Matt Bormann feels used and abused as a model for stewardship by an ag establishment that does not want to invest in comprehensive conservation.
The St. Joe farmer, age 46, is a registered Republican. He is a former Kossuth County Farm Bureau president and was a voting delegate to the Iowa Farm Bureau for 14 years. He was appointed by Gov. Reynolds to the state soil and water commission.
“It disgusts me,” Bormann said.
All of it: the polluted surface water and lost soil, the duplicity of state officials, the chemical companies spinning yarns using him on the cover of their magazine as an agent of conservation improvement.
He’s been in the “strip-till Mafia” for decades, farming with his two brothers and his wife, Nancy. She holds a doctorate in soil science and is a former agronomy consultant for a confined swine feeding company. They were held up by the commodity groups as an example of the kind of culture that could be fostered under “voluntary nutrient reduction.” See? Here’s a guy with an Iowa State cap who’s doing it.
Eventually Matt realized that the president of the chemical company was making kajillions while the Bormanns make rent but didn’t get a red cent for posing. In fact, his brother pays rent to my wife as an absentee landlord from the farm where she grew up near LuVerne. Matt was not crazy about me because he had heard all the smack at the meetings. His views started to changed in conversations with my father-in-law, an eccentric and brilliant farmer who never toed the corporate line.
Bormann was furious when the chair of the state soil and water commission came back from a meeting with Ag Secretary Mike Naig and someone from the governor’s office who told them what the budget would be without the commission having any say.
“I got absolutely used and they did absolutely nothing,” he said. “This thing is rigged. You eat a free lunch for not doing anything.”
Water quality is getting worse. Soil is rolling down the river. Matt and Nancy would hold a field day for three farmers wanting their own free lunch and a van full of politicians and bureaucrats for pictures.
“I’ve been paraded around as the poster boy and I’m sick of it,” he said. “Every neighbor around is not strip tilling. They’re all doing what they’ve always done. So I ask: What are we doing?”
Matt says advocacy can’t be merely left to a bunch of aging hippies. He says he is in a peer group of about 25 farmers devoted to resilient and regenerative agriculture who need to be heard: You can farm for yield without fall fertilization, or without over-applying manure at the wrong time. You can reduce chemical costs and improve soil health with cover crops.
The incentives favor production and ample use of chemicals.
“Back in 1997 I was a conservative farm kid at Iowa State who wanted less government just like these guys. Now they’re defending the system. I’m still the same guy. What happened to them?
“Everybody’s frustrated,” he said. “They’re scared of the machine.”
He would love to give gubernatorial candidates an earful from a real producer with big red tractors who used to raise cattle until they nearly dragged him under. He knows first-hand the challenges of modern agriculture. They have ghosted him and his cohort so far. If Rob Sand indeed wants to learn more about surface water pollution, Bormann farms in the Des Moines River watershed that funnels toxic nitrate and phosphorous to Saylorville Reservoir. Bormann’s phone is not ringing off the hook. He isn’t waiting for a call from whichever Republican succeeds Gov. Reynolds.
If he were full of bunk he would not be growing seed corn for a major company. They know he and Nancy pay attention to detail and manage it. He is no outlier. Matt lives on Kenny Bormann’s place, next door to where his dad grew up on the Harold Bormann farm. Not all farmers buy into the cropaganda.
A lot of people clamoring for water quality should hear him out. We need nitrogen at the right time in the right place. Chemicals in moderation. Cover crops inhibit weed growth. If you are conserving soil and water, you are sequestering carbon. None of it is radical. Change is possible even in St. Joe when the right people get on board and the right incentives are in place.
Change we must. Our rivers are among the worst in America. People in Des Moines worry about tap water safety, pretty basic stuff of life. Eventually the politics catch up, and Matt Bormann would like to be independently on the right side of it.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. 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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HERE!!!!HERE!!!!
I want to say it was in the 70's sometime that a Big Ag Company ran an advertising campaign with a Farmer walking in pasture with the tag: "I'm not an environmental activist, I'm an active environmentalist" and went on to chat about the attributes of the newest thing in herbicides or laundry detergent, can't be sure which. But it resonated with me to think that they were in on it too, Farmers and Agriculture as a whole wanted to preserve the land, air and water for future generations. But it was a lie, a big, fat stinking lie.
The corporate side of all of this has been gutting the golden goose for decades, damn the results. They'll just engineer their way out of this crisis and leave the unfertile ashes in the wake.
That I hear more than a whisper of Farmers upset about being shanghaied on soil and water with even louder voices in the back starting to scream about the fact that they can't seem to sell the crops where they used to, or for what it costs to get them planted. Tariffs, storage fees and now the irony of a bumper crop but nowhere for it to go should start getting some attention from a State Auditor and a few people running for House and Senate seats.
Thanks Art!
I share his frustration! There needs to be buy-in from the general public who is also affected by these environmental decisions that farmers make. Farmers need to make a living.