by Ted Genoways
Brand is the first to concede that nitrate problems are not exactly new in Iowa. In the 1980s, as the farm crisis led to consolidation and the rise of industrial agriculture, DMWW chemists began recording substantial increases in nitrate levels in the Raccoon River. That’s when the DMWW built its intake at the Des Moines River, but soon the Des Moines was experiencing similar problems. In 1991, the DMWW built the world’s largest nitrate removal plant, a massive negative-ionic system adjacent to the filter building, at a cost of nearly $4 million. The system was intended as an emergency backup, to be turned on in cases of spikes in nitrate levels. A decade later, the system was in operation for 106 days—and nitrate levels in the Raccoon River were continuing to rise. Finally, a comprehensive study of nitrate levels in relation to fertilizer application on the Des Moines River Watershed found that a combination of subsurface tile drainage and annual cropping that left soil exposed throughout the winter were mineralizing the nitrogen from fertilizers, which then leached into the soil and ran off into waterways.
In response, the USDA provided nearly $40 million in funding to restore buffers and maintain wetlands in the thirty-seven tile-drained counties of north-central Iowa on the Raccoon River Watershed. At the same time, a number of commercial fertilizer producers, led by Dow AgroSciences, banded together to create Agriculture’s Clean Water Alliance in hope of encouraging farmers to embrace responsible application methods and avoid new regulations governing use of nitrogen fertilizers. Yet, even as methods improved—enough for DMWW to take the nitrate filtration system off-line in 2007—more and more incentives were being created to take croplands out of conservation programs and put them back into production. Worse still, a significant shift in Iowa’s law governing the vertical integration of livestock production encouraged grand-scale construction of massive hog barns—and use of manure as a replacement for commercial fertilizers.
Brand said that the problem has grown too large for the Des Moines Water Works to engineer a technological solution. If the systemic pollution of Iowa’s waterways is to be reduced, it will fall upon politicians—and the ordinary citizens who elect them—to demand that the row crop farms and livestock producers of the state comply with federal law. “The agricultural community says, ‘We have to produce food. That’s the core of who we are,’” Brand told me. “But the Des Moines Water Works says, ‘We produce water. That’s the core of who we are.’ And do you know anybody who can get by without either food or water? There are better agricultural practices available, but the industry is resistant to change, to adopting something that they’re not familiar with. We have to demand better practices. They are out there.”
In April 2013, Jay Moore appeared again before the Emmet County Board of Supervisors to propose building another confinement on the east side of town. The tone was quite different from the year before. Supervisor Joe Neary pointed out that the county, in adopting a Good Neighbor policy, had asked that anyone undertaking a major construction project—including erecting a hog confinement—provide evidence that he had first sought out the approval of his neighbors. Neary said that two of farmers with land adjoining the proposed property had come to him to express their opposition to the project.
Supervisor Linus Solberg couldn’t stand any more. His grandfather had come to Iowa from Norway more than a century before, and Solberg’s father had bought a parcel of land near Estherville and farmed it until he was eighty-two years old. Now Solberg farmed that same land, raising a small herd of hogs. “Teddy Roosevelt broke up all those corporations and packing plants way back in the early 1900s,” he had reminded a documentary film crew a few years before, but thanks to “high-priced lawyers in Washington, D.C.,” the laws against vertical integration and monopolies were no longer enforced against meatpackers. “And it’s just been a rat race trying to make a living and support yourself off the land,” he said.
Now Solberg had a simple question for Moore.
“Why don’t you guys build up in Minnesota?”
“The last thing we want to do is break any rules here,” Moore said in reply. “We want to work with you.”
“We want you to have the same respect for our people that you do for your pigs,” Solberg replied, and moved that the supervisors bring the application to a vote. The permit was unanimously denied.
Despite the increasing contentious climate around Estherville—or maybe because of it—Brad Freking surprised me yet again in November 2013. I asked if I could attend the inspection of a New Fashion Pork facility near Estherville, and Freking agreed, requesting only that I check in with Jay Moore when I arrived at the site and follow all biosafety protocols. By then, the porcine diarrhea virus that had been ripping through herds earlier in the fall had turned into an outright epidemic that would eventually put a sizable dent in the national pork supply. I had quickly agreed and soon after found myself waiting outside another New Fashion Pork wean-to-finish operation, known officially as the Booth Site.
Moore arrived in the lot not long after I did, accompanied by a large team from New Fashion, and a few minutes later the Iowa DNR inspection team, led by environmental specialist Don Cunningham, pulled into the gravel parking area. Even before shaking hands with Moore, Cunningham slipped plastic covers over his boots and cinched them at the top. Cunningham is young, still in his thirties, with a hawkish expression and by-the-book demeanor, but he is one of the seniormost inspectors now at the DNR, one of the few to elude the waves of departures under Governor Branstad. He chatted briefly with Moore, then laid open the thick binder of paperwork related to the site across the bed of his truck and went point by point through the specifics of the manure management plan. New Fashion Pork was preparing to pump the pit under the confinement in a matter of days, applying that manure to the tilled fields all around us. It was Cunningham’s job to make sure that the pit wasn’t leaking, adding more manure to the soil than the management plan allowed.
We walked around the outside of the facility—the pea gravel crunching underfoot, pit fans roaring as they vented methane off-gassing from the underground waste. “Primarily we’re looking for the integrity of the concrete. Is it cracking, or is it fresh and sound?” Cunningham explained. “The pit fan is a direct port to the manure that’s underneath in that pit, so we look for any leakage coming from around those pit fan ports. Are there manure leaks?” At every key spot, Cunningham squatted and snapped photos with his handheld digital camera. On this day, one of the seven newly hired inspectors followed along, observing the inspection from a cautious distance.
Later, I asked Cunningham to explain the seeming contradiction: here he was checking to make sure there were no minor leaks in the concrete or around the access ports, when in a matter of days nearly 300,000 gallons—by Moore’s own estimation—of that same manure would be applied to these very fields. “We’re really looking for accountability for the manure,” Cunningham said. During periods of containment, the manure was supposed to be in the pit. During periods of application, the manure was supposed to be on the fields in the quantities and distribution approved by the DNR’s manure management plan.
Cunningham paused a moment. He understood what I was driving at—but he wanted to be careful what he said. He told me that when he came out of South Dakota State University with a degree in wildlife and fisheries science, he had expected to get a job in biology and wildlife management. When those jobs weren’t available, he worked in Farm Bill programs, encouraging farmers to put acres into CRP and instructing them on replanting native grasses and trees. When that funding dried up, he took his current job. He emphasized how much he generally enjoyed being outside and “working with livestock producers to keep the streams clean and keep soil where it should be,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re still achieving some great things for natural resource management.”
I told Cunningham that he seemed to be describing a series of compromises—perhaps even a regret that instead of working with wildlife, he was now expected to ensure the safety of mas
sive confinements without ever even seeing the hogs inside. It wasn’t that exactly, he told me. He said that when he was just out of college he’d worked in a breed barn near Emmetsburg, Iowa, not twenty-five miles from Estherville—a large farrowing facility very much like those run by New Fashion Pork. And he’d learned one thing: “Concentrated animal feeding operations are designed, really by definition, to house as many animals in as small a space as possible for maximum production. I think they do that very well—in terms of temperature and the amount of feed that they have and the amount of water that they have. Their barest essential needs are being met—but any animal has needs, and wants, beyond food, water, and shelter.”
What bothered him, he said, was the knowledge that the behaviors that define these animals in the wild—rooting for food, wallowing in mud—were impossible in large-scale livestock production. “Any animal, I think, should have the opportunity to have dirt under their feet and the sun on their backs,” he said. “But, of course, they can’t have those things. There’s no way that you could raise as many hogs and feed as many people if you were to put hogs on pasture for farrowing and feeding, thereby sacrificing millions of acres of row crop production.” When I said that he seemed to be holding back, Cunningham paused again, longer this time, then sighed. He said he stuck to his job description: inspecting manure management plans, ensuring compliance with existing regulations, and reporting problems when they were observed.
At the end of the walk around the New Fashion Pork facility, Cunningham reviewed his observations with Jay Moore. He told Moore that the soil samples were out of date and noted that the well seemed to be closer to the confinement than entered on the Matrix application. (Moore later conceded that the well was only half the distance claimed on the original permit.) He informed Moore that there would be a formal notice of violation—the site’s second in eighteen months. New paperwork would need to be submitted, and everything would proceed as before. He shook hands with Moore again and stripped off the plastic covers for his boots. Within days, the confinement’s pit was pumped dry and the fields injected with hundreds of thousands of gallons of manure.
And what became of Jay Lausen, who had expressed such concern for his family in the face of this endless cycle? Brad Freking sent me an e-mail in early 2014. “I thought you might be interested to know,” he wrote, “Jay Lausen is now one of our growers.”
Part Six
Chapter 16
THE CITY OF NO
The wind in Fremont seems always to be blowing—not just blowing but whipping.
When I reached the railroad tracks on the south edge of town, just past the corner of Union and Factory, in March 2012, the gate arm bobbed and crossbuck flapped, as the Union Pacific cars clacked and squealed into the headwind. Big flat-bottomed, billowy clouds—dark, ready for rain—trucked across the sky, over the Golden Sun Seeds silo, the Fremont Beef grain elevator, the twin Spam towers of the Hormel plant, and onward, shadowing the Platte Valley toward West Omaha. As I drove down the brick-laid boulevards, old oaks pitched and swayed overhead; American flags, anchored to the porch beams of neatly lined Victorians, snapped in the wind.
The gales were gusting so hard as I reached the Ostrom household on East Sixth Street that when Kristin unlatched the handle, the storm door flew open, slapping on its hinges, and she hustled me over the threshold. Inside, the house was an empty shell—all the furniture moved out, ghost trails worn on the wood floor where everything used to be—and the wind fluting through the leaded windows echoed down the halls. Kristin invited me to sit on the marble lip of the fireplace, joking that it was the only chair she had left. She sat in the middle of the floor, cross-legged, and marveled at the timing—that she and her husband would be closing on their house the next day, handing over their keys to new owners on the very day the anti-immigration ordinance she had so vehemently opposed officially was scheduled to go on the books.
Ostrom had scoffed at the housing portion of the ordinance when it was first proposed; it was simply unprecedented, she said, and she had never imagined it would hold up in superior court. So when the ordinance passed, Ostrom continued her efforts. When the ACLU, together with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), filed suit against the city of Fremont, they hired Ostrom full-time—and, initially, the legal team assumed that the courts would strike down the ordinance, just as they had with previous measures in other small towns, and that would mark an end to the long battle in Nebraska, too.
Instead, with former pro-ordinance councilman Charlie Janssen now in the legislature, the anti-immigration movement pressed its advantage. In January 2011, he introduced LB48—a bill clearly modeled after Arizona’s LB1070, authored by Kris Kobach. But Janssen bristled at the suggestion of outside influence. “I’ve always said this is Nebraska-style,” he said. But the legislation stalled at the hearing in March over language assigning the power to any peace officer to take steps to determine the immigration status of a person “when reasonable suspicion exists that the person is unlawfully present in the United States.” In particular, other senators wanted clarification on what would constitute “reasonable suspicion.”
In a public hearing, Senator Steve Lathrop, representative of the Twelfth District in Omaha, asked, “Can you think of anything besides skin color and a command of the English language that would provide a reasonable suspicion?” Janssen stumbled. “If you . . . you know, one scenario would be perhaps if you pulled somebody over in an unlicensed vehicle. Nobody knew exactly where they were going. There were way too many people in the vehicle as far as . . .” Video of the hearing shows that the gallery let out a collective gasp, then a disgruntled murmur passed up and down the rows until the sergeant at arms called for order. But Janssen proceeded. “There are ten people in a vehicle,” he said, “that could be . . . reasonable suspicion.” Ostrom thought the obvious racial profiling inherent in Janssen’s comment would not only sink LB48 (as it did) but also the city of Fremont’s legal defense, argued by Kobach, that there was no evidence of racial bias underlying the city ordinance.
But, then, in May 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling in Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting that upheld Arizona’s right to “suspend or revoke business licenses of employers who knowingly or intentionally hire unauthorized aliens.” Two weeks later, the Court voided a lower court ruling on the ordinance in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, which, like the one in Fremont, not only sought to crack down on businesses that hire undocumented workers but also targeted the landlords who house them. Judge Laurie Smith Camp of the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska issued a declaratory judgment on the Fremont ordinance—a ruling that slapped the ACLU for arguing racial bias when they had pointed to no precedent cases in which “such scant evidence and conjecture has been found sufficient to support a conclusion that unlawful discrimination was a motivating factor in the enactment of the statute.” Smith Camp struck down provisions of the ordinance that sought to bar the harboring of illegal aliens, revoke occupancy licenses if renters were found in violation, and impose fines on violators. However, she not only upheld the E-Verify provision, in keeping with the recent Arizona ruling, but also upheld the portion of the ordinance that empowered the city to require occupancy licenses in the first place.
Smith Camp’s equivocating ruling appeared a marginal victory for anti-ordinance advocates (and the ACLU was quick to claim the win), but the judgment effectively closed a loophole in existing Nebraska law. With the advent of these housing permits, people would either have to lie on their application forms—an act that would likely violate laws for document fraud and Social Security fraud in Nebraska—or willingly acknowledge their illegal status on a form submitted at the Fremont Police Department that could then be entered into the FBI database, which, thanks to the Secure Communities program, was now linked automatically to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For would-be renters who had entered the country without legal documentation, it was a classic catch-22: eith
er admit to violating federal law, or lie and, in so doing, violate state laws. Many undocumented immigrants said they would simply pick up and move out of town—exactly as the architects of the ordinance had hoped they would. For Ostrom, the development was enough to convince her and her husband that Fremont was no longer their home.
“They’re a lot smarter than I gave them credit for,” Ostrom conceded. She rocked up and wrapped her arms around her knees, ruefully. The bare walls of her empty house creaked against the lashing wind outside. “I just found myself thinking, I can’t live here anymore.”
The couple that bought the Ostroms’ home, Rafael del Jesus and his partner of thirteen years, April Wadleigh, got their keys to the house on the very day the ordinance went on the books. Their two children, Eleyanna and Audrek, went bellowing through the empty house, charging up and down the stairs with wild excitement, as April and Rafael stood outside with me—still marveling that this beautiful Victorian, with its wraparound porch looking out onto the boulevard, was really theirs.
The family had lived at Conestoga Crossing Apartments for two years, then moved to a snug duplex near the YMCA for the next six. All the while, Rafael had worked at Hormel, starting out droving animals through the chutes to the kill floor and eventually working his way up to running the spice mixer, a computerized system that chills and blends 9,000 pounds of sausage at a time. Rafael is disarmingly baby-faced, with Cabbage Patch cheeks and sad eyes; his emotions are just barely under the surface, and he had no qualms about working through his thoughts in front of a relative stranger. He freely admitted that he supported the ordinance when it was first proposed and only slowly came to oppose it.