Editorial: Not news to the nose

No scene is more gorgeous than West Lake Okoboji at sunrise looking east from the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory. A bit of rain fell early Tuesday but the clouds gave way to blue sky, and the day was greeted with the smell of hog manure wafting. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder while stench filled his nose.

We’re inured to it. Smells like money, we use to say when farmers owned the hogs. Barely even notice.

So it was not news to us when the environmental advocacy group Food and Water Watch released a report that Iowa leads the country in feces, and that up here we lead Iowa. The report combed 2022 USDA records of reported livestock operations by county. It found that Buena Vista County poops out about 2.2 billion gallons of manure annually. That makes us an “extreme outlier” even in Iowa. Okoboji really has nothing on Storm Lake in terms of pork tourism. You want to talk stink, come to The City Beautiful when the wind is out of the southeast.

Meantime, down in Des Moines where our nitrate is sucked out of the Raccoon River to make the water potable, the Harkin Institute at Drake University opened a conference on the public health impacts of industrialized agriculture. Folks from John Hopkins University are doing a book on it.

We have reports and books. Lawsuits, too, over agricultural pollution and nuisance. The pollution has not abated but intensified. The nuisance has been deemed a necessity. Hence the green explosion in the bay from all the phosphorous shed from the manure.

To put a number on it — billions — is to put an exclamation point on it.

The whole while losing farmers and small businesses to the consolidation of livestock. It’s all in the report. The manure load was the talk of Des Moines for a couple days. We heard the reports years ago from the University of Iowa about the health impacts on children living near concentrated livestock operations.. Remember the studies on “brown lung disease” from hoghouse workers? Dairy workers are now picking up avian flu.

Regulation is shrugged off in Iowa. The courts have barred claims against agricultural surface water pollution. The state doesn’t know precisely how many hogs there are because manure management plans are ignored. The legislature tried to drown water quality monitoring in rivers.

Storm Lake gets raunchy algae blooms because its silt bottom is loaded with phosphorus, which attaches itself to sediment before flowing from field to ditch. We were reporting on that 34 years ago. Algae blooms can be toxic. More dredging? No money or time for that.

If you were to suggest that we are saturated in crap you might be considered no Friend of Agriculture, in a Farm Bureau sense. The consolidation that pollutes our lakes and drains our underground aquifers eliminated the independent pork producer along about 1998. The victims would tell you that the integrators crashed the sow market and held it down to drive out the farrow-to-finish and feeder-pig operations that were the backbone of our Buena Vista County economy. That’s all history. What can you do but try to enjoy it?

You breathe in and sigh, “Ah, the smell of ammonium sulfide in the morning!”

If you were to trifle with the idea of anti-trust enforcement, well, Teddy Roosevelt charged up that mountain a long time ago and look where it got him. Three companies dominate pork: one from Brazil, one from China and one from Arkansas by way of Wall Street. The government lawyers nick them for wage and bid malpractices, such that it has become a cost of doing business. The USDA is hiring out inspections to the meatpackers. You can’t break up the Chinese owning the hogs and the meatpacking plant because that would offend freedom of capital. It’s the same reason you can’t stop the manure from piling on top of us.

It’s good to know that Iowa leads in something. It used to be education. Horseshoes. Agronomy, too, and husbandry. We really did have clean air, and the Raccoon River at one time was not rife with nitrate. That was before the consolidation of the past 50 years that brings confinements to the brink of Okoboji. Nothing we could see between here and there indicates that the winds of change are upon us. The nose knows what yet another report details. To register with our trained sense, fouled over the decades by nature and habit, merely confirms that our ways are those of an “extreme outlier.”