Iowa

Philpott on the ground in corn country

In my very first article for Grist a year and a half ago, I declared with confidence that “If you’re going to talk about poverty, food, and the environment in the United States, you might as well start in the Corn Belt.” Trouble is, I had never actually been in corn country, at least not […]

How “merchant coal” is changing the face of America

 From his rolling green soybean fields above a slow river in eastern Iowa, Don Shatzer looks out over the farm where he was raised, across land he and his neighbors have farmed all their lives. Below him are the garden beds where his wife Linda grows organic vegetables to safeguard the family’s health, and the […]

In the heartland of industrial agriculture, a county goes local and organic

Nestled in the heartland of globally oriented commodity-food production, Woodbury County in Iowa has made a bold move away from industrial agriculture.

Last summer, the Kellogg Foundation's Food and Society (FAS) website reports, "the County passed an 'Organics Conversion Policy,' offering up to $50,000 annually in property tax rebates for those who convert from conventional to organic farming practices."

And then in January 2006, FAS continues, the county ...

... became the first in the United States to mandate the purchase of locally grown, organic food. The "Local Food Purchase Policy" requires Woodbury County departments to purchase locally grown, organic food from within a 100 mile radius for regular city use. The policy has the potential to shift $281,000 in annual food purchases to a local farmer-operated cooperative, increasing local demand and spurring increased production and processing.

Why would a county in Iowa, of all places, implement what amounts to a rejection of industrial agriculture?

Is agribusiness behind the ouster of one of its biggest critics?

Plunked down in the land of huge, chemical-addicted grain farms and the nation's greatest concentration of hog feedlots, Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture has always had a tough row to hoe.

Imagine trying to operate an Anti-Cronyism League from Bush's West Wing, and you get an idea of what the Leopold Center is up against. Industrial agriculture runs the show in Iowa, sustained by regular infusions of federal cash and its government-sanctioned ability to "externalize" the messes it creates. The state grabbed $12.5 billion in federal agriculture subsidies between 1995 and 2004 -- second only to Bush's own home state. Iowa leads all states in hog production: It churned out 14.5 million pigs in 2001 alone, the vast majority from stuffed, environmentally and socially ruinous CAFOs (confined-animal feeding operations).

Yet since springing to life in 1987 by fiat of the Iowa legislature -- funded ingeniously by state taxes on nitrogen fertilizer and pesticide -- the Leopold Center has become an invaluable national resource for critics of industrial agriculture and seekers of new alternatives.

Now, however, a sudden purge at the top has called the Center's much-prized independence from industrial agriculture into question.

Post-Katrina floodwaters are dirty, but so are other U.S. waterways

Last month, “toxic gumbo” entered the American lexicon with the speed and force of the floodwaters it describes. A LexisNexis search of major U.S. publications doesn’t return a single hit for the phrase in the year before Hurricane Katrina. But in the 30 days after the storm’s landfall, 66 articles contained the phrase. Measure twice, […]

An Iowan causes growing pains for agro-industry

Kamyar Enshayan is a folk music aficionado and a lifelong soccer fan. He lives in a comfortable house on a shady street in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with his four-year-old daughter, Nettie, and his wife, Laura Jackson, a biology professor at the University of Northern Iowa. They have a large vegetable garden. Laura is expecting their […]