Marble Technologies of Lincoln, Neb., uses artificial intelligence to eliminate human labor (and error) in packaging for meatpacking plants, covering about 3% of the nation’s beef production in just three years. It is working on automation “from the ground up” — kill floor to the loading dock. It won’t be long.

The implications for Storm Lake, where thousands of knives are wielded by human hands daily, are enormous.

Gear can distinguish between a lamb chop and a pork chop. Cameras adjust equipment for product size and shape. Deployment is just starting. It will trim human jobs from deboning to packaging to clerical.

We are not ready for this.

No less than Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who helped uncork the genie, told The New York Times last week: “In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it’s getting, they’re very worried.”

Gates thinks highly of himself but not even he knows how to put it back in the bottle. He worries about biological weapons. AI hacking programs have escaped their labs. AI drones are being used to bomb Ukraine.

Gates suggested a tax, an admission that he is at a loss.

So you can’t blame our two candidates for governor for not having this figured out. Perhaps they should ask Claude. They mainly outline ideas about data centers, which 70% of the voters hate and nearly 100% use all day long. Democrat Rob Sand says data centers deserve no tax breaks, that they must not cause rate increases for other customers, and siting should be subject to public hearings with transparency. It’s moderate. Republican Zach Lahn says much the same, but he calls for a “temporary” moratorium on new data centers.

MidAmerican Energy reports that large energy consumers already must pay their own way. Iowa is 12th in the nation with 105 data centers (including Microsoft) but MidAmerican rates are 44% lower than the national average. Over half of the state’s electricity is generated from wind turbines. Electric rates are regulated by the Iowa Utilities Board, appointed by the governor. A little bit of socialism can be a good thing.

There will be more data centers. Regulate them. A moratorium is futile. Make them run exclusively on renewable energy without consuming water.

What about the rest of the whole AI schmear? Cashiers are being squeezed out by self-checkout, just like gas station attendants a generation ago. Gates was offended to learn in that AI writes better code than he can.

What will we do in Storm Lake and Denison without meat cutters? What about the schools? The livestock will be here on computerized feed but not the people.

It is not hypothetical.

AI is already being used for precision fertilizer and pesticide application by drone. It is being used to monitor livestock health. Hen houses are automated. You don’t need help until the conveyor breaks down. Iowa State offers a master’s degree in AI. The University of Iowa has its own initiative. Medicine is being transformed. Everyone is plugged in whether they want to be or not.

Gates got his epiphany in 2022 with an in-home demonstration. That’s how fast the industry is evolving. He is a year older than me. I don’t care to keep up at this point, until AI finds a cure for my next ailment. The president is 11 years older than me. He is not with it. Neither is Chuck Grassley. Few among the elder class can conceive how things will change.

The party line on the phone was still a thing when I was a kid. The fax machine came and went. Text me. It used to take a half-dozen typesetters to put out a community newspaper when I started — now there are none. You can absorb a few typesetters. How do you absorb thousands of people in a town like this who are not AI engineers or physicians? Presumably you will always need a plumber but not a human on the ham line. This is absent from our political conversation. We are just catching up to data centers, which have been in Des Moines for decades.

All the while rural areas empty out. No milkmaid in the parlor. Sand says that AI should not be used to deny health care or rip people off. Good as it goes. Lahn thinks AI should be regulated. Nice start. Now where do you take that?

What do you do with poor people without much education? Do you put them in a Musk spaceship and send them to colonize Mars? When employment declines, how do you re-educate workers for jobs that survive? Wells Fargo has cut more than 300 jobs in Des Moines this year. Des Moines and Cedar Rapids live on back-office clerical jobs that will vanish shortly in the finance industry.

It will take more than a tax and a prayer to coax the genie. We’re not ready for this.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column 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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.

Zach confides to Bobby that he likes Mepps spinners. Chartreuse.

Bobby goes uh huh.

So cool. Just two guys, doing what they do, fishing for a good time. It’s all over the socials. Trump’s main vaccine fighter, nephew of the former president, with the Republican candidate for governor. Zach says they are “good friends.”

You can almost hear them on the way to the farm pond at St. Mary’s:

“You need crawlers?”

“Nah. Got a dozen in my ear.”

Bobby was legal with a temp license. Puny little gills barely worth the effort in the heat. The catfish get oily and mushy in the warm water. Kinda like gnoshing on bear. Not bad eating if you smoke ’em.

Who knows what fat they chew waiting for a tug on the line?

“Have you heard about the new mRNA vaccine that can fend off melanoma cancer? Pretty scary. It puts you on the spectrum.”

Well they are doing all they can to block it. When you have 11 measles cases (and counting) in Iowa, centered around Clive, you know that the MAHA line is deep into the drink.

Lahn told the Hardin County GOP sweet corn feed that social studies in Iowa public schools take on a “Marxist bent” and he will not countenance it. “There is a battle being waged for these kids’ hearts and minds,” Lahn said. “We cannot cede ground. We have to be in there, to help put the right pieces in place.”

It’s a battle to keep them awake in social studies. An entire generation slept through it and let a fruit like RFK2 slip into the corridors of power.

If zany worked for him, it can work for Zach Lahn. He, too, thinks these vaccines like the one for Covid are suspicious.

Meanwhile, Zach Nunn campaigned for Congress with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the State Fair. They are men. Warriors. They wore aviator shades and did fist pumps. The real warriors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln were thinking about jumping off while those two clowns sniffed corn dogs. We are losing against a bunch of ayatollahs because Pete Hegseth had no idea what Trump was getting him into. That Zach Nunn would go near him shows how dim he is — to highlight a foreign policy disaster that is driving up fuel prices when many Iowans cannot afford the price of admission to the fair.

Why would Lahn want to hang with a bona fide freaky cat? Is it a real man-crush or is it just a way to lure in the MAHA matriarchy who think that garlic is the best prevention against cancer?

“RFK Jr.’s story is one that I have long admired,” Lahn gushed on X. He said RFK2 is acting in the family tradition. JFK launched the vaccine project that eradicated polio. That is the family tradition, not eating roadkill and forcing warped pseudoscience on school children.

Lahn runs a nice farm at Belle Plaine using conservation agriculture. He calls it regenerative. He says he will take on Big Ag, even though he made his mark with the Koch Brothers.

His opponent, Rob Sand, talked up ag with Tom Vilsack during State Fair week. A manure digester in every pot. We all could use one about now. Trump said he would get our fiscal house in order. The US debt hit $40 trillion with Republicans in control. In Iowa, the annual deficit is over $1 billion under Republican governance. Feed it into the manure digester — we will cut taxes and make you rich — and smell the methane come out the back end.

They wrap themselves in mildewed coattails.

Trump is underwater even in Iowa. Voters are restless and anxious. Ashley Hinson is trying to downplay her fealty to Trump in her Senate campaign. Lahn is in Kennedy’s full embrace. Nunn and Hegseth were partying down while ships are attacked in the Persian Gulf. The boys are gone fishing when there is work to be done.

Lahn revealed no qualms about the paid hecklers from Turning Point USA who tried to run off Sand from the fair. Lahn does not like the insinuation that he lives in Kansas, and says it is an affront to his family. Heckling must be in order.

This sort of stuff will not play well among independent voters filling up the truck. Who thought measles would make a comeback from Clive? It is time to get real, kids. Marxism is not a pressing issue in the classroom. Teachers are not commies. This guy is the Republican nominee who thinks that Bobby has all his lugs tightened. We’re going full oddball in chartreuse.

We need that manure digester ASAP. It’s piling up around us.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column 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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.

Henry Wallace was no Red, he liked the green too much.

Dad wore polished black wing tips and a blue suit 24/7. He went to the Elks Lodge every day and to Mass every Sunday. He did not spit on the sidewalk. He helped to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. He swore by the New Deal and JFK. He was a federal crop insurance agent.

I guess that made him a socialist by today’s standards.

FDR and Harry Hopkins of Sioux City, that notorious progressive hotbed, cooked up Social Security in the commie closet. Give Em Hell Harry Truman tried for universal health care in 1945. It got shot down as socialism but paved the way for LBJ to deliver Medicare and Medicaid. LBJ was a socialist from Texas who made a fortune.

Tom Harkin is for universal health care and breaking up consolidated power. He and the late Sen. Paul Wellstone were in the fight for the common good. FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace would fit right in with the Democratic Socialists of America. He founded Pioneer HiBred and its line of seed corn. He was an eminent capitalist. An Iowa Stater. He thought everyone deserves food.

It goes by way of saying that this is nothing new.

John Birchers were hyperventilating over communism infiltrating Iowa during the late 1950s and 1960s. They took over some school boards and ran Robert Dilley for governor against Harold Hughes in 1964. Iowans favored whiskey at the bar and a statewide system of community colleges. Dilley tallied nearly 8,000 votes, well behind Republican Evan Hultman.

Today, you could label Chris Jones a Democratic socialist in his run for secretary of agriculture against incumbent Republican Mike Naig. Jones attracts big crowds who hunger for change. Jones made clear to me that he has not declared himself among the Democratic Socialists of America. It is hard to imagine him hanging out with New York Mayor Mamdani.

“But I have been invoking the name of Paul Wellstone at my events and saying I’m from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, and using the ‘we all do better when we all do better’ rhetoric of Wellstone,” Jones said.

“When we all have medical care, we all do better.

“When we all have robust public education, we all do better.

“And when we all have clean water, we all do better,” he said.

Gimme more of that.

Rob Sand does not pander to lefties. We have not heard him cry out to the spirit of Wellstone. Sand is, as our reporter Tom Foley observed, a “radical centrist.” Sand says the two-party system locks out real debate. He is running as a change agent against the political system, not necessarily the corporate structure of things. Sand is campaigning for better health care access, public education and clean water. He is not criticizing corn ethanol or unbridled livestock confinements as Jones does. There are important distinctions but each demands change. Each does well by it.

Republican Congresswoman Ashley Hinson will claim that Democrat Josh Turek is too risky for Iowa in their race for US Senate. She is a Trumper, for his tariffs and endless war that undermine farm income and drive up costs. She says the problem is Washington — Hinson is Washington.

Voters are rejecting the status quo, as they did when they elected Trump in 2016. Now, Trump and Hinson represent the status quo. Turek is the alternative. AOC has not come calling. Turek is trying to hide any tie to senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York. Turek runs to the right of Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, she of Cargill patronage. It might be the right tone: not Trump and not a whacko. Turek is the underdog rolling uphill in a wheelchair. You naturally want to cheer him on, unless someone finds that he carries pictures of Chairman Mao around Council Bluffs.

Peggy Flanagan won a Senate nomination in Minnesota last week by saying that ICE needs to be ripped up and stitched back together right. She opposes shooting citizens dead for protesting. As a Native American, she urges a pathway to citizenship for immigrants. That’s just common sense.

Next door in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong went too far in calling for ICE and prisons to be abolished along with Thanksgiving. Democratic voters selected the progressive chief executive of Milwaukee over her to face a Trump election denier.

People want change that lets them afford seeing the doctor. Iowans want clean water — over 80% in the polls. This state is worried sick over climbing cancer rates. Rural communities are desperate to protect their schools. To the extent that Sand, Turek and Jones represent change, voters will respond.

Labels are smokescreens designed by the propaganda machine to fool us. No commies are on the ballot. They’re plain old Democrats like my dad. He fought for freedom.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column 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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.

Fortunately, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., led a charge to delay implementation of a rule that would force states to help pay for food stamps. It was another attempt to chip at the foundations of the nutrition safety net, which took a big funding cut in the Trump tax bill. They will attack school food programs, force bureaucratic red tape on poor parents just trying to make it, and try to pass the bill along to backwards states like Iowa where it gets plundered like they did with Medicaid.

Farmers were well cared for in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. Crop insurance subsidies are protected. Ag disaster funding will be available for the ag disasters the Trump Administration creates. The farm bill is a shell of what it should be. If it is held up in defense of nutrition programs, let it dangle. The Republicans could get a farm bill done if they would let up on their mission to trample struggling working families.

Into the breach jumped Josh Turek, Democratic candidate for Senate, saying that the farm bill deserved to move forward. He was trying to sound like he is above politics. Instead, he sounded like he was okay with the steady assault on food security in the United States, and particularly in rural areas. He calls himself a prairie populist. George McGovern and Paul Wellstone were prairie populists, and they would stand with Sen. Klobuchar.

Rep. Ashley Hinson, Turek’s Republican opponent for the Senate, is a big part of the reason that the farm bill is three years late. The House wasted that time trying to bury food assistance programs against Democratic opposition.

Thune said that the senate would give the farm bill another try in September. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, does not expect a farm bill before the November election. He expects a compromise before Christmas. It may not matter anymore. Food and production agriculture were divorced in the Trump tax bill, where the spending parameters were set. The farm bill is not so important anymore. But when production agriculture needs support for crop insurance, urban politicians may not be there for them. The coalition that was forged by McGovern and the late Sen. Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, is shattered. It will take a long time to put it back together again.

No hiding the truth

The farm bill isn’t the only thing hung up in Trump’s Washington. An assessment of the toxicity of nitrate by the Environmental Protection Agency is stalled, if not dead. The assessment would have allowed the EPA to issue new guidelines on safe amounts of consumption of nitrate.

Food and Water Watch, an advocacy group, sued for records to illuminate why the assessment is being scuttled. The review was cancelled during the first Trump term, reinstated by the Biden Administration, and again held up in the second Trump term. The office charged with the research is being eliminated. The EPA last updated drinking water standards in 1991. Since then, science reveals that nitrate thresholds are about three times higher than they should be.

Polluted water is the top issue in Iowa this fall, followed closely by cancer. Both Zach Lahn, Republican candidate for governor, and Chris Jones, Democratic candidate for secretary of agriculture, concur on this and their polling backs it up. Iowans are making the connection between polluted air and water and their own personal health. Young people are afraid to have families for the health threats, and often are forced to leave the state for someplace healthier.

Jones was run off as a water scientist employed by the state. People thought he was some sort of heretic when he questioned how sacred corn ethanol is, when we are poisoning ourselves growing corn or complementary nitrogen-fixing soybeans on every last acre. Now they are waking up to the reality that everyone around them has cancer or Parkinson’s and nobody knows why. Could it be nitrate in the water? The EPA is not saying, and Iowa is barely even looking at the issue. The state took away funding for water quality monitoring when nitrate levels kept creeping up. Jones used to be in charge of it.

No data, no pain in the kiester, no problem.

What you don’t know might kill you.

Iowans do know that something is terribly wrong, and that is why Chris Jones, according to his own poll, is in a statistical dead heat with incumbent Republican Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig, former pitchman for Monsanto.

“This poll is more evidence for what we’ve been seeing on the campaign since January. Iowans are fed up with the status quo and ready for change. And that our message prioritizing clean water and diversifying our agricultural system is resonating with Democrats, Republicans and Independents across the state,” Jones said.

The EPA can’t hide the science. Iowa’s leading university researchers are telling us that nitrate is associated with various maladies, as are other common chemicals used extensively in agriculture. Airborne particles from crop and livestock production contribute to Iowa’s stunning growth in lung cancer since 1960, especially among women, and in the highest child asthma rates in the country. The epidemiology is all there, but the regulators don’t dare look.

If Jones gets elected, someone will bark relentlessly in the Iowa Capitol every day about pollution and cancer. Those beholden to the chemical companies will have to listen to him until their heads hurt. At least we could take some comfort in the affliction of toadies for conglomerates that would just as soon drink Storm Lake dry, nitrate and all.

A fiscal noose

Beware a constitutional amendment on the ballot this November that would require a two-thirds super-majority of the legislature to increase the individual or corporate income tax. It will force higher property taxes, sales taxes and fees (like fishing licenses) so the wealthy can run largely tax-free.

Iowa has been slashing income taxes and raising sales and property taxes for decades. The result is the poorest performing economy in the Midwest, and nearly the worst in the USA. Rich people are not flocking to Iowa, either.

Flattening the income tax at 3% plus frivolous spending on private school vouchers will result in a structural deficit of about $1 billion for as far as you can see — unless we continue to increase sales and property taxes, which fall hardest on the backs of working families. It would be foolish to make it almost impossible to increase the income tax. We will need to address that deficit within the next three years as state savings accounts are spent. An adjustment to income taxes may be necessary. Property taxes are already zooming out of sight.

Iowans for Tax Relief claims a survey showing over 70% support for the amendment.

Schools are cutting budgets. Highways 4 and 7 are in terrible shape, and are representative. Young people continue to flee the state because they can’t fetch enough income to tax.

We should not put the state in a fiscal straitjacket. Iowa probably will need the money sooner rather than later. The corporate class is trying to lock in its tax cuts with this constitutional amendment before the tab arrives at the table for the wanton spending of the Republican legislature. They hope to hoodwink the public — everybody wants a tax cut. The rich get the cuts while the working stiffs pay for the schools and roads, and for the deficits that these wastrels in the legislature are racking up.

Vote NO on the constitutional amendment. Do not put a fiscal noose around the neck of Joe Sixpack.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where these editorials 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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.

Josh Turek

Those who wish me silent six feet under may be disappointed to hear that my blood test came back last week looking pretty good.

Nine months following cancer surgery at the Mayo Clinic my prostate is carved by cryotherapy (freezing of the tumor) but apparently clean. Medicare allowed me to go to Rochester. Our newspaper’s health insurance plan confines you to regional providers offering fewer solutions. Medicare is one of the few benefits of growing old.

You can choose your own doctor! Mayo seems happy to have me. You don’t have to ask permission from the insurance company to get quality care. You can choose the University of Iowa or go to Omaha.

A not-so-secret dirty secret: Health insurance companies turn a profit by denying care. A nurse on the phone from Timbuktu is getting between you and your doctor so the insurance company can justify itself.

Call me a socialist or a communist. It is a relief to be unshackled from corporate health insurance. I’ve never understood why it should be the responsibility of businesses to provide for health care. We are editors, not health insurance administrators. We should divert the money we’re already spending to Medicare for All.

It will make health care better in Storm Lake, Sioux City and Des Moines. We can see that Iowa is spending more money on privately managed Medicaid than it did when the state administered the program. Rural health care has suffered terribly.

The procedure performed on me at Mayo is not available in Sac City or Sioux City. It is cheaper than conventional cancer treatments, it is effective, and it is done on an out-patient basis during one procedure. Medicare pays for it.

We can afford it. We’re already paying princely sums in premiums. Our out-of-pocket on a corporate plan is $5,000. The co-pays are frightful. Medicare and Medicaid do not reimburse providers at their cost; private-pay patients subsidize government pay. Incorporating younger, healthier patients into the Medicare system can float the boat — you cut out the profit factor. Our tax dollars would be better spent at the University of Iowa Hospital than bombing Iran.

The current system protects mediocrity by limiting competition through insurance contracts. Sick people are a captive market. Denying care is a moral stain. We should plumb our conservative souls and arrive at a more pragmatic solution.

Zach Lahn, the Republican candidate for governor, says he thinks private enterprise can do a better job at health insurance. We have a fundamental disagreement. I wish him well on the farm at Belle Plaine and trust he can swing the premium on a Farm Bureau policy since he can afford to self-finance his campaign.

Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate, would offer a start by undoing the privatization of Medicaid. We need to restore federal funding for Medicaid. That would help to protect rural health providers.

The real answer is beyond Des Moines. Democrat Josh Turek has to force Republican Ashley Hinson into a full debate over single-payer health care in their race for the US Senate. If anyone has actual street credibility on this issue, it is Turek in a wheel chair. Hinson claims she would take care of veterans. What about their sons?

It’s hard for most of us to imagine what a victim of Agent Orange goes through. Turek had 21 surgeries by age 12 from spina bifida. Turek managed to rise above it, win a Paralympics gold medal, and shoot hoops with Barack Obama.

A rectal exam is almost too much for me to endure. Navigating health care decisions is frightening enough without worrying whether the tin cup at the convenience store is getting any donations.

Sand is smart to put strengthening Medicaid at the top of his agenda. Turek should go all in on Medicare for All. He says he would “introduce a public option.” That’s a weak cup of tea. We have waited on a “public option” for 20 years. Medicare for All is a winning issue. Ask any senior citizen — they love Social Security and Medicare. The health system so strained the Turek family that they had to get their clothes from Goodwill. Is that how we take care of veterans and their families?

It isn’t good enough. If Turek intends to win, he should get on board with Sand and create a campaign to get every Iowan Medicare. At least Turek would attempt to restore funding for Medicaid, which could save a lot of rural hospitals and clinics. Medicare for All would give everyone options like I get at age 69. Why make people wait?

Those who wish me dead for appreciating socialized medicine should note I also gave up cigarettes. We will keep haranguing until we run out of breath: The corporate insurance system is a cancer on the body politic. Cure it.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column 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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.

Which caused a young local woman to declare into a cellphone what most Iowans were thinking when they voted for Donald Trump, Steve King and Kim Reynolds: Why can’t those people just go back where they came from?

Well, for one thing because a lot of them hold down jobs at the livestock company owned by the young woman’s family.

The manure hit the fan on social media. People jumped down her throat for repeating what she hears around Northwest Iowa every single day. It impacted business. Her family had to explain it to the help, who really have no choice but to stay put and lie low. It doesn’t need much explaining to Latinos that Anglos resent them — even though you wouldn’t have sausage for your meat truck without them.

She is barely out of high school. Her brain isn’t fully formed. Cut her some slack. That was essentially the message from Latinas on Facebook who urged reconciliation and forgiveness.

Let those who are not hypocrites cast the first stone.

False narratives are planted deep, but so is redemption in this black soil.

The accident was tragic. She felt a need to blurt something out, since all our feelings are worthy of Snapchat. Prudence dictates that you just don’t trade in that sort of talk in Storm Lake, which is majority Latino. For sure, not if you want to sell some chorizo from your mobile meat store.

The allure of social media and its ready access — just post it — is too much for simple country folk who do not think things through (like being cognizant of who is tending the sows). The blowback was such that her Facebook site and business site were wiped clean.

In the good old days meat vendors stuck to ribs and kept their opinions in the bar. Just because social media is there does not mean you are compelled to display how narrow your perspective is. No law demands that you respond to a post that does not agree with you.

The young woman wears a cross, which is essentially about forgiveness. You would like to think she knows not what she is saying. These days you can’t leave it at that. A storm must ensue.

Donald Trump won Iowa by wide margins by bashing immigrants. Steve King made a career of it. Things have been deteriorating in rural Iowa, and if you are the governor you blame somebody who doesn’t belong here because they don’t look like you.

The young woman is parroting them.

The fact is, Tyson can’t operate without immigrant help. Our entire food system is built on the backs of immigrant labor. Her own family depends on them.

She has been led to believe that they are the source of her pain. She feeds on social media. It is refracted back to her in every dusty stop of her truck. Life was better when we were all White. Who are those people steeped in dung with the hogs? Must they be there?

So many people feel just like she does.

She went to school in Storm Lake, so she should know the score. Still, people believe that Mexicans or Salvadorans are the problem, and not people with blonde hair. The blonde’s people came the proper way, no doubt, while immigrating to what was the territory of the Ioway and Dakota people. Our forebears took them out to make room for us, and apparently us alone. The journey is justified by faith. Progress is a gestation crate in a nursery tended by someone of a lower strata who can be returned to sender when not needed.

She is each of us blurting and bleating into a record of our ignorance, so don’t be too rough on her. She could be made into a red-cap hero but that is not the posture the family has taken. They are trying to show some humility that meets the embrace of the Latinas.

She didn’t kill anyone. She dealt a blow to the family enterprise by getting suckered in by the phony immigration debate. The people who pull the strings need Storm Lake to be split and confused so they can go on, unnoticed. High food prices? Must be the stoop labor. Can’t make rent? Too many illegals. Diesel at $5? Send back the Haitians. Can’t afford health care? Must be the Latina nursing aides driving up costs.

She will get through the storm. Have mercy on her and the driver with a man’s death on his mind and no resolution yet. Forgiveness is the way, the Latinas remind us. Thank God they are here.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column 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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.

Rob Sand in Storm Lake. Times Pilot Photo by Tom Foley

Rob Sand spent a lot more time talking open primaries and ranked-choice voting than he did water pollution or cancer during a packed town hall event in Storm Lake last week.

Who needs political parties? They’re just “private clubs” that keep the game dirty. Can’t we all just get along?

The crowd at Smokin’ Hereford ate it up. They’re hungry for some unity. They hate the acrimony. Love one another, the Norwegian Lutheran fisherman from Decorah implored. Applause. Who doesn’t love neighborly?

It seems to be working. Over 100 people in Sioux Center showed up. Seventy in Sanborn. This is the belly of the beast for a Democrat. But he is not so much a Democrat, Sand insists. You can’t sell that woke stuff in Sanborn. He wishes he could be independent. The two parties are no good, in his telling. They divide us.

Were it not for the Democratic Party, we would not have Social Security and Medicare. The Republicans have been trying to undo them for generations. Were it not for the Republican Party, we might still hold humans in slavery.

Political parties matter. They exist to joust in the battle of ideas, and to elect candidates. Iowa’s system works, if not to the satisfaction of minority Democrats.

Storm Lake is green with algae. Northwest Iowa is hot with cancer — hotter than anywhere. We got hogs and chickens up the wazoo but barely a drop to drink unless you, poor yeoman, pay through the nose. We hate to talk about it, but there is something in the air, and it does not smell like money.

Sen. Catelin Drey, who flipped a Trump district in Sioux City, says water, cancer and housing affordability are what she hears about. Her seat was vacated by a guy named Rocky De Witt who died from cancer. Drey, 38, was treated successfully for uterine cancer. The coincidence should be lost on no one.

Sand dwelled on unity at Sioux Center in his 100 Town Hall tour. Teacher Brock Lehman, a Republican and a cancer survivor, said he wished more people would get informed. Lehman told the Sioux County Radio reporter that he wished that Sand talked about cancer more.

“After what I’ve had to go through — the fear and the medical bills and all that stuff — what are we going to do to fix it?” Lehman said. “That’s one thing that I wish we had more time on, that he could have addressed more … That’s a conversation my wife and I have had. Is it safe to have our kids here? … Why is it that I have to buy a reverse osmosis water system? … Is that right for a human being?”

Sand has suggested investing $20 million into cancer research. He supports levying a fractional sales tax for water quality and natural resource conservation, as approved by voters in a Constitutional amendment in 2010. The legislature ignored the amendment. Sand wants more payments to farmers for conservation. He wants to reinstate funding for stream monitors. He endorses radon mitigation, and says we should not smoke and drink so much. Standard fare from a Democrat who announced another $9 million raised from just friends.

No socialism here, folks.

Sand does not talk about regulation. You don’t hear him preach mandatory stream buffers like they have just over the border from Decorah in Minnesota. We have so many hogs we lost track of how many. Sand’s opponent, Zach Lahn, says he aims to break up the corporate livestock consolidators. (Lahn also wants to exorcize Marxists from our public schools, so there’s that!)

Sand blanches at putting a blemish on corporate ag because it feeds him. You don’t go up against the Farm Bureau. Lahn, by the way, made his fortune (enough to fund his own campaign) working for the Koch Brothers fertilizer and politics empire.

Sand has come a long way. A year ago he did not want to discuss ag pollution. It has made its way into his stump speech. That’s progress. Still, he leads with trashing the two-party system. He says it is the issue of our time. Polls say he may have a lead of nine percentage points, so he obviously knows what he is doing.

Others must be misinformed if they think that a warming climate, toxic water and corporate consolidation are the real issues confronting Iowa in 2026. Creating open primaries does not cure the fact that we will have a hard time growing corn south of I-80 in 25 years because of too many 90-degree days in July. People don’t like to think about that.

You must take it on faith that Sand will put it at the top of his agenda. His mother would want him to. Lutherans want to be good stewards. That’s what Sand is selling. So far, people are buying it.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column 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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.

It has long been known that the Iowa Department of Natural Resources lost track of how many hog confinements filing manure management plans exist. The state coordinator job was eliminated. We rely on EWG, which used satellite imagery to count the number of confinements. You may or may not agree with its agenda (it promotes environmental stewardship) but it is a credible messenger that gave us the widely accessed farm subsidy database.

EWG estimates that those hogs produced 107 million tons of manure — 33 tons for every Iowan. The heaviest concentrations are in Northwest Iowa around meatpacking complexes. Of course we catch a whiff in Buena Vista County.

That is a lot more manure than we produced when family farms raised hogs as “the mortgage lifters.” As a result, we have a lot more phosphorous toxic blue-green algae in Saylorville Reservoir, from which Des Moines draws its drinking water. Iowa’s lakes and rivers reek with fertilizer excess. Our air is polluted with tiny particles of feces that give children respiratory illness.

This was not true 50 years ago. The Raccoon River was not polluted with unsafe levels of nitrate. Workers in the packing house earned decent union wages. Hog farmers could afford to pay tuition at Iowa State.

Consolidation is polluting Iowa and making it poorer.

Hogs owned by large integrators can help younger farmers get a start. They reduce risk for the farm operator. Income is steady and guaranteed by contract. The flipside is that we have almost no independent pork production. We have half the number of farms and schools. Storm Lake is bigger and far more diverse but the little towns are falling down. Iowa’s rising cancer rate should scare you.

The trend continues unabated. EWG found that the number of Iowa hogs in confinement rose 13% from 2019 to 2025. During that same period, Storm Lake found that a $100 million expansion in its water treatment capacity is necessary. Much of the cost gets thrown onto residents of The City Beautiful while most of the consumption is from meatpacking. The Dakota Aquifer cannot stand all this success.

This latest report confirms the obvious, when you look at the world from Storm Lake, Iowa. We produce more corn, soy and pork from fewer farms generating less wealth in rural Iowa. We are left with pollution, higher municipal water rates, and weaker communities where young families cannot earn a fair living. The speed of the degradation is shocking.

Iowa could have a more diverse, healthier rural economy if we demanded clean air and water. We have ceded our stake to agri-industrial interests that plunder us. This is supposed to be a government of and for the people, who are dying or dispersing from the place we love. We could change the trajectory if we choose to. Likely voters say cancer and water quality are urgent priorities. We shall see if they believe it when the midterm elections roll around in November.

TO THROW ANOTHER LOG on the fire: Net farm income dropped in half from 2022 to 2024, according to a study by the Iowa Farm Bureau and Iowa State University, and things are not getting better. There could be a downturn lasting another six years. The findings in Iowa echo national projections of depressed net farm income going forward.

Input costs are rising but corn and soy prices to farmers are listing sideways. About 20% of Iowa farms are considered vulnerable.

Just a few huge players control the nitrogen market. Three or four seed/chemical companies control what is available. Three or four meatpackers dominate pork, beef and poultry, and routinely are making settlements over wage and price fixing. The profits flow right past Iowa. It’s all about the consolidation. We have anti-trust laws but politicians are all hat and no cattle. They’re on the payroll of the consolidators. You pay a price-fixing settlement to fool people into thinking that the system is not rigged, and then you may return to fixing prices and wages.

Iowa loses farmers and fosters cancer because of consolidation forced by a tight group of agribusinesses that do just fine. It is not a conspiracy theory, the price-fixing settlements testify that the scheme is very real. We are slaves to that system although we are loathe to admit it. We prefer to dignify ourselves fancifully as free decision makers.

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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.

George Foerstner

Imagine 1,500 foreigners showing up in rural Iowa who can’t speak English, are pacifists, refuse to take loyalty oaths, live communally with no pay, and shun social convention.

Arrest them! Then deport them! That’s what you do these days.

Fortunately for coffee drinkers and defrosters, Iowa was not such a backwards place in the long yonder past. A sect of radical Christians who rejected dogma got run out of France and then Germany, bought freedom by purchasing land from the Seneca people near Buffalo, and eventually got elbowed out of New York for their unorthodox ways.

They came to Iowa in 1855 and set up the Amana Colonies where nobody would bother them. The outcasts gave us home-style cooking, quaint trades shops and the microwave oven. Were it not for the Community of True Inspiration (Radical Pietists and theological cousins to the Baptists and E-Free denominations), we would not have had George Foerstner, whose parents were among those pioneers. George grew up in the shop tinkering. Recognizing that the end of Prohibition would create demand for cold beer, he made a fridge. He started Amana Refrigeration, and in 1967 introduced the Radar Range counter-top microwave.

Then there was Fred Maytag, anchor baby among 10 born to German immigrants Amelia and Daniel Maytag, who built washers and dryers that never broke down. Maytag built Newton. Later generations peed it away.

Anchor baby John Vincent Atanasoff was born to Bulgarian immigrants. He earned his undergraduate degree at Iowa State in Ames, and returned with his PhD to teach and invent the computer. Of course we let him and the computer get away from us but we at least have bragging rights.

Our politicians — lookin’ straight atcha, Ashley Hinson — boast about how tough they are on immigration. Just last week Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee was moaning and groaning about birthright tourists who keep dropping babies as citizens. She easily got Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to pledge that he would use every legal tactic to prevent babies from being born here to riffraff like the Foerstners who might otherwise save dying rural communities.

To emphasize the point, federal agents shot dead a young father in Maine who was living here legally but looked Latino. They also took out a 52-year-old construction worker in Houston by shooting through the passenger window of a vehicle. They claimed these legal residents were a threat to public safety.

So was Atanasoff, because if it weren’t for him they wouldn’t be trying to build a data center in the middle of nowhere that you don’t like. Pretty soon you will have Bulgarian electrical engineers living in your neighborhood. It’s all downhill from there. They compute all day long and do Bulgarian dances at night.

An enclave of Prussian draft dodgers started farming around St. Ansgar. Danes who laid in around Newell and Elk Horn founded Grand View College in Des Moines so Danish Lutherans would have a way to propagate their subversion. Protestant reformers who got broomed out of Holland ended up with Mexicans in the milking parlor at Sioux County — Catholics have spread into Orange City.

This is what makes Iowa great: the Germans, Lao, Czechs, Sudanese, Swedes, Danes and Dutch, and even the Irish from Fort Dodge. Fisher Controls in Marshalltown was founded by an immigrant from England. If you haven’t had a burrito in Storm Lake you have not lived.

We’re telling the refugees from Haiti that they must go back. We’re attempting to deport Afghanis who fought for us. Omaha is their sanctuary. If you protest it, you could get shot in the street. If you run away from a man with a gun wearing a mask, you are a terror on society. If you are Brown, you could end up in a detention camp by tonight without a hearing — even if you have papers.

From Houston to LA to Maine to Minneapolis.

As the protests grow, immigration czar Tom Homan called for a respite from traffic stops where ICE tries to ram unsuspecting Latinos who are on their way to work or to pick up their kids. Trump caught wind of weakness and was furious. Traffic stops will continue. So will the shootings.

This is not the sort of place that embraces refugees, where you give Afghanis the bum’s rush. We don’t want to foster a Foerstner anymore.

My ancestors were undesirables. They slipped in during Ireland’s potato famine as indentured servants and as mercenaries hired to kill indigenous people near Dubuque. Maybe they were legal, maybe not. The Community of True Inspiration paid cash and got in. George Foerstner died in 2000, with 3,000 people employed at the time by Amana Appliances across the street from where he lived. Lucky us, in 60 seconds your tea is hot or your damp cigarette is dried out.

Somebody in Storm Lake or Columbus Junction who wants off that kill floor has similar ambitions if we don’t shoot them first.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column 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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.

Gas jumped and stocks slumped when Trump said that the cease-fire was over, and that the Iranians are “scum” and “kuckoo” after they attacked commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Even if you were able to dodge a 50% hike in fertilizer prices this year by booking early, the enduring war and failed negotiations ensure a troublesome 2027 for farmers and agribusiness. Trump just asked Congress for an additional $11 billion for farm disaster payments on top of the $12 billion in disaster checks already cashed. More perks should be tucked in before the November elections.

That might not be enough to get Ashley Hinson of Marion over the hump in her bid to defend a Republican-held senate seat from Democrat Josh Turek of Council Bluffs.

Net farm income is expected to decline slightly this year nationally. It won’t get any easier as a third of the world’s fertilizer ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump last week laid out at least $500 million to seed new domestic ammonia production (made from natural gas). Nitrogen, critical for corn, is bound to get pricier for fall bookings.

This bombing is bad timing.

Not that farmers would vote Democrat or that the farm bloc is a sizable consideration anymore, even in Iowa. Prosperity in rural Iowa still springs from the land. Agriculture and food production drive the Fourth Congressional District, the most conservative part of the state where Hinson is not that well-known and where enthusiasm is ebbing. She needs Sioux County to turn out.

Trump doubling down on war does not look good from Sioux Center or Orange City, already hurting from the loss of soy and pork export sales. Farmers may be forced to cut back on their inputs. Yields suffer. It depresses the psyche in Cherokee, which could tamp down the GOP vote.

Hinson can try to run and hide, but heretofore she always has been eager to accept Trump’s embrace. She was disappointed the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship (guard the help in the dairy barn). She is a solid Trumper. So is Zach Lahn, full MAHA and MAGA and what-have-you running for governor. He made his money from the Koch Kingdom, which is having a heyday running up these fertilizer prices.

Hinson blames Washington for the affordability rut. She should look in the mirror of the Congressional Republican cloakroom. Tariffs lead to trade wars with our best friends, including Canada where we get most of our potash. Shooting wars don’t end with zealots who refuse to relent. Medicaid cuts that Hinson supported are closing rural health clinics in Iowa. How are you supposed to keep the young folk home when you can’t deliver a baby in the county seat anymore?

Health care is urgent with voters. They were not so concerned with Iran’s ability to bomb Omaha. People who voted for Trump thought they were voting against forever wars. Now they can’t get in to see a doctor who fell victim to Elon Musk’s chain saw. Hinson was all in on that circus, which saw the bird flu workers get laid off. Farmers are having a hard time finding help to sign up for those programs because the USDA office staff is not in.

We better get all the money we can before November, because nobody will care about Iowa next year with a war raging and NPK prices rising. The disaster payments and year-round E15 fuel might buy enough votes for Hinson. They will not cover the lingering higher costs engendered by Trump & Co.

Zach Lahn will be challenged to defend it all. Why is Iowa’s economy tanked? Why are we cutting funding through the National Institutes of Health to the University of Iowa when we have the worst cancer problem in America? Democrat Rob Sand will ask that of Lahn if he can ever find him. Why are we bombing Iran when we can’t keep the clinic open at Ottumwa? What about Iowa first, for once? And why can’t a kid read Huck Finn in school anymore? Please explain why we foster ignorance.

War with seedy-looking men in robes seemed like a good, unifying distraction from the pedophile class at the time. Until we found out we can’t drop enough bombs to make the kuckoo birds quit clucking. Now we continue to endure chants of “Death To America!” except that diesel prices are on a roller coaster bound for outer space.

Fortunately for the powers that be, Iowa is inclined against an upset. Trump has all our voter files now. Sand and Turek may hold slim leads that could vanish. The bumbler-in-chief is doing all he can in the Persian tar pits to hand them indisputable victories.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column 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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.

Chris Jones and his boss at the water works used to ask as they gathered daily to discuss the roiling river’s polluted water: “Where’s the outrage?”

Iowans are freaking out over our leading cancer rates, chemical companies are held harmless by the Supreme Court, and it turns out Trump fleeced the world for $2 billion in just a year.

“The outrage has arrived!” Jones declared at the Iowa Democratic Convention. The delegates went nuts.

Nuts for a secretary of ag candidate, mind you.

The outrage is why. It is why so-called Democratic socialists are winning primaries. They want affordable heath care. They can’t make rent and Trump is hauling in $2 billion. Mainly from crypto-currency and a coin of himself that people actually pay for.

What could possibly make this geezer worth $2 billion per year? Not even LeBron rolling home to Cleveland is worth that.

The CEO of Principal Financial Group makes $13.8 million. The boss at John Deere makes about twice that. Greg Abel, who runs Berkshire Hathaway and MidAmerican Energy from Des Moines, earns about $25 million annually. Tyson CEO Donnie King brings down $37 million. These are all complicated companies. Jamie Dimon of Chase Bank is paid $48 million to help orchestrate the world economy.

Trump gets $2 billion for trading in confederate money. Pixie dust. Crypto makes trading in pork belly futures look like honest work. You set up a shell company, sheiks who have more money than sense pour $600 million into it, and you are off to the races.

Legal pilfery. That’s what a friend who worked in financial markets calls it. That sort of money could talk you into a war.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Younger people are fed up with it, from New York to Colorado to Iowa. Call them what you will. They are tired of living in the basement. They can’t afford to farm. They are afraid to drink the water. Our legacy is washing downriver.

Chris Jones gives it voice. The degraded quality of life brought on by industrialized agriculture “is the issue of our time,” Jones said.

He speaks essentially to the plunder of Iowa, seeded by greed, as the family farm went the way of the rural village and trust.

People who are struggling to survive see Trump getting fat on their account can only shrug, bound up in a system they believe is rigged by the uber rich. Elon Musk is made a trillionaire by going public with a space company that is losing boatloads of money. Trump is raking it in on a promise to pay for a hamburger next Tuesday.

We are left with a river full of manure.

That’s why Chris Jones draws a crowd. “I never speak to an empty seat,” he said.

The governor candidates notice. Republican Zach Lahn built a primary campaign against corporate power. Democrat Rob Sand is talking a lot more about cancer and water. Sand’s TV ad on accountability is solid and earnest, and the attack ads don’t seem to be landing. People want to believe they hear a straight shooter.

Still, Trump scores around 45% approval among Iowans.

The Supreme Court ordered him to pay E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexually assaulting her, and people think ho-hum, that is chump change in the shell game we’re playing. Our state attorney general thinks he is swell. So do our legislators.

Not everyone. Sand may have a slight lead on Lahn, who sees Marxism in the schools with his crazy glasses attached to the tinfoil hat.

Catelin Drey flipped a Trump state senate district to blue by calling out the attacks on working families: schools, health care and child care. Women bear the brunt. She is leading the way. Democrats have nearly swept special elections like hers, leading up to the midterms across the country.

Iowa is at the center of it all. Trump has at least $500 million ready to dump on a half-dozen Senate races, including the one between Democrat Josh Turek of Council Bluffs and Republican Ashley Hinson of Marion. They’re in a dead heat. How can Hinson fire up her base when the standard bearer is picking their pockets so he can pay off rape and fraud judgements?

Jones channels the outrage for Sand and Turek. He is able to identify the issue.

“I’m telling you, I have been in politics for 50 years in Iowa and I have never seen anything like it,” said retired Sen. Tom Harkin, who stumped for Jones and believes he may be setting the tone for other Democrats.

Young people who never knew we had a state ag secretary are paying attention, Harkin notes. It’s because Jones is confronting a system driven by greed and led by a convicted fraudster. Trump told them he would drain the swamp, but he emerged with $2 billion in a year. Things need to change. We should all be filthy rich but we’re just filthy, and we know it. Enough with getting played.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column 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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.

Instead, the 65-year-old found himself disembarking at Philadelphia for the NetRoots conference on his way to a goal of raising $1 million in his uphill Iowa Secretary of Agriculture campaign against Republican incumbent Mike Naig.

“I might be the dog catching the bumper,” said Jones, who was run off from state employment as a water researcher because he kept finding that the water is polluted by agri-industry.

Jones could win. It’s a long shot, considering he is running against a former Monsanto lobbyist who farms near Cylinder, a Republican incumbent in a state that hates change.

Jones jumped off the airplane two days after a primary election that saw Zach Lahn claim the Republican nomination for governor. Lahn campaigned as a “regenerative” farmer from Belle Plaine worried about the connections between agri-industry and cancer. He says that Big Ag is stealing our family farm legacy and rotting rural communities. It is as if Lahn and Jones are singing from the same hymnal.

“Why are we doing this if nobody is happy?”

That is the Jones refrain. The average Zach is not making money. Cancer is spreading. It is in the air: Dr. James Merchant, founding dean of the University of Iowa College of Public Health, tells me that the links between lung cancer and livestock confinements are clear and growing. The Iowa Legislature just approved $3 million for child cancer research. The University of Iowa last week launched a $10 million study on cancer causes, with $5 million coming from Sharon and Kyle Krause (formerly of Kum and Go).

Lahn’s opponent, Democratic State Auditor Rob Sand, proposed an additional $20 million into Iowa cancer research. Sand, too, is making links between ag chemicals and cancer.

This is the conversation Iowa has needed for about 40 years.

“People don’t want to die of cancer from living here,” Jones said. “They’re fed up and they’re connecting the dots.”

More hogs and hens cooped up leads to disease in the herd and the humans. How much more load can Iowa handle? Voters are starting to ask questions that were heretical in GOP circles just a few years ago. “What? You don’t want to subsidize ethanol production and CO2 pipelines through your land?” A troupe of northern Iowa farmers who call themselves “The Lobe Rangers” are calling out the toxic construct in a social media schtick that attracts a growing list of followers.

The conversation began to change in 2015 when the late Bill Stowe, then CEO of the Des Moines Water Works, prosecuted an indictment of agricultural pollution of the Raccoon River. The lawsuit against Buena Vista, Calhoun and Sac counties was dismissed but the conversation never stopped. Jones got in trouble for saying as a state employee that we produce as much manure as 125 million people.

Last summer Des Moines imposed mandatory water conservation because of nitrate pollution. At the same time, Polk County released a report from the state’s leading academic scientists essentially confirming Stowe’s allegations made a decade previous. People packed into Sheslow Auditorium at Drake University to demand change a year ago this month.

If earnest, Lahn finds himself in direct odds with Secretary Naig on the same ticket.

“Absolutely it helps me,” Jones said of the milieu..

We’ve been writing about nitrate in the Raccoon River for 37 years. We have been ridiculed, boycotted and banished over it. We live to tell, as does Jones. Finally, the issue is getting some traction, when a former Koch employee like Zach Lahn testifies.

Jones says that door-knockers hear that education is the Number One issue for the November general election. Water quality and cancer are right behind. Seventy-five percent of Iowans agreed with Bill Stowe (who died of pancreatic cancer at age 60) but it took this long for the politics to catch up.

Jones is riding the wave. Naig endorsed Randy Feenstra for governor. Bad bet.

The Iowa Democratic Party immediately tried to label Lahn a carpetbagger whose principal residence is in Kansas. For a carpetbagger, he seems to get what animates Iowa voters. Lahn hit a nerve when he talked about the fact that we are driving young people off for lack of opportunity. That is rooted in ag consolidation, which is predicated on petrochemicals. Lahn made a living at the hands of the Koch Brothers, kings of nitrogen fertilizer. Irony and politics share a pillow when the money all spends the same.

Jones is the one without the money, running into the wind and against the odds. Naig is tending the rose garden with Roundup, gathering up his funds to defend and prop up a statistically fatal status quo. That approach didn’t work for Feenstra. Jones is not measuring the curtains, but he thinks this might be a moment.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column 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.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep them going, and it keeps you in the know.