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Edited on Tue Jan-20-04 12:55 PM by WilliamPitt
(this is a portion of the essay I am writing about my time with Kucinich)
It was a bit like going back in time. The red van hummed and bounced down the highway from Des Moines to Dubuque on a morning when the sun never showed its face. A white fog hung low over the rolling hills, and whitewashed barns and farmhouses loomed out of the mist like an echo of an agrarian wonderland. The fields of corn and soy had been reaped, and the black soil waited like a postcard for spring and seeds and sunlight.
The pastoral image outside the window belied some hard facts that speak to larger issues which demand attention in the coming election. In 1900, the topsoil in Iowa was 14 feet deep, made up of dirt so rich in nutrients that you could eat it by the fistful and be nourished. In the last several years, industrial farming has stripped that topsoil down to a mere 14 inches. The earth that remains must be saturated with chemical fertilizers that have bled into the water table, poisoning it.
100 years ago, agriculture in Iowa was dominated by family farmers. Each farm raised its own portion of crops and kept a few head of cattle. Those cattle were fed whatever was grown on the land. It was a perfect machine, an agrarian society that hummed along in a timeless harmony. Then came the 1980s, and a new generation of farmers graduated from college. Their heads were filled with a desire to purchase the shiny new farming machines pitched to them in classrooms by corporate agribusinesses. Farms that had been in families for three generations or more took on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt as these new farmers bought equipment they didn’t need. The debt held, however, because the agrarian harmony paid enough dividends to keep the banks at bay.
In the 1980s, however, corporate agribusinesses convinced those banks to call in those debts, and thousands of farms crashed. There were about two suicides a month for a long period, as farmers who felt they had failed their families killed themselves out of rage and shame and despair. The farms went up for sale, and were purchased at fire-sale prices by corporations like ADM.
Today, the cattle and crop industries in Iowa are owned by massive agribusinesses which keep thousands of head in tight quarters. The waste created by this is extraordinary, and goes straight into the ground. Likewise, massive industrial pig farms create untold thousands of gallons of pig manure which is stored in huge ‘lagoons.’ No material crafted by human ingenuity can contain this caustic filth, and so these lagoons breach their containers and further contaminate the water table. The stench from these lagoons is so extreme that houses a mile downwind become covered in flies.
In five years, the aquifer underneath the state will be completely polluted by dung and chemicals. The topsoil, denuded by factory farming, will continue to disappear, and continue to require chemical fertilizers to bring forth the crops. The introduction of genetically modified crops to the landscape, meanwhile, will change the ecosystem in ways we do not even begin to understand.
Recently, America endured its first Mad Cow scare. We were told that everything was under control, but this was a fantastic lie. Mad Cow is transferred two ways: In the manure or in the feed, two conduits that are demonstrably connected. Factory cattle farms in Iowa feed their animals an incredibly dangerous mixture. A massive turkey farm north of Des Moines composts the corpses of dead turkeys, mixed with the sawdust bedding they live in. The product of this is sold to the factory farms, which mix it with rotten candy bars purchased from candy manufacturers.
Finally, the brew is spiced with the dross created in the process of cattle slaughter: Blood and offal sluiced through grates when the animals are killed. Into this mixture goes neurological material from slaughtered cattle – brains and spines – and cattle feed is the final product. It is in the neurological parts of the cow that Mad Cow breeds. The animals eat this, and then defecate it by the ton in these massive factory yards, and all the other animals walk around in it. This is a ticking time bomb.
The fog that morning covered all this, and offered only a postcard. The problems that were hidden – the wreckage of the environment, the dominance of corporations, the danger of a poisoned food source – await us all.
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