Iowa: Not The Breadbasket Of The World, Part One

See also Iowa: Not The Breadbasket Of The World, Part Two, 10/24/16

THE IOWA LANDSCAPE is some of the richest land for agriculture on Earth.  However, it is a vulgar [i.e., facile/too easy/ popular] myth that Iowa is the breadbasket of the world.

Most U.S. agricultural exports go to countries whose citizens can 

afford to pay for them.

....86 percent of the value of U.S. agricultural exports in 2015 

went to Canada, China, Mexico, Europe, Japan and 15 other markets 

with low numbers of hungry people, according to the U.N. Development 

Program. 

. ...Only half of one percent of U.s. agricultural exports went to 

a group of 19 under-nourished countries that includes Haiti, Yemen

and Ethiopia.

Des Moines Register Editorial, Don’t expect Iowa 

Farmers to ‘feed the world,’ 10/10/16

The agriculture that does occur in Iowa is modern and industrialized and as such it perpetrates high costs on all of the citizens of Iowa including farmers.  The demand to get the most ag production out of the land, depletes the soil quantity [i.e., soil loss that has been stored for millennia] and quality.  To get the most production, crops are densely planted, annually rotated, not covered with vegetation that returns quality to the soil, enduring continual soil loss, and treated with intense artificial chemicals.  

Now, while being a small part of the Iowa economy, industrial ag seeks statewide taxes to reduce water pollution that does major and continual damage to water quality to the point of being a public health concern as well as contribute strongly to a national ecological concern in the Gulf of Mexico as well as locally in streams, rivers, ponds and lakes.  The federal EPA only hopes for a 45 percent reduction decades from now at best, and the odds of getting that require an effort that many organization and source point polluters do not even consider a problem.   

If someone is to be aided, what about the costs of water treatment systems?  In the federal Clean Water Act, water treatment systems are mandated to reduce nitrates to safe levels in incoming water, as well as regulation in disposing of nitrates removed from the water.  Of course, political influence assured that farm runoff would not be subject to regulation in the Clean Water Act. 

Municipal water treatment systems and myriad private wells in Iowa can’t afford reduce nitrates from water and then need to begin to spend even more to clean the extracted nitrate waste to avoid returning it to the water.

Across Iowa last year, the water supplies serving about 260 cities 

and towns were considered highly susceptible to contamination by 

excessive nitrates and other pollutants.  That’s about 30 percent of 

the state’s 880 municipal water systems.  

Unlike Des Moines, many of those cities and towns have no 

facilities to remove nitrates.

....Over the next five years, [Des Moines] Water Works estimates 

it will have to spend almost $80 million more for additional nitrate 

removal measures--a cost that ultimately must be covered by taxpayers.

Lee Rood, Reader’s Watchdog, Utility shifting how it 

disposes of excess nitrates, Des Moines Sunday Register, 10/9/16

The Register reported last month that 15 percent of private wells voluntarily 

tested between 2006 and 2015 had nitrate levels that exceeded federal 

standards, according to Iowa Department of Public Health data.

Donnelle Eller, Concerns voiced about nitrate levels, Des Moines

Register, 9/30/16

All Iowa ag, be it the family farm or the corporate farm or feedlot,  is about squeezing a profit out of a very fragile situation that it dictated by weather and price shifts for commodities.  It is a tight situation.  And in such a situation, good intention to be a good steward and to assure for clean water are simply overtaken by economic demands over eco-demands.  But the intensity of intrusion into the landscape to turn a profit are also dressed up in distractions that say agriculture is a stewardship when it is not.  And it gets dressed up in ideas such as being the world’s breadbasket, feeding the world, and putting food on Iowa tables.  And these noble ideas do not represent an Iowa agriculture that in reality feeds the buyers not the world and little of the ag products reach Iowa’s tables.

Industrial ag gives a bad name and damaging economic cost to family farmer.  If it did not, there would be more family farmers.  Family farms ride, very dependently, on the tail of indust. ag, and indust. ag can settle in lower commodity prices because they produce more and can take a smaller margin of profit on a mass production.  And this industrial ag strategy will not get much better in the foreseeable future.  Industrial ag will do even more to chase ways to sell to any system that can pay--such as growing interest in meat in China--and further deplete Iowa’s natural rare in the world land.  

While rural populations are being depleted by a global process of urbanization, industrial ag has contributed to the population drain by making it nearly impossible to buy in and compete.  Accordingly, there is a societal cost to community as well as both an immediate public health cost to individuals subject to pollution and economic costs [i.e., taxation to clean water] and a vaster ecological impact that feeds back everywhere as public health issues, quality of life issues, and higher ag production costs due to strategies that continue to deplete soil fertility.

Iowa must balance the economic benefits of trade with the cost of 

feeding a few wealthy countries.  How much should Iowa bear the 

environmental consequences of satiating growing appetites for meat 

in China and other nations?

Des Moines Register Editorial, Don’t expect Iowa Farmers to ‘feed the world,’ 10/10/16

*****

Des Moines Register, Letter To Editor:

Kurt Johnson, "Don't give farmers more credit than other producers," 10/13/16:

In a recent editorial, you warn against the unintended consequences of expecting Iowa's farmers to "feed the world" [Oct.10].  As you wrote, "...the most effective way to reduce world hunger is to help small farmers in Africa, Asia and elsewhere increase their productivity and income."

Some farmers and their supporters have a vested interest in making sure fellow citizens hold them in a special position because they produce the food we eat.  They perpetuate that meme in order to get special treatment by our government, for example, by not having to either stop or pay for polluting our waters, and by receiving a 60 percent subsidy on their crop/revenue insurance premiums.

Every week, most of us buy food from all over the world at our local grocery stores.  It may be wonderful to be able to buy local fresh food, but it is not a necessity.  International voluntary free trade is what has allowed us, and much of the rest of the world, toad starvation when local producers fail for any reason.

Farmers should be given no more credit than other producers of all kinds of products.  As Adam Smith wrote in 1776 in "The Wealth of Nations," "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker than we expect our dinner but form their regard to their own interest."