Iowa Has Robins in February and We Can Barely Water the Hogs

By ART CULLEN

Editor’s Note: TV reporter Katie Couric visited Storm Lake a 2018 for a National Geographic special on immigration that featured Storm Lake, Iowa. Couric asked Storm Lake Times Pilot Editor Art Cullen about what has changed since she was here. Read his response below:

Couric wrote: I recently read an op-ed Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times, had written for the Washington Post about January’s Iowa Caucuses and wondered how Storm Lake had changed and how the immigration debate was impacting his community. So I emailed him and asked for an update. Here’s what the ever-opinionated Art emailed me back.

Dear Katie,

Thanks for your note — it’s been a while, nearly six years since you visited Storm Lake, Iowa, “The City Beautiful.” You asked how things have changed since then. It’s not easy to answer. The biggest change is the weather.

We’re going into the fifth year of a severe drought in Northwest Iowa, the Buckle of the Corn Belt. The Great Plains to our immediate west have been dry going on 30 years, and it could run another 50 years or so, leading climate scientists say. The great cattle herds are liquidating.

Last summer, just as 40,000 bicyclists were rolling into Storm Lake on a statewide ride, our wells nearly shut down. We’re sucking them dry from livestock production and processing — we slaughter 15,000 hogs a day here — and ethanol hooched from corn. We were perilously close to shuttering the Tyson pork and turkey plants. Perish the thought.

The last time Tyson shut down was during the pandemic. At the peak in 2020, we were the hottest COVID spot in the US, trading places with other meatpacking towns like Waterloo and Sioux City. Waterloo and Storm Lake shut down for a matter of days, and meat prices shot up 50% in no time. It has taken years to recover.

The immigrants working the kill floors drew you here, to hear their stories. They are quiet, laying low and terrified of what shoe drops next. Donald Trump said they are “poisoning our blood.” People in Waterloo cheered him on. He said he wants to deport them. Iowa legislators are targeting immigrant students. People who never met a Mexican think they are invading. In July, Ron DeSantis attended a pork feed hosted by Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Hull, at which the good Calvinists all bashed the very immigrants whom the attendees employ in their dairy barns, and who actually cut the pork chop that DeSantis pretended to grill. Who cuts your meat, pretty boy?

Some things don’t change — the political hypocrisy that leads to self-defeat among them.

Yet everyone knows we need Latinos and Asians and Africans to do the jobs that Ron DeSantis would not have his daughters perform. We can’t get enough help. As a result, wages have increased by a third since your visit, up to $21.50 per hour at Tyson. That’s change for the better. The company also provides a free health clinic to employees following the COVID upheaval. Through the worst of it, they worked. Without all the right protection. Without vaccines. Some died — we still don’t know how many. Anything to keep the cheap pork and deli turkey moving to your grocery store.

It was awful. We isolated among ourselves while a man with an orange face and orange hair glowed on the TV set from the veranda of the White House to prove COVID could not fell him. Each in our own bubble, you could feel the community fabric giving way. We fed on our ideology and lost ourselves to misplaced fear and misinformation. Friendships faded. Trump lost but insisted he won, they charged the Capitol, Joe Biden took over, and we thought that maybe things actually would change. That we would restitch the social compact: You work hard and you can live the American Dream.

That pretty much fell apart. Congress passed a huge infrastructure bill, and then a climate action bill disguised as the Inflation Reduction Act. Together, they were supposed to get America on track again. It didn’t really work out that way, not with those pesky food prices weighing down the shopping cart precisely because of climate inaction. Biden said he would treat immigrants with dignity. That didn’t work out, either.

Not a drop to drink for Storm Lake from that bucket of money. We need nearly $100 million to keep the water system going. FEMA denied us twice, and the USDA once. The burden will be borne by the immigrants who will get to swallow a disproportionate share of the cost. Call it Bidenomics. Smells like Reaganomics. Acts like Trumpnomics. Hope and change, not so much.

We will get by. We will be forced to come to our senses and get a grip on reality. Democracy as we understand it has endured. Nature will call the shots and we will react. I’ve learned over the past six years that we are left largely to our own devices. The government is not here to help, which is a shame. The latest National Climate Assessment warns that we can’t go on like this for another six years.

We have robins in February and rain on Christmas. And we can barely water the hogs anymore. Buena Vista County is shipping two tons of soil per year down the Raccoon River — 12 tons per acre since you were here. Two years ago Iowa’s Raccoon River landed on American Rivers’ list of the most endangered because of agricultural pollution. Corn yields are projected to decline by 30% over the next two decades in Iowa, which suggests at least 30% higher egg prices. The soil that gives us life with water was our birthright, now laid at the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

We need change but it’s not happening fast enough. All we Iowans do is watch the weather. You can’t change it, right? So let’s wall off the immigrants who can’t grow corn in Guatemala because of heat and drought for fear they may invade Storm Lake. That’s Iowa stubborn, sister. It’s in our blood.

Yours,

Art Cullen

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2024

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