Iowa Farm Bureau Gets Rich While Iowa’s Natural Environment Degrades

[IFB’s fight for farmers’ rights supports legislation to prevent environmental improvement.  The follow excerpt from Cedar Rapids Gazette, 4/30/2017, takes a deeper look at IFB. Kinseth]:

Farm Bureau flourishes as water quality flags

Powerhouse ag organization has millions in surplus, seven-figure executive pay

Even as low commodity prices strap Iowa farmers and the Legislature pinches pennies to fund water quality initiatives, one agriculture group has been socking away tens of millions of dollars a year and paying its executives up to seven-figure salaries.

The Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, which will celebrate its centennial next year, is the alpha dog of agriculture, using its vast influence and money to “help farm families prosper” — part of its mission — but also to ensure success for farm-related corporations like the Farm Bureau itself, a Gazette investigation shows.

Some Iowa farmers, even dedicated former board members, say it’s time for the Farm Bureau to take ownership of the role agriculture plays in poor water quality and put its weight behind meaningful change to help the environment.

“I look at this as more of an issue for my daughter,” said Josh Nelson, a 35-year-old farmer from Belmond, about his 5-month-old. “For her to be able to swim in the ponds around Belmond, I need to get my act together.”

The Iowa Farm Bureau started in 1918, one year before the American Farm Bureau was born. As a nonprofit, the Iowa group is exempt from income taxes.

There are 100 county Farm Bureaus in Iowa — one in each of 98 counties and two in Pottawattamie County. Issues that resonate at the local level make it to state meetings where members vote on a platform that influences the organization’s statewide agenda, explained Iowa Farm Bureau President Craig Hill during an interview at his southern Iowa farm.

Steve Swenka, a Tiffin farmer and cattle producer who has been vice president of the Johnson County Farm Bureau since 2010, underscored the value of the Farm Bureau for farmers: “As long as you produce food or fiber, we will help you in any way we can.”

The Iowa Farm Bureau has more than 160,000 member families. Of that, 62,600 are actively involved in farming and may hold county or state office. The rest are associates, most of whom become members to buy Farm Bureau insurance.

Of the nearly $686,000 the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation PAC donated to Iowa political candidates from 2010 to January, GOP recipients outnumbered Democrats nearly 5 to 1 and overall got 15 times as much money, a Gazette analysis showed. The top three lawmakers to get Farm Bureau cash were Gov. Terry Branstad with $88,000, Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey with $43,000 and Iowa Sen. Dan Zumbach, R-Ryan, with $29,800, campaign records show.

Nelson, who raises row crops and hogs with several family members and has his own chemical-free vegetable farm, doesn’t side with Farm Bureau politically, but likes the diversity of Farm Bureau members he met serving on the Wright County board from 2013-2015.

He’s also glad the Farm Bureau stands up for rural America, often ignored or ridiculed.

“There are people who would argue they are wielding undue influence,” he said. “But it’s one of the most effective organizations I’ve seen.”\

FINANCIAL SURPLUS

Member dues of $30 to $55 a year make up about 4 percent of the Iowa Farm Bureau’s annual revenue, which was a whopping $88 million in 2015, according to forms the nonprofit is required to file with the IRS and make public. At that time, the organization had $1.36 billion in net assets — which includes 60 percent ownership of the Farm Bureau Life Insurance Company, founded by the federation in 1939.

The Iowa Farm Bureau spent $31.5 million in 2015, with the largest line items listed as employee compensation at $8.2 million, publications at $4.2 million and grants and other assistance at $2.8 million.

That year, the Farm Bureau had 34 people paid $100,000 or more, including two executives — Executive Director Denny Presnall and General Counsel Ed Parker — who each got more than $800,000 in total compensation, the records show.

After expenses, the Farm Bureau had $56.4 million left over in 2015, which Hill said the group put into savings. In fact, from 2013 through 2015, the Farm Bureau banked nearly $170 million in surplus revenue.

“The goal is to create an endowment fund of diversified investments to support our activities,” Hill said.

The Farm Bureau started stockpiling after the 2008 recession walloped the insurance industry.

“Our stock value went down to single digits,” said Hill, referring to Farm Bureau Life, which he serves as chairman. “We were around $2 per share at the depths of the 2008 financial crisis. We nearly lost our investment as a result of that crisis.”

As the economy improved, Farm Bureau Life stock climbed out of the cellar.

“That fear created by the financial crisis gave us a pause to think and rethink about our investments,” Hill said. “We’re trying to put money into more diversified portfolios so we don’t have all our eggs in one basket.”

In September 2013, Farm Bureau Life increased its quarterly dividends, declared a special dividend and sold additional shares of stock, which together generated more than $65 million more for investors, including the Farm Bureau, Hill said.

EXECUTIVE PAY NOT SET BY MEMBERS

Those moves made 2013 a banner year for the federation, which reported $110.4 million in revenue. That year, five Farm Bureau executives each received more than $800,000 in total compensation, with Chief Financial Officer/Controller James Christenson making $2.2 million and Field Services Director Duane Johnson making $1.06 million, records show.

“Our membership probably does not know what those executives are earning,” Hill said.

“It’s no secret it’s a wealthy organization, but I don’t think they (farmers) quite would realize the amount of money being dealt with in the Farm Bureau.”

- Josh Nelson

Farmer

A 100-member voting delegation sets compensation for Hill and other state board members, then the state board decides how much to pay the executives.

Several Iowa farmers said they were surprised by the hefty compensation for a group that represents farmers, who had a 2016 median income of $66,000 nationwide, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics.

“That’s something that needs to be exposed,” said Chris Petersen, 62, a hog farmer from Clear Lake. He was on the Cerro Gordo County Farm Bureau many years ago but dropped his membership in 2000 over what he saw as the organization’s focus on large producers and agriculture-related companies.

“I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the Farm Bureau being top heavy,” Nelson said. “It’s no secret it’s a wealthy organization, but I don’t think they (farmers) quite would realize the amount of money being dealt with in the Farm Bureau.”

Sacred Water, Part 3

See Sacred Water Part 2 12/15/16

See Sacred Water Part 1 10/13/16

See River-Keeping 12/5/16

See Flowing Wisdom 10/27/16

See A Praise Of Water 9/16/16

If you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant, or weak, return to yourself, to who you are, here and now and when you get there, you will discover yourself, like a lotus flower in full bloom, even in a muddy pond, beautiful and strong. 

Masaru Emoto, The Secret Life of Water

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”

Margaret Atwood - The Penelopiad

HAIL WATER, full of grace.  Water, wind and light are connection made visible in a very real way.  We don’t pray to these events to bring them into our lives.  We are these events.  We do not praise them in an effort to purify them, but rather to cleanse ourselves by bring our attention to them.

The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests, are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.

It is just because you miss it right where you are, or avoid it even as you face it, that you are unable to attain actual use of it.

Yuansou, from “Expedients and Reality,” in Thomas Cleary, Zen Essence

When water is “you” and life itself, everyday actions can transform.  Value changes so that water becomes prioritized rather than being a secondary commodity.  And this “spiritual reality” is practical rather than esoteric.  Respect for water optimizes its economic contributions to daily life.  Not respecting water adds major financial costs to clarify and also increases public health costs.

(After Devon Pena, Aceqia [“A-see-key-ah”], on water democracy):

Spirit is essentially a dissolution of boundaries of things and self into other selves AND

attentiveness to the activity of primal order.  Such a perception is not fantasy or even esoteric reality; it is practical and optimal living.  Water, for example, reaches from ocean to rainfall, to stream to riparian edge and extends seamlessly into human life. 

*****

Landscape is infused with spirit, every tree, stone, and even things that humans make.  And yet, in modern life, such a sense of spirit doesn’t exist.

in the garden of beauty

the intensity of our use introduces a shadow.

Because of this shadow

the commonness of water equates unimportance

do not pass by

listen and see

Water is present throughout the cosmos

yet rare are conditions that permit liquid water

Liquid water is the ground of life

Deep wellsprings of human culture--the sacred forest, the

 tree as a landscape with spirit, and so, too, water and stone--can inform modernity. 

A “modernity” that will soon add a billion people to the Earth and that favors electricity, autos, water, soil, food safety, can decimate human health.  An ecological civilization can optimize human life and is at the pinnacle of human development.  

Inhabitation is “place-based” where “self-care,” when healthy and sustaining, prioritizes the landscape down to the smallest details.  Inhabitation values the smallest details--a particular bird, snail, bee or butterfly as a valuable aspect of self.  This has an optimizing aspect upon water, atmosphere, food sources.  The human community acts as a “keystone species” that melds new forms as an extension of primal forms, giving standing to primal forms and non-human otherness as primal, essential rather than separate and secondary..”

Sustainability is not stewardship.  Sustainability is habitation that follows the primal instructions. Primal” does not reference ancient or archaic or primitive in the sense of being simple and less complex.  Primal is “foundational”  or “core”  and “first.”  The “eternal” is not past, but rather references the “enduring,” and as such is in the present moment.  

How is “sacred Earth” not a reach?  

Increasingly urbanized and spending the majority of time alive inside buildings, it is to be recollected that most of human development has been spent in unbuilt landscapes.  The landscape has a healing capacity--wind, fragrance, wild plants, bird-song, light and colors in water, wind song in high tree branches, sunrises and sunsets, stars, insect chants, and even space itself both sheltering and wide open.  It can be felt as “homeland.”  In The Outermost House, Henry Beston suggests  that, in fact, we “hunger” for the elemental before the senses.  There is a sense of shinrin-yoko or “forest-bathing” as Earth-healing, both from mental calmness and the role of natural materials as medicine for immunity.

Water: Far More Than We Allow Ourselves To Imagine

Lance Kinseth, The Color Of Water 1 & 2, 2017

OUR POSTMODERN, postindustrial, cybernetic sense of water is still primitive.  We are so very limited in our perception.  We are so homocentric, self-entered,where water is sill sensed to be an external, inanimate commodity.  For all our intelligence, we are so ignorant, even self-ignorant.  We base our lives on economics, but we cannot see the deep economy of water, and it is costing us dearly.

EARTH DAY 2017!!!: Iowa Agriculture: A Mining Mentality / High Yield Extraction

[Iowa Water Post Number 10, selections from Your 2 Cents Worth, & Letters To Editor, Des Moines Register]

*****

It was wonderful to read about thousands of acres of farm buffer strips next to creeks and lakes, and how, very soon, all the waterways in the state will be protected. Unfortunately, I was reading about Minnesota, which requires buffer strips. Iowa doesn't.

*****

Iowa farmers are switching form corn to soybeans to search for more profit this year.  Here’s a novel idea.  How about adding a third, fourth or fifth option?  Try planting oats, wheat, sorghum or anything else but row crops.  Plant a crop that actually holds the soil and takes less inputs (fertilizer, chemicals).  Oops, silly me.  You would lose your row crop welfare checks.

*****

I’d like my taxes to help the farmer down the road who raises veggies and uses compost to improve his soil.

Instead, my taxes help the corn farmer next door who sends lots of soil and nitrates into the creek via tillage and tiling.

*****

[letter to editor: Selden Spencer, Water is still polluted]

Despite the recent legal decision against the Des Moines Water Works, Iowa’s water is still polluted and getting worse. How do we fix this problem?  Who is responsible?

Each of us can help. but the bulk of the problem is from industrial agriculture.  It is the owner of an “operation” that must accept final responsibility for the pollution of Iowa waters.  Whether the owners are on the farm, in a condo in Arizona or in some boardroom in Chicago. The owners, through persuasion or legislative rules must be brought to a conservation mentality and practice--a mindset that would value increased biomass as much as increased yield. 

The obsession with maximal yield will never allow for practices that might preserve or even enhance our gift of topsoil.

A mining mentality will continue to tear, destroy, pollute and wash away our topsoil into our waters and thereby foul them.  With carrot or stick we must try to promote and elevate the best practices of soil and water conservation to all landowners if we want to restore our water quality.

Editorial: Pulitzer Winner Took Brave Stand

Editorial: Pulitzer winner took brave stand

The Register's editorial Published 5:16 p.m. CT April 11, 2017 

Art Cullen, 59, editor of the twice-weekly Storm Lake Times, won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for his editorial writing. Kelly McGowan/The Register

Art Cullen may have lost friends over his powerful editorials, but he’s no “enemy of the people.” So it’s inspiring to see the colorful editor of a small-town, family-owned newspaper honored with the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

The editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times won for 10 editorials he wrote last year on Iowa’s water quality, including the Des Moines Water Works’ lawsuit against drainage districts in northwest Iowa. His work no doubt offended local officials, farmers and advertisers.

Cullen, however, was fighting for taxpayers in Buena Vista County. He worked with the Iowa Freedom of Information Council to obtain public records disclosing how his home county and two others financed the defense of the lawsuit.

“Regardless of your opinion about the merits of the water works’ lawsuit, the public deserves to know who is paying law firms in Des Moines and Washington, D.C., and under what terms,” he wrote in one of the editorials.

A few excerpts from those winning editorials:

On challenging those lawyers: "To use a barnyard euphemism, every once in awhile even a blind pig finds a nut. We are not so polished, but our snout smells something that is being hidden. We can’t see very well right now. But we can smell it."

On Gov. Terry Branstad’s proposal to redirect schools' sales tax revenue for water quality: “So, the workers at Tyson who buy school supplies for their children would find their sales tax payments going to agland owners who install bioreactors while living in California and paying no sales tax in Iowa. And Storm Lake (schools) could not build the size of facility it needs to accommodate the children of food processors woven into the supply chain that pollutes the Raccoon directly and indirectly.”

On why regulation is needed: “The truth is that we can’t dump a barrel of ink down the drain without impunity. Why should a farmer be allowed to dump a couple tons of phosphorous-laden soil into the Raccoon?”

Congratulations, Art.

Misguided Iowa State And Federal Policies Impacting Water Quality

Your 2 Cents’ Worth excerpts, Part 9 [various readers submissions/ Des Moines Register]:

Letters To The Editor

*****

[State]

An indisputable truth: Des Moines water is polluted

Patricia Prijatel, Des Moines, Letter to the Editor, 3/25/017

Des Moines water is polluted, requiring millions of dollars of treatment before it is drinkable. That’s an indisputable truth. And hog confinement lots and cattle operations upriver are major causes of our unhealthy water, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

It was a brilliant political move by a hog farmer in Keota to draw our attention away from the real problem through his heavy-handed legislation dissolving the Des Moines Water Works. Mean-spirited and short-sighted and not in the overall interest of Des Moines or the state of Iowa, but darn clever. And it punishes the one agency that is actually serving citizens by cleaning up our water.

So can we regain our focus and remember that one fact: Our water is polluted. And dirty water is a health hazard, period. It’s linked to, among other things, cancer, infant deaths, miscarriages and nervous system problems.

Stop the diversions and the finger pointing and the rhetoric and the bogus legislation and the ineffective Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy. It’s past time to take measurable and meaningful action upstream to clean up our water. Somebody show some spine and leadership here and make those who are causing the problem accountable for their destruction.

*****

[Federal]

The EPA saves lives

Karen Johnson, Fairfield, Letter to the Editor, 3/23/2017

My father was a foreman at General Electric Co. in Massachusetts from the 1940s to the '70s. He was told to clean out a vat of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) with another man. The other man was overcome by the fumes, fell into the vat and died. My father got skin cancer. Luckily, he eventually beat it.

A few years later GE buried the PCBs under the ground. People built houses there. Many got cancer and died. GE said they were innocent since they did not know PCBs were toxic. How many people have to die before we know something is toxic? There was no Environmental Protection Agency then.

When GE pulled out of the area, most of the city was employed by GE. They all lost their jobs.

I need to know President Donald Trump cares about all, not just the wealthy. If the president feels the EPA is wrong, then he should then make changes to fix the problems, not dismantle the EPA.

The environment needs to be regulated on the federal level, as the problems are bigger than the state level.

A job is not as important as health. Without health, you have nothing of value.

Iowans Suffering From Dirty Water

 [The following commentary is full of data that clearly illustrate the impact of polluted water on all Iowans and places the problem source, the many public financial benefits given to farmers,  and the required regulation and financial reparation required to improve water quality strongly on Iowa agriculture.  Bold italics on article content are mine.  Kinseth]

Craig Cox, Lawsuit's real losers: Iowans suffering from dirty water, Des Moines Register, 3/23/2017:

Friday, March 17, was a bad day for Iowans’ health, quality of life and belief in fairness. That day U.S. District Judge Leonard Strand dismissed the lawsuit the Des Moines Water Works brought to protect city residents’ drinking water from pollution carried by underground pipes from farm fields in upstream counties. Legal technicalities arising from outdated state drainage law and loopholes in the federal Clean Water Act did the suit in.

Agricultural interests and their political patrons are celebrating the Water Works' loss. But the real losers are all Iowans suffering from dirty water.

The state Department of Natural Resources lists 253 community water systems as highly susceptible to the same nitrate pollution that threatens the Water Works’ 500,000 customers. Sixty-two systems draw water from the same watersheds that supply Des Moines. Thirty-nine systems are targeted for immediate action because their drinking water is already contaminated with nitrate at levels half or more of the legal limit.

Private wells are even more likely to be polluted. Between 2006 and 2008, the University of Iowa tested 473 private drinking water wells and found nitrates in almost half, with about one in eight higher than the legal limit. New science suggests that long-term ingestion of drinking water with nitrate levels that high is linked to increased risk of bladder and thyroid cancer and birth defects.

The Water Works has been accused of waging war on rural Iowa. But the water of many rural Iowans is likely just as polluted with nitrates, or more so, than in Des Moines, and they don’t see the lawsuit as an attack. A Register poll found that more people living in small towns and rural areas support the lawsuit than oppose it. The same is true for Democrats, independents and Republicans.

Nitrates get all the attention, but algal blooms caused in large part by fertilizer and manure running off or drained from farm fields set off a cascade of problems. When utilities disinfect water overloaded with algae, a suite of chemical byproducts are formed that elevate the risk of cancer. Utilities then try to remove the dangerous chemicals, but sometimes they can’t. In the last five years, 163 Iowa systems reported that their treated water exceeded the legal limit for disinfection byproducts at least once.

Toxic algal blooms and bacteria already ruin vacations and sicken people. Since 2006, state beaches reported 185 instances of unsafe levels of algal toxins. A record 32 warnings were issued in 2015 and 37 last year. The Department of Natural Resources’ Water Quality Index classifies water quality as good in only one of 58 streams monitored in 2015. Water quality was listed as poor or very poor in 53 streams. In much of the state, the primary culprits are polluted runoff and drainage from farm fields.

Even as their health is threatened and costs to treat dirty water rise, Iowans are also supposed to pay farmers to stop their activities that pollute the water. How fair is that?

Agriculture interests and their government patrons dither over ways to find more money to pay farmers to cut pollution by making often simple changes to how they farm. But U.S. taxpayers already send billions of dollars to farmers and landowners every year.

In 2015, Iowa farmers and landowners got $660 million in income subsidies through the federal farm bill and an additional $378 million in subsidies for insurance premiums. A study by the Iowa Department of Revenue reported that in 2010 alone agriculture enjoyed $278 million in state tax credits and another $32 million in property tax benefits.

Diverting a small slice of this largesse to pay farmers to stop polluting would jump-start the agonizingly slow progress seen today. But maybe farmers should do something to cut pollution in return for the support they already get. In the 1985 farm bill, farmers agreed to cut soil erosion in return for farm subsidies. Thirty-two years later, surely farmers would agree to do more to cut pollution in return for more billions in federal and state support.

Iowans have waited too long for clean water. In 1979, the Register won a Pulitzer Prize for James Risser’s reporting on the environmental crisis on Iowa farms. It shouldn’t take a lawsuit to focus the state’s leaders on a problem that’s been right in front their eyes for decades.

Iowans should be grateful to the Water Works leadership and staff who took financial, political and personal risks to put water quality front and center.

Progress in cleaning up Iowa’s water is moving at a snail’s pace at best. Agricultural interests constantly complained the lawsuit was distracting from their efforts to clean up Iowa’s abysmal water quality. They are out of excuses now.

Judge Strand has put the ball firmly back in agriculture’s court. Let's see how they play it.

Craig Cox is senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources, based in the Ames office of the Environmental Working Group.