God & the Devil in Iowa Agriculture

“Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing.” James Thurber

Grandpa could never say no to my grandmother, so he sold his O’Brien County farm during the Great Depression and bought a motel in more cosmopolitan Ames. A piece of his heart remained on his farm though, at least until he returned many years later. On that bitter homecoming, everywhere Grandpa looked he saw that corn and beans had over run all other crops. “Like weeds from Hell,” he said.

“Where’s my apple orchard? My strawberry patches? My grape vines? Where are my potatoes?” He asked those questions many times during his remaining years, even in the hospital as he lay dying.

In the modern Iowa of GMO’s (genetically modified organisms) and livestock confinements, Grandpa could drive from Ames to Spencer without ever seeing a pig, a cow or a pasture. He joked about the 20th century, saying " I could pick a better century out of a hat blindfolded.” So I laugh, and cry a little, now imagining what he might say about 21st century agriculture.
Hopefully, that is changing, slowly.

Iowa’s food identity is in transition again. Grapes are back, so much so that the Des Moines Wine Festival is a totally sold out series of events, and a bona fide tourist attraction. So are two state vineyards that hosted 25,000 visitors last year. In the last ten years Iowa farmers discovered grapes were a hedge against the tyranny of corn and bean prices. Farmers also rediscovered environmental advantages: Grapes prevent erosion.

An herbicide lethal to grapes helped chase that crop from Iowa in the late 1930‘s, when this was a top five grape state. Ironically fear of the same technology that created 2-4D has helped return diversity to Iowa agriculture.

For four thousand years farming was a self sustaining labor. Farmers saved enough seeds from harvest to plant the next two Springs. Man and beast provided labor, God provided sun and rain and the cycle perpetuated itself, feeding the people and their animals.

That changed before Grandpa died, with Iowa at ground zero. A technological revolution created hybrid seeds, pesticides, herbicides and machines that now lay 32 rows of seed simultaneously. The number of American farmers declined and the size of farms rose dramatically. Iowa’s rural population peaked in 1870 and, except for a brief blip in the Depression, it has been in constant free fall ever since then. Between 1900 and 2000, the average farm in America went from 147 acres to 435.

Such numbers added up to craziness, with big mortgages on all the extra land and modern technology that Big Ag required. Industrial farming became so efficient that the laws of supply and demand drove prices into the dirt, until huge government subsidies propped them up. Farmers needed to pay off those mortgages so they could produce more food than all the people and livestock in America could eat or buy. Most farmers took outside jobs. Over 90% of farm household incomes now come from outside jobs, the most in history.

Most folks were oblivious of this insanity until food started tasting bad and poisoning people. New diseases like e coli sprouted within the new food system. A counterrevolution began slowly, and again in Iowa. Dick Thompson of Boone founded Practical Farmers and farmers like Wayne Paul converted.

“All those chemicals, that didn‘t seem like God‘s work,” the organic grain farmer and miller from Laurel told us, explaining his 1970’s conversion to organic farming.

Because of the popularization of farmers markets and chefs who believe in fresh and local foods, small sustainable farms made a comeback in Iowa this decade, leading to a new diversity of crops like those Grandpa raised. They also created a new efficiency - the smallest U.S. farms (under 27 acres) have more than ten times greater dollar output per acre than larger farms!
If sustainable farming is God’s work, then the sterile seeds of patented GMO’s are the devil’s. It’s a much repeated political myth that GMO’s can exist side by side with organic crops, a belly laugh of a myth in a state where the main crop is corn, the super slut of the plant kingdom whose windblown seed has bastardized the DNA of pure bred crops as far away as Oaxaca.

This devil is in the details. If an old school farmer can not save and replant his own seed, as his fathers since Abraham did, then agriculture is no longer the work of the Lord's children but just an impersonal business of corporate lawyers and their lackey legislators. And we will all soon be asking,

“Where are my apples, my strawberries, my grapes?”