Auctioning Off Rural America

By ART CULLEN

I got sad and mad all over again reading a story in The Guardian of a Wisconsin family auctioning off their small dairy herd fallen prey to consolidation. The same thing happened 30 years ago with hogs in Iowa. We used to call them the “mortgage lifters.” Most farmers had a few sows or bought feeder pigs from a neighbor to fatten for slaughter — just like Wisconsin where most folks grazed cows on pasture. If you kept raising hogs every year fed by your corn, it covered the payment on that 160 acres. It built local wealth.

They traded for new pickups every third year. They bought hogs and cattle at the Storm Lake sale barn on Saturday, bidding in an open market. The packinghouse workers were represented by the Amalgamated Meatcutters, and they could afford a Harley and pay all four years for the kid at Iowa State University. Our rivers ran free of toxins.

We had a good thing going. There was no tuition at St. Mary’s School when I was little, thanks to the generosity of those farmers and butchers. You could buy a house on one salary.

Consolidation ruined it all.

You could almost retch driving Interstate 35 for the hog stench.

Walmart stands where the livestock sale barn did. So long, Curly Miller and Coast to Coast Hardware. Wall Street couldn’t abide that the hog farmer was taking a profit that rightly belonged to the trade. The suits figured out how to raise hogs (or heifers) indoors like chickens. Stuff them full of soy and corn and antibiotics and don’t let them move for a fast rate of weight gain. They drove out the independent hog producer in 1998 by tanking markets — exactly what’s happening in dairy today. In their place rose the long steel sheds crammed with thousands of porkers, owned by the corporate integrators (including the Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the USA).

The farmer is a serf raising somebody else’s livestock in his own building. A hog hotel. Wall Street knows just how much it has to pay to keep him hanging on. Same at the pack. Not a dime more.

The farmer loses. The community loses. The worker loses. The consumer wins, right? Bacon costs the same as it did in 1940, subtracting for inflation. Prosperity that used to be shared now flows to Manhattan or Shanghai, not to Iowa or Wisconsin. To the consolidator goes the profit.

It just gets bigger. The huge dairies in California, under threat of fire and running out of water, are moving back to Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa. So are the beef cattle as the Great Plains run dry. One cowboy wants to lay in 11,000 steers next to one of Iowa’s rare trout streams. Go right ahead, the state said. Mark it up as progress.

We have half as many farmers as we did 50 years ago. The Raccoon River that runs past Storm Lake is so fouled by agrichemicals and manure it made the American Rivers list of most endangered waters. If you drink that water, loaded with nitrate and phosphorous and Lord knows what else, your baby could turn blue and you could develop everything from thyroid to breast cancer. Because of it, the city of Des Moines is drilling new wells in search of something potable. Toledo, Ohio, takes its chances drinking from Lake Erie, fouled by ag runoff.

Our rural counties shrink and age. Suicides and opiates keep going up. But they say agriculture is having a banner year. More hogs are coming in to Iowa. We are swimming in manure. Dollar General has replaced the family-owned grocery in the little burgs of 1,000 people.

You wonder why they might be resentful.

You can pull down $18 an hour slicing carcasses. Storm Lake has benefited, I suppose, from the consolidation that sustains 3,000 meatpacking jobs. It is a melting pot of 30 languages and dialects. The farm kids that used to work the pack nights and cultivate by day were shooed off decades ago. Get big or get out. All the little towns around are dying.

The cattlemen are the last of the independent producers. They’re raising a ruckus of being locked out of markets by contracted production with huge corporate feedlots. They want at least half the cattle traded in open markets, where everyone knows the bid. US senators on left and right are talking up taking on Big Meat or Big Dairy or Big Tech or Big Pharma. Just three or four companies control beef, pork, poultry, dairy, seed and chemicals. Break them up, the chorus cheers.

It’s a familiar refrain dating back to 1910 when the Big Three packers organized the Fort Worth Stockyards. They’ve been fixing prices ever since. If Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t whip them to heel, can Joe Biden? He swears he will. They are saying all the right things. We’ve heard it so many times, along with the song of the auctioneer as the last heifer goes.

Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of The Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2021

Populist.com