iowa II

Yup, this is just what it looks like: a 50-foot-high pitchfork. Did I mention how much I love Iowa?

The conference ended Saturday night with a rousing BBQ with the ICCI staff, and I'm moving along to learning as much about hog production as my mind can wrap itself around. The research I'm doing, as far as I can tell (in each meeting, I find myself explaining it a little differently, and I've now kind of forgotten exactly what it was I was supposed to be asking about. How can I be expected to remember when absolutely everything is so interesting?)- anyway, it looks at whether (and how) federal farm policy drives the industrialization of livestock production systems. I was lucky enough to find myself at the ICCI conference presenting a paper we released just last week, which is available on-line here. Trouble is, I'm proporting to study something related to livestock production while knowing virtually nothing about how it's done. So yesterday, I spent the day on the farm of the co-founder of Niman Ranch, the sustainable meat company that sells to specialty outlets like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, and to restaurants around the country. No, this is not typical swine production- but it's fascinating nonetheless, especially as consolidation and corporate control of hog production force smaller, independent producers to seek out niche markets like Niman's. The niche market outlets are growing faster than the supply of this type of meat, so it's a potential source of income for ever more small- and mid-sized family farms. It's also, I've found out from my interviews, one of the great hopes for drawing young idealists into the aging farm sector.

When Niman Ranch began, this hog farm in Iowa was it; now, there are over 500 hog farmers participating. They conform to Animal Welfare Institute standards for animal care and housing, which explains the huts and pasture you see below. A far cry from the confinement operations that are beginning to encroach up the road from the Niman farm.

The first thing we did was climb in his tractor and go out to water the hogs, who were beginning to swelter in the near-100 degree heat. Here are some happy hogs in their new mud pit.



Momma sows and piglets stay together for much longer under this system than they do in confinement, and they seem to appreciate it.



Pigs are curious. You can't tell, but they're eating my pants in this one.



The sows stay in the field for most of the time, except when they're brought to pens for breeding. Here, they're getting fed with corn grown on the farm.



It's hot! Happy sows under the hose.



Finally, we wandered around a wetlands he's restoring with help from the federal government's WRP funding and a hefty supply of native seeds. He let me keep the printout of a list of native plant species he finds around the wetlands, and it's over two pages long. It includes these Black Eyed Susans below, which I remember from our garden when I was growing up.





Somehow, "inspiring" doesn't quite cut it. Another Iowa moment in need of language I just don't have.

iowa I

I think it’s safe to say that I was totally unprepared for Iowa. In a way, I guess that’s akin to saying that one was unprepared for the moon- it’s hard to know how to be prepared for something so unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I arrived Friday and drove straight to Ames for lunch with two wonderful friends, and spent the car ride up there trying not to hyperventilate. Perhaps it’s my mountain blood, but the flat landscape unnerved me in a way I hadn’t expected, made me gasp theatrically at every field of corn and soybeans I passed (and believe me, they really do go on forever, and fill every available space. Even the strips along the highway are that deep green or gold-topped hue). Like the dumbstruck east coaster I am, I stopped along the highway to take pictures.


I came for the conference of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a group that I can honestly say is the most energetic, passionate group of activists I’ve ever been around. (I know- I’m waxing hyperbolic. I think Iowa does that to you, though; once you’ve tried (and failed) to accurately describe how much corn there is, there’s just no way you can go back to words of a normal scale). Friday night started out with a dinner and speeches by a few long-term ICCI members who blew me away with their energy. In a complete 180 from the activist groups I’ve been part of in the past, I was by far the youngest person in the room, aside from a few kids whose parents brought them along, and a few of the younger ICCI staff. The group began 31 years ago working on redlining in Des Moines and has expanded to work on other urban issues like predatory lending, and on rural issues as well (helping communities keep out factory farms, resist eminent domain takeovers that benefit private developers, etc). In recent years, they’ve created a program focused on issues specific to Iowa’s growing Latino population. That means lots of work on labor conditions and labor rights, often in meatpacking and other assembly-line plants.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the group is how it’s clearly grown and transformed over the years to accommodate new but parallel issues (predatory lending work evolving into resisting exploitative livestock growers’ contracts, for example), and how the members have evolved as well. At a barbeque on Saturday night at the director’s house, he described it to me as the slow expansion of each members’ sense of what constitutes their community. People get involved because of something that’s happening in their town, maybe even next door, but they stay involved because they recognize the parallels between their own experience and the experiences of others. That awareness broadens their sense of community to include other towns fighting factory farms, and then urban residents being taken by banks, and then-- now-- immigrant laborers with whom they often don’t even share a common language. Even looking in from the outside, I sensed the power of the members’ understanding that universal structural inequities bound their individual experiences together. They act on that understanding collectively, too, which is one of the reasons they’re so effective. Lewis Lapham, the keynote speaker on Friday night, chose a great quote from William Sloane Coffin to describe this phenomenon: “To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.” ICCI, he said, was definitely loving. The democratic party was sentimental. Touché.