When a barn is not just a barn

How Big Ag's marketing is helping us finish off rural Iowa

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The barn is finished!

You didn’t know we were building a barn? Well, we didn’t build a barn, exactly.

I say “we” but I really mean Roger and Ryan.

I say “barn” but I really mean big metal shed.

The word “barn” doesn’t mean barn anymore, anyway, ever since confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs for short) started getting called barns.

“Hog and chicken barns.” Sounds quaint. And brought to you by the same folks who came up with “Round Up Ready” corn. If you’re not familiar with ag marketing doublespeak, that means antibiotic resistant corn.

We spray Round Up on most of our corn every year, then feed it to the millions of hogs and chickens in those barns.

I say “we” but I really mean farmers on the corporate feed-and-fuel debt treadmill. That’s why I buy meat and poultry from farmers who aren’t.

The Bayer Corporation, which manufactures Round Up, has lost billions in decisions by juries, groups of Americans who listened to Bayer make its best case in court, deliberated over the evidence and still determined that its product is contributing to killing people.

Our governor claims these losses could cost 500 workers in Muscatine their jobs. As if Kim Reyolds ever cared about workers or Muscatine. The woman who has slashed unemployment benefits and job services, gutted workers’ union rights and deputized state cops as ICE agents.

There were so many other ways to approach this “killing us slowly with cancer” issue.

Backed by the most powerful Farm Bureau in the country, Reynolds could’ve told Bayer, “We’re not buying what you’re selling. Make a better product. One that doesn’t sicken farmers for life if it splashes on them in the field where, by the way, there are no wash stations.”

Where there’s a will there’s a way. And where there’s absolutely no will at all...we get the fastest growing cancer rate in the country.

And then there’s Bayer, which didn’t have to buy Monsanto in the first place. Instead, it doubled down on the loser. Its Modern Ag Alliance has spent millions or more kissing up to legislators and buying ads to “protect farmers.”

What does protecting farmers look like to Bayer? Introducing bills that would make it nearly impossible for farmers to be compensated by Bayer when they get sick or die from a Bayer product, then paying off legislators to pass these bills.

In Iowa, this year, Bayer lost. A short-term victory to a long-term disease.

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Marketing can’t mask the damage forever

Never in the history of man has anything called a “barn” housed up to 24,000 hogs or 125,000 chickens.

But we call them barns so you’ll imagine barnyards where flocks of chickens eat kitchen scraps in the sun, making happy, healthy chicken sounds all day long.

I say “we” but I really mean corporate ag and its handmaiden the Farm Bureau.

Guess how healthy 100,000 chickens can be eating grown-out Round Up Ready corn, cooped up inside a metal building their whole lives?

Look at the water their manure eventually lands in. Do those brown suds floating down the river look healthy to you?

Ask the small town that once had a feed store, a café and more churches than bars how that’s working out for it. Because how healthy can it be when one corporation contracts with one farmer to grow the chickens and hogs that hundreds of farmers used to grow?

The number of hog farmers has dropped 90 percent in the last 30 years but we’re growing more pork than ever. Farms are bigger and lease more land from non-operator owners than ever. Property values near these barns crash when the stench chokes everyone out of their houses. Owners sell for a song and the buildings gets razed for, you guessed it, more “farming.”

(Adding insult to injury, these kings of the mountain then bitch about high property taxes. The nerve.)

Then there’s human health: People living within one mile of a CAFO are nearly three times more likely to suffer from antibiotic resistance than those who don’t, according to a University of Iowa study that of course, never made the papers.

Latest figures also show that Iowa ranks No. 2 in cancer rates. Our governor blames it on binge drinking, not citizens surrounded by 23 million acres of industrial agriculture blowing chemicals into the air like Pig Pen at the Iowa State Fair.

This is what consolidation looks like. And I’d love to hear just ONE candidate from any party talk about ending this wholesale corporate destruction of rural America cloaked in billion-dollar ad campaigns of white men in flannel shirts and bluejeans standing proudly by their tractors!

The only thing healthy about any of this is the corporate bottom line, a corporation based in Germany…where all of this is outlawed.

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Our barn is different.

Our barn isn't made of wood or painted red like the iconic Iowa barn in my neighbor’s yard. But it’s got drainage for a wash/pack station if a veggie farmer needs it someday. It’s got shelves for tree shelters and lumber, drip torches and backpack sprayers for prairie burns, fence-building materials and things a person just might need someday. And at least for now, it’s got wide open space for tractors and trailers, implements and tools.

What it’s missing are hundreds of gestation crates and hog slats.

Call it a barn for “farming lite” if you like, “homesteading” if you wish. I’m a woman in my last chapter. I grow perennial crops. I’m too old or lazy to wrestle with cattle or sheep. I’m not interested in scaling up. That’s fine by me.

But I know this: Every fruit and nut tree I plant, every time I fail and learn, every time I inspire a beginning farmer, I’ve made a difference I can live with.

And now I’ve got a roof overhead to protect me while I try.

That’s all a barn was ever meant to be, after all.

I’m a proud member of the Iowa Farmers Union, the oldest and most progressive farm organization in Iowa. Please consider joining as a farmer or Friend of Family Farmer today. Let’s force every candidate to take a stand against corporate consolidation in rural Iowa.

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You’re invited!

Potluck on the Prairie Saturday, June 21st starting at 11 am. Weather permitting, we’ll be set up right alongside the Cedar River. Sign up here to get notifications of this and other events all season long.

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Scenes from Draco Hill Nature Farm

And…as part of our Sex On the Farm series (Join us on Notes to see more!)