turned into land for housing developments, nuclear storage facilities, big factories, and the likes. At that time, the counties issued permits for the construction of a CAFO, keeping the control over these structures local and involving a public process.

Jan, Tim, and another handful of neighbors (one neighbor in a rural area must be equivalent to at least a dozen urban ones) participated in the public process. They went to multiple zoning committee meetings and voiced their opposition. When the county supervisor gave the go-ahead to the construct the CAFO, the group of concerned citizens decided to pool their money, hire a lawyer, and sue the county because it had violated county law.

The case was heard in a district court, and the group of neighbors won. Bob appealed with the guidance and legal resources of Farm Bureau and the Iowa Pork Producers, two powerful industry groups.

The case went to the district court of appeals, where Bob won. The citizens appealed and the case went to the Iowa Supreme Court.

Producers, citizens, and industry groups had been waiting and watching for a case to go to the Iowa Supreme Court. Citizens in other counties had opposed permits and had won. To the industry, however, a patchwork of permits and differing county zoning laws across the state created a significant hassle; it wanted a state-wide rule.

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled in favor of the CAFOs and the pork industry. Agriculture in Iowa is regulated at the state level, and the county zoning ordinances were found to be in violation of state law. The group of citizens may have won a battle but it lost the war.

In the years immediately following the ruling, there were no zoning ordinances and no laws in place at the state level regulating CAFOs. During the mid-1990s, the state experienced the greatest growth in the number of hog confinements as large confinement operations moved in and were even courted by certain county economic development directors in the absence of regulation. The result was that in 2002 farms in Iowa produced an average of 1,500 hogs per farm — a dramatic jump from 250-hogs per farm in 1980. In that same time, the total number of farms keeping pigs plunged from 80,000 farms in 1980 to only 10,000 farms in 2002. Fewer producers were raising more hogs; most farmers I talk to around here today had hogs up until the mid-1990s. Very few still have them today.

Jan, Tim, and their neighbors continued their work, however, by meeting with law-makers and advocating for better regulations governing CAFO construction and permitting. They proved to be no match for the industry lobbyists, who had been pressuring supervisors, lawmakers, and anyone with power to act in their interest.

In the 15 years since the CAFO came to Kanawha, producers in contract with the pork industry have brought many more CAFOs to rural towns across Iowa. State law has regulations governing set-back distances from neighboring residences and public water use areas, and requires bigger CAFOs to have waste management plans. But the law has essentially supported the proliferation of these buildings, their negative social and environmental impacts, and the concentration of the hog industry as many hog producers have chosen to sell off their hogs instead of building confinements.

What happens when you fight the good fight and you lose? The group of concerned neighbors used the democratic processes available to them — and us — to fight a situation they believed would hurt their community, pollute their environment, and significantly lower their quality of life. They organized, put up the money, and took time outside of their professional and personal lives to fight. In a time when activists and organizers are trying to convince citizens to engage and use the powers available to them to fight whatever good fight, this group of citizens did that without having to be coached or convinced. And they lost.

But the war is ours to win. In the years immediately following the CAFO fiasco, Jan and Tim could have taken the loss as final and disengaged. Instead, Jan and Tim both quit their jobs and decided to live what they were fighting for. Without having any farming experience, they started growing vegetables and raising chickens in an environmentally-sound way to supply a community-supported agriculture operation that is currently in its 13th year. While they no longer go to the state capitol and lobby, Jan and Tim work everyday to grow a local and sustainable food system and engage more people in issues of food and agriculture. And they do this even with the hog confinement down the road.