An editorial: Drinking us dry
A meatpacking town can’t afford the water
April showers bring May flowers, but not enough to fill Storm Lake’s cup. Already the city is asking residents to conserve water with a dry spring, high demand and a system that has not kept pace. The lawn may be patchy but you should leave it be and pray for more rain.
We sit uncomfortably amid climate change. Storm Lake and Cherokee, which share the same pocket of the Dakota Aquifer underground, have been dry for several years. Go West, and the Great Plains have been parched for decades. Cattle herds have been liquidated from Nebraska to Texas. Iowa generally has been getting warmer and wetter. Here, at the eastern edge of the Plains, it just gets warmer.
Ethanol, livestock production and processing, and consumer demand overwhelm systems above ground and below as we witch for more water. We were able to neglect our systems and get away with it but the pinch of drought has made our deficiencies evident. We will pay for it in double-digit water rate increases far as the eye can see. Residential users will pay relatively more than industrial consumers for reasons that are fundamentally unfair and unsound.
We are not able to keep up with demand for water at a sustainable cost. We are offloading the costs of industry onto the backs of the residents of Storm Lake and Lakeside. First you must pay the higher rent for lack of building. Then you must pay far higher property taxes for declining services, and you are socked with exploding water/sewer rates so major conglomerates get subsidized gallons.
They put the farmer out of business, force him into town for a job, and then ask him to subsidize the company that helped to put him out of business. And, it would be appreciated if you did not drink the water unless you absolutely have to because it is May, the hogs and hens need it, and it looks like it will only get worse. We are being sacrificed for the sake of hogs.
You could spend $100 million and find yourself high and dry, the way things are going. Since you are just a working fool you must put up with it because this is how the business is laid down. There is no state or federal government to help. We are on our own, left to prop up a corporate system that drives a new round of farm bankruptcies while drinking us dry. At some point we will not be able to preserve our job base unless we curtail water consumption. Households of moderate means will not be able to afford the fees and taxes, and will look for somewhere else. Who then will pay for the water?
No China ag deal
After years of hectoring, President Trump proclaimed his friendship with President Xi of China last week, which is a good thing between irrational nuclear powers. Trump didn’t have much else to show for his trip to Beijing other than handshake photos with girls waving American flags. That is better than a war over Taiwan.
There is nothing new for our moribund agricultural trade. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant said ag is status quo. That is, China promises to buy soybeans and does so when it is good and ready.
Soybean markets plummeted as Trump boarded Air Force One for home.
China used to be the top market for Iowa soy and pork. It made other arrangements during the first Trump trade war in 2017, shifting its soy sourcing to South America. Brazil was all too eager to clear rain forests for grazing and row-crop production. Argentina filled in the gaps while the USA bailed out the authoritarian government so it can be exploited by China. The sum of it is that we lost those export markets until our beans get so cheap that they are preferable to Brazil’s, where China has an investment it intends to recoup.
Trump got nothing for farmers in the world’s largest market. He promises bailouts while Xi grins like the cat that ate the canary. Bailouts are too late for those going broke on his higher fuel and fertilizer costs born of the Iran war.
This empty trip should help us recognize that we are plundering Iowa by blindly chasing export markets. We have been convinced to grow too much corn by the seed and chemical complex. We have been led to believe that we can enrich ourselves by growing pork in Iowa for the Chinese while fouling and exhausting our waters. If the Chinese don’t want what we have to sell, perhaps we should do something different. Meantime, we should play nice so long as China controls things like rare earth minerals vital to computing and energy production. Apparently we need the minerals more than the Chinese need our soybeans.
Primary notes
Sen. Lynn Evans, R-Aurelia, is betting the farm that property rights animate Republican primary voters in the June 2 election. He has made opposition to carbon dioxide pipelines his central issue as he faces a challenge for his Senate seat, which covers Buena Vista and Cherokee counties, from Republican Cherokee County Supervisor Shane Bellefy.
“He fought for your land. They want him gone,” the Evans ad says.
The former school superintendent says he hears about the pipeline wherever he goes. It demonstrates how deeply this issue cuts in conservative Northwest Iowa, and that populism has roots. Evans once lost a House primary from his right and learned.
It is noteworthy that the pipeline issue is that powerful.
PRIMARIES ARE UNPREDICTABLE, especially the five-way Republican race for governor. One would think that Randy Feenstra is the favorite in the field with the most Establishment support (but no Trump endorsement). Little reliable polling information is available.
Adam Steen enjoys the endorsement of Family Leader and its leader, Bob Vander Plaats. Zach Lahn has a ton of money, talks populist and has weird ideas about Marxists in Iowa schools which should appeal widely to the base. Brad Sherman and Eddie Andrews are in the mix, potentially enough to force a nominating convention if nobody gets 35% of the primary vote. Anything can happen at a convention. Republicans should hope that they can settle it June 2.
Democrat Rob Sand already is running strong and will only get stronger from further division among Republicans. Trump has proven that his endorsement means everything. The president could weigh in and change the entire dynamic. He must think a convention is unlikely.
Hydrogen prospects
Iowa has a lot of hydrogen down below in the rocks, the geologists believe. The legislature passed laws governing drilling and natural resource rights as companies express interest in exploring. The question is whether there is enough to make it worthwhile to provide electricity and green fertilizer, among other things.
You don’t have to drill, baby. We can grow it.
Biomass can be grown (to replace those crop acres lost to export markets) and then heated to about 900 degrees in a process called pyrolosis. The resulting mass is biochar, a carbon product that is a good soil amendment. It sequesters carbon without a pipeline, unlike corn to ethanol.
The hydrogen gas can be combined with nitrogen to form ammonia, which would allow for the energy source to be transported. A transport and storage system already exists in the vast anhydrous ammonia network. If we had a decent farm bill, this sort of system would be supported to lessen our reliance on corn and soy. We are growing about 30% too much corn to make good money at it, and we are making a hash of the environment.
There are different ways to prosper in agriculture but the means often are limited by vested interests. We can power data centers in Iowa that have closed-loop water systems from solar, wind and biomass (like grass or other forages). Just a fraction we spend on bombs for the Persian Gulf could fund any needed research to ramp up pyrolosis-to-gas projects in Iowa. Or, if we saved a third of our anhydrous ammonia applications instead of wasting it to the air and water, that would pay for market development, too. The technology is there. It requires scale and, ultimately, acres. It would be better than drilling for it.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this editorial appeared. His latest book, Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World, is available from Ice Cube Press. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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As a water resources expert with 40+ yrs of professional experience, I was recently asked when the water supply situation would reach a crisis point justifying panic. My response: "about 40 yrs ago,"
I wasn't kidding.
The good news is that it's not intractable to ameliorate the situation, if we wish to get serious and make changes, including by treating water as precious resource that belongs to all of us, and not as a commodity to be controlled for profit by the relatively few, such as agribiz, including animal factories. Hardly novel, less water-intensive ag was the norm not so long ago.
It's a matter of will, not tractability.
If the will is not there, the outcome will be deserved.
I often wish I had not left Iowa in 1968, but for all of the unpleasantness associated with with life in Texas,I was forced to to learn some important lesson’s. The Degree that I obtained for pennies was not much value as to subject matter, but it was priceless in learning to observe how things worked and how to apply that to my life. The skill set for the first decade of my professional life soon proved inadequate. Things just degenerated from there. The need to produce revenue remained and increased. I was forced to go inside my reservoir of training, skills and knowledge. Change is never easy but better than the options. I made it through presidential administrations that created conditions that should have been unsurvivable , but I remember Methodist Sam preaching that an Iowan will try to farm Hell itself.
When I found out in 2022 that my sisters and I inherited the Quarter Section we grew up on, I started paying attention to Iowa again. I was dismayed that the way that my Grandparents and their contemporaries had farmed was largely abandoned. Replaced by ,”Buy bigger Tractors and dump more stuff on the land that they had to obtain off of the land , from Corporations. One does not need to be smarter than I am to know this is not a Future. We are seeking means to sustain ownership of our farm without destroying it. I resented having to move to Texas, but I did leave with a lesson that I would not have learned staying in Iowa. “If what you are doing doesn’t work, doing it on a larger scale digs the Hole deeper”. Stop digging and start thinking!