by Ted Genoways
Even with the improved ground cover, this property drained so directly into the West Fork of the Des Moines River in the near distance that, when his landlord decided to put the acreage up for auction, Lausen fully expected that the Iowa Department of Natural Resources would snap it up. After all, he said, turning and pointing to the west and south, they already owned adjacent property on two sides and even paid to undercut the dirt road to reestablish the gully’s direct flow to the river as part of a wetland restoration program. But when the auction came around after Thanksgiving of that year, the DNR was nowhere to be found. Instead, the high bid came from New Fashion Pork. “I knew right away what the intentions were,” Lausen told me.
Lausen is soft-spoken with wispy blond hair and a shy smile. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who goes looking for trouble, but his roots run deep around Estherville. His family’s Century Farm is just five miles away from where we stood, and a mile to the east, he and his wife are homeschooling their four children, in the same house where Lausen grew up with his four older siblings. He’d never had any great love for New Fashion Pork, as they erected confinements all around the outskirts of town, but now they were planning to build less than a mile upwind from his family’s home and uphill from where they drew their water, bringing Lausen’s concerns about modern hog farming right to his front door.
When Jay was young, Estherville was a community of eight thousand people, supported almost entirely by agriculture. But in the late 1970s, as the economy stumbled and then fell into the worst agricultural recession since the Great Depression, Estherville, like so many farm communities, began to empty out. Struggling families sold off their ancestral land and moved away to find jobs, and the forces of agribusiness, from seed companies to harvester dealers, moved in—encouraging farmers to buy more land, plant more crops, invest in more equipment. They could do more with less, they said, by using modern techniques.
By the time Lausen began farming with his father, some 1,500 people had left Estherville, and more and more acres were owned by or mortgaged to out-of-state interests. To prevent further encroachment, Iowa had strictly enforced the prohibition on meatpackers owning livestock or feed crops, but the big packers were always searching for loopholes. In 2000, the legislature tightened language, prohibiting packers from contracting for the care and feeding of hogs in the state. Two years later, lawmakers banned packers from financing the construction of confinements or receiving a percentage of profits from a hog operation.
In 2002, Virginia-based hog producer Smithfield, by far the nation’s largest producer, had had enough; they sued, accusing the state of Iowa of engaging in discriminatory business practices. Fearing an all-out repeal of the bans, Iowa attorney general Tom Miller instead brokered specific exemptions for Smithfield, Hormel, and Cargill. Some counties in northern Iowa, like the Interstate 35 corridor to the east of Estherville, which had almost no hog confinements during the years of the vertical integration ban, soon had hundreds, each housing thousands of hogs.
New Fashion Pork has been a major player in the boom. The company not only raises 1.2 million hogs per year—about half of those in more than fifty wean-to-finish facilities across northern Iowa—but also owns hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, dozens of feed mills, and produces so much manure that it has developed and marketed its own line of fertilizer injectors. The company has been recognized by Hormel Foods as one of its top suppliers. Lausen understood that the whole goal of such vertical integration, controlling every link in the supply chain, was to reduce costs by establishing seed-to-slaughter monopolies. New Fashion already owned five other hog barns within a few miles of Estherville and had purchased a feed mill just south of town, so Lausen knew the best thing for the company would be putting the land surrounding this new barn into corn production to feed the hogs inside—and, in turn, he said, “I knew as their source of fertilizer, they’d like to use hog manure.”
The practice has become so widespread—especially along Iowa’s northern border, where even seemingly remote communities like Estherville are less than twenty miles from Minnesota’s Interstate 90 into Austin—that the impact on Iowa’s waterways has been almost too massive to comprehend. Of ninety test stations established across the state, only two now rate water quality as good. None rate as excellent. The Raccoon River and Des Moines River watersheds, which together supply most of the drinking water for the city of Des Moines and converge just east of the capital, have the highest and second-highest nitrate loads of the forty-two major tributaries to the Mississippi River. The Iowa DNR estimates that the level of E. coli in the Raccoon River needs to be reduced by 99 percent.
Lausen said he knew that putting up a hog confinement at the high point on the quarter section near his home would virtually ensure that the land would be taken out of the Conservation Reserve Program, that twenty years of plantings would be torn out, and that the erosive hillside would be planted with corn and fertilized with hog manure. “I knew firsthand how the farm laid and when we got a heavy rain where the water went,” Lausen told me. “There’s an open ditch that starts right at the edge of that property and leads roughly three-quarters of a mile directly to the Des Moines River.” If New Fashion Pork were allowed to put up a hog barn there, he feared it could pump contaminants straight into the whole town’s drinking water.
At the height of the Dust Bowl, when deep plowing and uprooting of native grasses on the Great Plains during a period of historic drought created enormous storms of lost topsoil, dubbed “black blizzards,” and put the future of the entire nation’s food supply in doubt, FDR’s secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, initiated a series of projects aimed at stopping soil loss and discouraging the overproduction of crops that had created wide swaths of erosible earth in the first place. Though the era is often remembered as the Dirty Thirties, it was also a moment of revolutionary advances in agricultural methods—and perhaps the greatest focused environmental effort the country has ever undertaken.
First, at Wallace’s urging, FDR signed the Soil Conservation Act, establishing subsidies for farmers to restore native grasses and trees, rather than planting commercial row crops that reduced ground-cover and depleted soil nutrients. At virtually the same time, FDR authorized employing federal foresters to plant more than 200 million trees at the perimeters of farm fields in a hundred-mile-wide zone from the Canadian border to the Brazos River. The idea was to create a national windbreak—what was termed the Great Plains Shelterbelt—to reduce the velocity of dust storms and the loss of moisture due to evaporation from windswept soil.
Second, to mitigate crop overproduction, Wallace proposed the “ever-normal granary.” The mechanisms were often complex, but the concept was simple: when grain supplies went too high and drove down prices, the government would pay farmers to take portions of their land out of production. During these peak times, the government would also stockpile grain, then release it during years when supply dropped due to crop loss. Just as Wallace predicted, the steady flow of key commodities normalized supply and stabilized prices in ways that benefited farmers, meat producers, and ultimately the consumer. And, in combination with soil conservation efforts, soil loss had been reduced by 80 percent by the time the United States entered World War II.
But the whole system was dismantled when Earl Butz became Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture in 1971—an appointment opposed by family farmers and congressional Democrats right from the start. Butz had grown up on a dairy farm in Indiana, taken a doctorate in agricultural economics from Purdue in 1937, and spent the next thirty years on the faculty there, becoming dean of agriculture. But he also served as the key voice for turning small-scale farming into big business. At his appointment hearing, the president of the National Farmers Organization warned Senate leaders that Butz, as assistant secretary of agriculture under Eisenhower, had pushed for policies that favored agribusiness and earned a reputation among farmers “for his callous lack of concern about their welfare.” His refrain
for them, famously, was: “Get big or get out.”
Almost as soon as Butz’s appointment won approval, the worst fears of small farmers were realized. In a reversal of thirty-five years of farm policy, he canceled payments for fallow land and exhorted farmers to “plant fencerow to fencerow,” promising to use the emerging global economy as a bulwark against low prices. If our supply threatened futures, we would simply go to the world market and use our size and economic might to meet the demand and forge foreign dependence on American food in the bargain. To illustrate his philosophy—and shore up reelection support for Nixon among farmers—Butz pulled off the remarkable sale of our grain reserve to the Soviets in 1972. With supply now low, prices climbed internationally but remained low at home. And America was sold on a future where we could economically dominate the world and feed it at the same time.
To take advantage of the new policies, farmers acquired more land, put fallow land back into production, invested in new and more advanced equipment, and bought more fertilizers and pesticides and engineered seeds. Interest rates were low, so farmers without capital could afford massive loans, using their land as collateral. Those growers who felt nervous about so much overhead often “got out,” as Butz had instructed, keeping a ready supply of land available at bargain prices for still further expansion.
“People used to have an eighty-acre farm and raise a family,” one farmer who used to raise corn and hogs in Nebraska told me. “Now you’ve got eight-thousand-acre farms. It’s just like a corporation. But pretty soon you get too big for your britches—and that acreage rears up and bites you.” And in the late 1970s, that’s exactly what happened. The economy slowed, interest rates rose, and foreign markets declined. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter attempted to use American grain as a political tool. But the USSR simply established new supply sources in South America and Europe, and American commodity prices plummeted. Instead of making the world dependent on our grain supplies, we had grown reliant on their demand. In an attempt to undo the damage, Carter convinced Congress to pass the Federal Crop Insurance Act of 1980. But this policy had serious unintended consequences.
First, it kicked production into overdrive. The high-density and high-volume planting encouraged by Earl Butz was possible at new levels by the 1990s. Emerging technology—everything from the GPS-mapped furrows to computer-controlled irrigation systems—made it possible to plant crops (especially corn) in places no farmer would have dared waste seed, much less water, a generation earlier. The more farmers planted, the more they stood to profit, and crop insurance removed the element of risk.
But after a period of sustaining heavy losses, the insurance companies began taking a stronger hand in determining what was planted—the second consequence of the policy change. Initially, insurance companies simply decided which crops were insurable and set variable payouts, making certain crops more attractive than others. But in recent years, they have taken to telling tenant farmers what to grow on land acquired through foreclosure. Big companies, with lots of resources, can afford to irrigate and fertilize and spray against pests; their yield increases—and drives down prices for their smaller competitors. Everyone gets locked into a system where farms carry outrageous overhead and need outsized grosses just to show a profit. Insurers and loan agents alike insist on the crop most likely to produce profits: corn.
Ironically, the problem was exacerbated by U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) efforts to reduce carbon emissions and improve air quality. Approval of the first Renewable Fuel Standard in 2005, requiring the production of at least 7.5 billion gallons of renewable transportation fuels within seven years, created runaway demand for ethanol. The market price quadrupled, encouraging farmers to plant more rows into already overplanted fields. The steep jump in feed prices tipped many struggling hog operations toward bankruptcy, but the increased planting also drove up demand for fertilizer and spurred farmers to consider lower-cost manure over industrial anhydrous ammonia. Manure sales soon helped stabilize hog profit margins and lowered input costs for row crops, driving still more corn production—which, in turn, tempered steep feed prices and encouraged still more hog production.
To make this self-perpetuating cycle viable, however, the industry needed buyers, which is why Iowa’s Republican Governor Terry Branstad and other Midwestern governors have made repeated overtures to Japan, China, and South Korea. (The three countries collectively import more than $3 billion worth of American pork each year.) The industry also argued that it needed greater control over its supply chain and demanded the end to decades-old legislation aimed at keeping meatpackers from becoming major players on the feed commodities market. Desperate farmers didn’t complain. If packers wanted to build large confinement barns filled with hogs eating their corn and producing waste that could be used as a cheaper alternative to commercial fertilizer, it seemed like a win for everyone.
Soon, however, the impact on Iowa’s water became obvious. In 2009, the Washington, D.C.–based Environmental Integrity Project, joined by the Iowa Chapter of the Sierra Club and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, filed a petition with the EPA, informing the agency of the dire water quality problem in Iowa and calling on them to take over enforcement of the Clean Water Act in the state. The EPA never responded.
In the spring of 2012, just as the ground was beginning to thaw, Jay Lausen spotted markers on the hillside across from his property, a sure sign that New Fashion Pork was preparing to dig a pit for a hog confinement. He called the DNR to get a copy of the blueprints and the application to build and soon learned that New Fashion was intending to erect a 2,400-head wean-to-finish operation. But under the Master Matrix Plan, the state of Iowa doesn’t count livestock according to heads. Instead, they count by “animal units”—using weight equivalence to standard-size slaughter cattle. A hog is considered 0.4 animal units; thus the operation was proposed to hold 960 units, just below the 1,000-unit size that requires a public hearing under DNR rules. There would be no official opportunity for Lausen and his neighbors to oppose the construction. And, just as he suspected, the manure management plan submitted to the DNR called for injecting the contents of the facility’s waste pit into the surrounding fields as fertilizer—including the fifty acres that empty directly into the Des Moines River. So he started digging through USDA data, DNR reports, and Iowa Department of Public Health records, researching all of the laws governing the permitting of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). What he found was even more troubling than he’d imagined.
In spring 2011, Republican governor Terry Branstad, newly reelected after more than a decade out of office, announced the elimination of one hundred positions at the DNR, including fourteen unfilled vacancies in CAFO inspection and enforcement. Branstad also appointed Roger Lande as the new director of the Iowa DNR. A former chairman of the Iowa Association of Business and Industry, Lande is an attorney whose law firm represented the Iowa Farm Bureau, Monsanto, and other agribusiness interests. Wayne Gieselman, then head of the agency’s environmental compliance division, told the Associated Press that the cuts would hurt enforcement. “If we could be on site on a more regular basis, producers would know we’re watching,” he said. Shortly after those comments hit the newspaper, Gieselman was removed.
The governor also announced four appointments to the nine-member Iowa Environmental Protection Commission: Eugene Ver Steeg, owner of Sunnycrest Inc., a wean-to-finish operation that markets 20,000 hogs per year, and past president of the Iowa Pork Producers Association; Brent Rastetter, the owner and CEO of Quality Ag Builders, a company that has built hundreds of hog confinement facilities in Iowa; Dolores Mertz, recently retired from the Iowa House, where she had sponsored and fast-tracked a bill that gutted an existing state law banning the spreading of confinement pit manure on frozen and snow-covered ground; and Mary Boote, who served as agriculture adviser to Governor Branstad from 1997 to 1999 and, at the time of her EPC appointment, was the CEO and managing partner
of Policy Management Interests LLC, a private fund-raising firm founded by Branstad. The appointments were a clear message: the governor wanted to attract agricultural dollars to Iowa, and if he couldn’t do that through deregulation, he would accomplish the same goal through lax enforcement.
Soon after, Branstad’s allies in the statehouse went one step further; they proposed transferring all EPA Clean Water Act programs from the DNR to the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, formally putting environmental enforcement in the hands of a department with no environmental mandate. Watchdog groups alleged that these moves were payback from the governor. They pointed out that Branstad Farms, a cattle operation with capacity for 2,500 animals, owned and operated by the governor’s brother Monroe Branstad, was at that very moment under investigation by the Iowa DNR, accused of letting 900,000 gallons of manure removed from a basin run into a drainage tile that emptied into the Winnebago River. And it wasn’t the first offense for Branstad Farms. In 2010, the business had been ordered to pay civil penalties for a contaminated water spill that allegedly killed 31,200 fish in the same river.
In August 2011, just before the sale of the land near Estherville, the Environmental Integrity Group and its Iowa partners grew tired of being ignored by the EPA. They filed notice of their intent to sue the agency for failing to answer its earlier petition. In their letter of notice, they again urged the agency to “de-delegate” the state of Iowa from all water quality enforcement and instead assume direct control themselves. The DNR responded by issuing plans for reducing contaminants in the state’s waterways—but cautioned that the challenge had grown enormous. Their report estimated that nitrate levels in the Raccoon River and Des Moines River watershed needed to be reduced by a shocking 60 percent and E. coli by 99 percent just to come into compliance with federal standards.