Last week was tough for Zach Lahn, the Republican candidate for governor. The ground trembled a bit when the Iowa Farm Bureau political action committee did not endorse the self-described Belle Plaine regenerative farmer in his campaign against Democrat Rob Sand. Farm Bureau otherwise endorsed Republicans up and down the ballot, including Ashley Hinson for Senate, Mike Naig for agriculture secretary, Chris McGowan for Fourth District Congress and Lynn Evans for state senate.
Why not Lahn? Farm Bureau isn’t saying. Lahn topped a GOP primary by running against Big Ag and with MAHA. He garners support by talking openly about agricultural surface water pollution. This is anathema to the Farm Bureau. It has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, trying to whitewash the toxicity of the Raccoon River and divert responsibility for pollution away from agribusiness. Farm Bureau runs a huge insurance company with investments in the Big Ag corporations that Lahn attacks.
Sand earns no endorsement, either, since he has allowed that pollution is one factor in Iowa’s scary-high cancer rates. He has been careful. Enough so that Farm Bureau does well to avoid an endorsement of Lahn. An act of omission bolsters Sand. There’s no margin in alienating Sand, married to an agribusiness executive, who is running as a centrist with a stronger campaign. The Farm Bureau PAC might be placing a bet that Sand will win. That’s what it looks like from the outside.
It indicates that the Republican base is fractured. A lot of farmers and rural dwellers are worried about polluted water and corporate consolidation as Lahn expresses it. Lahn sides with property rights over carbon dioxide pipelines, which may be a friction point with Farm Bureau.
Also last week, The Des Moines Register reported that the farm of Derek Wulf, Lahn’s running mate for lieutenant governor, was placed in receivership by a judge over unpaid bills. The Register reported that a criminal investigation is underway by the Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office, which declined to comment. The campaign has said that Wulf is going through refinancing like many stressed farm operations. It doesn’t sound good just weeks away from the election.
Finally, last week the three leading prognosticators said the governor’s race “leans Democratic.”
Lahn starts the sprint out of the Labor Day campaign gate with a hitch in his giddyup. Sand leads in most polls. Farm Bureau blew him off. His running mate is apparently broke and reportedly stiffed some of his neighbors. Sand has a ton of cash and attracts fawning publicity as his rally crowds sing “for amber waves of grain.” Lahn is in deep trouble.
President Trump ordered up a huge pile of foreign lean beef trimmings to bring down hamburger prices, and in the process undermine domestic cattle producers (and other meat producers, by extension). He said he wanted 300,000 metric tons at a cost 25% under the market, free from tariffs.
Initially, nobody would say where this beef was coming from. We assumed Argentina, since Trump bailed out its economy with a $20 billion loan to prop up a friendly leader. Turns out, the beef will come from Argentina and Brazil, where the Bautista clan controls meatpacker JBS. The Bautistas have grown close to Trump. Executives of JBS admitted that they bribed inspectors to ship out contaminated beef in 2017.
Late last month, 30,000 pounds of beef from Argentina were recalled for skirting inspection. Before that, China rejected 22 tons of Argentinian beef from a single packer because it contained Chinese-banned antibiotics.
Carnivores are paying attention. The butcher got a little testy behind the meat counter when we said we didn’t want any of that hamburger from Argentina. His reaction told us he has been needled before. How can you know when there is no country of origin labeling? You have to trust the man behind the meat counter, who himself might not know, what with Trump cutting his deals all over South America. You can be sure at the local locker, which knows where its livestock came from.
Trump says he loves farmers. He has a funny way of showing it. He keeps creating disasters, then throws gobs of money at the disaster. Cattle remain an important commodity in Iowa. Trump’s antics wear thin, and will not help Republican Ashley Hinson in her Senate race against Josh Turek.
Importing beef through politically connected foreign friends is no way to rebuild the drought-thinned heifer herd. It worked when Trump imported eggs from Turkey, of all places, following an avian-flu hen wipeout that inflated prices. It takes a lot longer to rebuild a cattle herd than a flock of chickens. Hamburger remains plenty expensive despite the three months of imports ahead of the midterm elections.
Meantime, people are left with the uncomfortable idea of not knowing where their food is coming from. Imported produce from Mexico could confine you to the toilet for two or three days. We need country of origin labeling for producers and consumers. It will take the pressure off the butcher, too.
Todd Bogenschutz is a longtime Iowa Department of Natural Resources biologist who tracks upland game birds. He told the Iowa Capital Dispatch that pheasant roadside counts done in August show that the population has dropped in half since 1990 mainly because of habitat loss. That should be a shocking statistic.
It makes sense. Pastures have vanished over the past half-century, giving way to rows of corn and soybeans. Land that was locked away in the Conservation Reserve Program was unlocked by steadily rising rents, and the grass was disced up for erodible row crops to feed the hogs, hens and ethanol plants.
Birds need a place to nest. They need grass. It’s getting scarce.
Over the same period, our surface waters ran toxic with nitrate and phosphorous. It’s the worst in America. The Mississippi and Raccoon Rivers are considered endangered from pollution by the American Rivers project.
Grass protects the water. We plant up to the river and into the lake banks. We hold out money in hopes they will stop but the pheasant count dwindles.
You would think that the duck hunters and pheasant hunters would show their alarm at the ballot box. We plowed up paradise, and just couldn’t stop ourselves. The quail left. Then the pheasants. And the people keep leaving. What would keep them? The reek of the morning air? The sloughs got drained, the last of them in Palo Alto County in the 1970s. We put in a puddle here and there with a cost-share grant. We tell ourselves that we have mitigated the loss. We could require a buffer but swear off any regulations. The hook-and-bullet crowd got lost in the noise that someone is coming to take your guns away. Wake up to the numbers. The rivers and lakes can be clean. Vote for it.
ANOTHER READING: The New York Times last weekend ran an interactive map of how the number of days with a heat index (heat plus humidity) over 90 degrees has increased, by county. The number of days over 90 in Sac County during the period 1986-95 was 27; during the period 2016-25 the number of days rose to 48. Across Northwest Iowa we have 20 more days of sweltering heat in summer.
Many of those scorchers come in July, right when the corn pollinates. This will limit corn yields. West of Storm Lake, a drought hangs on. East of us, the weather is warm and wetter. Everything is more extreme. You can’t put weight on a steer in that kind of heat. It becomes difficult to increase crop yields.
Increased heat and drought are directly responsible for fewer cattle on feed, and for unrelentingly high beef prices. We already are paying the price for a warming climate.
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