Climate change is at the root of high food prices. Drought on the Great Plains, from the Dakotas down to Texas, is driving cattle producers out of business. The pressure has been building for decades. Heifer numbers are down, feeder cattle prices are high, Tyson announced last week it had enough at Joslin, Ill., Eagle Mountain, Utah, and Pasco, Wash. Tyson shut down in Lexington, Neb., in January.
Tyson will concentrate on three beef hubs at Amarillo,Tex., Dakota City, Neb., and Holcomb, Kan.
It is not surprising that plants shutter amid a historic cattle shortage. Tyson’s retreat is remarkable. More beef plants are expected to close. Cargill has not operated in Fort Morgan, Colo., since April.
Cattle need water and feed. Western Kansas can barely support a corn crop even with irrigation anymore, it’s so hot. The critters are drinking the aquifers down to the point of rationing.
Supply and demand dictate high beef prices so long as drought persists on the Great Plains. Climate scientists say we are in drought unlike any in over a millennium. Wildfire haze in Iowa is the norm. The rain does not fall on the plain in Spain — it was unbearable this summer.
Still, people say that climate change is not among their leading issues in polls. Food prices are, especially the American staple ground beef. So it depends on how you frame the question. In Iowa, the leading issues are water pollution and cancer. They are intertwined with agriculture and climate.
Drought is having a huge impact on small meatpacking towns like Lexington, where thousands of families were put out of work. It is having a huge impact on Storm Lake, where more than $100 million in water system improvements lay in wait; meantime, we are told to cut back consumption. Pork and poultry processing demand huge volumes of water, just like the cattle do in the Panhandle. We are depleting the aquifers beneath Iowa. It will become more difficult to maintain corn yields as heat records continue to fall in July and August.
This can’t go on. Tyson admits it by retracting from beef and consolidating operations. That’s climate change in the here and now. People have been told not to believe it, over and over. It’s all a hoax. Higher water bills. Stubborn beef prices. A $5 loaf of bread. People can appreciate that. They may not recognize it as climate-induced, but it is.
Iowa’s pollution problem is driven by climate change. Drought followed by gully-washers flush excess fertilizer down the Raccoon River, poisoning the river at Des Moines where it is needed to drink. The poison must be removed to make the water potable. This is a real cost, just like the higher water bills in Storm Lake from having to dig new wells.
None of this can be viewed in isolation. Humans have made the drought worse than it should be in Kansas and Texas. People are out of work because of it. That is no joke or hoax. We would like to tell ourselves that we can go on as things are, when they cannot. Nothing matters if you don’t have water. That reality is settling in with higher rates and lost jobs.
Republican Zach Lahn got on his soapbox at the Iowa State Fair to Lament Democrat Rob Sand calling him a carpetbagger from Kansas. Lahn takes offense that Sand’s TV ads show Lahn in the cockpit flying to Wichita, we are led to believe, for blended-family reasons. It’s a fair point for Sand to raise in the governor race, as it speaks to how Lahn doesn’t understand what has happened to rural Iowa in the years since he quarterbacked the Sioux City East football team, and wound up working for the Koch Brothers.
The Kochs of fertilizer industry dominance captured Iowa — the legislature, the courts, the universities — and started to roll it back by decades.
Lahn anguished on the soapbox, comparing himself to an “illegal immigrant” — as if he were a hunted and degraded man working night clean-up at the Marshalltown pack just trying to feed the kids. It gives a glimpse of how little Lahn thinks of the immigrants who bring new life to small towns like Alta.
Lahn commutes on the wing. It can be difficult to see what is going on below depending on the cloud cover.
Down at terra firma, the Alta-Aurelia school superintendent described to the school board how the legislature has laid siege to school budgets (an agenda put up by the Koch outfits like the Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council that did a brain meld with the Republican legislative caucus). Alta-Aurelia can’t hire help because they’re on the edge of eating up their cash flow. That’s familiar to a lot of rural businesses and farmers. Boone laid waste to the school orchestra. Storm Lake is well beyond that point. The reckoning is at hand and will become more difficult each year.
Lahn is okay with what has been done. He applauds the education record of the legislature and Gov. Kim Reynolds. Vouchers for private school and home-school corporations are a good thing because Lahn owns such a home-school business in Kansas. The vouchers are suffocating rural public schools in a zero-sum funding game against home schools and private schools, while reducing revenue through income tax cuts. Lahn is not calling out the problems with this stuff. It is the orthodoxy that got him that airplane.
Meanwhile, the Alta City Council had to cancel a meeting because members could not agree on an agenda. They were fighting over plans for a new municipal library (specifically, whether a library fundraising sign could be erected in the park where the building is proposed). Alta and the school district had a good thing going when they shared a library and staff. The Republicans started banning books and blew up the sharing agreement. Lahn has not set himself apart from this black mark of ignorance by the legislature and the governor.
Lahn would rather point to those pesky Rob Sand TV ads that remind you Lahn doesn’t have a clue what is going down in Alta. For his part, Sand wants to limit the voucher program and does not endorse the Know-Nothing education agenda put upon us while Zach Lahn worked for the Kochs.
We would like to hear more from Lahn about breaking up big ag and big pharma. That helped him win the Republican nomination. He has not campaigned that much in Northwest Iowa, where his base is. Lahn is playing it the way Sand would like it.
Sand urged civility during his time at the fair. This after Turning Point USA supporters heckled him while on the soapbox. One of them followed Sand into the bathroom. Sand told his own supporters not to act like kids.
“I mean, I don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, or how they think that’s effective,” Sand said of the hecklers. “I felt bad for all the people around us who were trying to enjoy the fair and having their experience disrupted. So that’s all I had to say about that.”
Sand supporters held up signs calling Lahn a part-time Iowan. They did not heckle Lahn during his speech.
It makes Sand look all the more moderate and centrist to get heckled by radicals. Lahn makes Sand look like the leader in this race when he complains about his opponent instead of explaining how he will break up consolidated agribusiness.
In last week’s editorials, we mixed up the Iowa Taxpayers Association and Iowans for Tax Relief, separate organizations. Iowans for Tax Relief promoted a survey showing strong support for a constitutional amendment on raising income taxes, not the Iowa Taxpayers Association. The amendment will be on the November ballot, and would require a two-thirds majority vote of the legislature to increase personal or corporate income taxes.
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