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If there was a prime example of all that is wrong with modern agriculture, Iowa would be a solid trailblazer. In 2019, the state had 3,963 large concentrated animal feed operations (CAFOs) – referring to those with 1,000 or more animals – up from 789 in 1990.1 The average large hog CAFO in Iowa has at least 2,500 hogs, while some house 24,000.
As a leader among pork-producing states, Iowa had more than 22.7 million pigs in 2017, which produce 68 billion pounds of manure per year – at least 68 times the amount of fecal waste produced by the 3.15 million people of Iowa, the environmental task force reported.2
By 2021, the number of pigs in Iowa had risen to 25 million, according to an editorial by Storm Lake Times editor-in-chief Art Cullen,3 who noted, “To feed these pigs, we farm 92% of the acres in the state to grow corn and soybeans, most of all states.
When you add massive amounts of fertilizers, pesticides, and runoff waste, this industrial farming system – which exists not only in Iowa but around the world – is responsible for destroying and exploiting the environment.
“ We cannot handle this load ”
Cullen details the atrocities of modern agriculture, which pollutes rivers and ruins water supplies. In the United States, agriculture poses the greatest threat to water quality and alone affects the drinking water supply across the country. The main culprits are nitrogen, phosphates and other toxins that run off industrial cropland (ie genetically modified corn and soybeans) and CAFOs.
In the Midwest, Iowa is at the heart of the storm, as the leader in US corn and soybean production and a major producer of CAFO hogs, eggs, cattle and chickens. In fact, over 85% of Iowa’s land is used for agriculture,4 much of it borders key waterways.
More than half (58%) of the state’s rivers and streams do not meet federal water quality standards, making them unsuitable for swimming and fishing, while 23% are “potentially weakened ”.5
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources says 92% of the nitrogen and 80% of the phosphates in waterways are the result of factory farms and CAFOs.6 The United States Environmental Protection Agency also states that manure from industrial agriculture is the primary source of nitrogen and phosphorus in American waterways.7
The resulting damage includes excess nutrients that lead to algae blooms, depleting the water of oxygen and killing fish and other marine life in large dead areas.
This, combined with excess fertilizer applied to monocultures like corn and soybeans, sends a constant flow of nitrogen and phosphorus to surface and groundwater, spreading potentially pathogenic organisms and unsustainable amounts of nutrients into the soil. course. Cullen noted:8
“Along with Illinois, we are the biggest contributors to the Gulf of Mexico’s slow death from suffocation from excess nitrogen fertilizer. We kill weeds with carcinogenic chemicals to grow the corn that feeds the pigs that pollute rivers, and it’s an article of faith that we can’t do anything about it.
… The legislator put it in place so that no one can follow the confinements or their manure plans. The state’s contained feeding coordinator has been eliminated. The inspection takes place on complaint. This is how it is planned. There is no limit to the number of pigs that can enter. They keep coming… We can’t handle this load.
Ruined CAFO Iowa Watershed Expansions
Northwestern Iowa’s watersheds are plagued by nitrate pollution – the result of CAFO’s unrestrained expansion. Areas with the highest livestock density have the highest nutrient levels in streams, including the Raccoon River.9
In December 2020, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and Food & Water Watch sued the state for failing to protect residents’ right to clean drinking water and argued that the growing number of Pig farms, with few pollution restrictions, contaminated the river with manure and fertilizer runoff. .ten The Northern Raccoon Watershed had 261 CAFOs in 2006, which grew to 619 in 2021.11
While new CAFOs must have a manure management plan on file with the county, farmers are legally allowed to apply up to 240 pounds of nitrogen per acre, which is 70% more nitrogen than most corn body need.12 According to Cullen, “The agricultural industrial complex, intertwined between chemistry and the military… leaves the farmer, the worker, the land and the community as assets to be exploited. This is what happened in Iowa. “13
In 1949, Iowan Aldo Leopold published an essay titled “The Ethics of the Earth,” which calls on people to be morally responsible for the natural world.14
“Everything he suggested has come true: the rivers have lost their former life, the soil washes them away and as we dominate the landscape, we diminish ourselves. He suggested that we live as citizens of the earth rather than on it, ”Cullen said.15 But while efforts to support regenerative agriculture grow, many obstacles still stand in the way.
Gates Ag One: Digital Agriculture
While claiming to save the world through philanthropy, Bill Gates penetrates all areas of life sustaining but, for over a decade, has undermined vitality in all its forms, in an effort to take control of it. and profit from it. In my interview with Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., she spoke about Ag One Doors,16 headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, where Monsanto is also headquartered.
“Gates Ag One is a [type of] agriculture for the whole world, organized from top to bottom. He wrote about it. We have a whole section of it in our new report,17 “The gates of a global empire,” she said. This includes digital agriculture, in which farmers are monitored and exploited for their farm data, which is then repackaged and sold to them.
So far, Shiva’s organization has succeeded in preventing Gates from introducing a seed monitoring start-up, where farmers would not be allowed to grow seeds unless approved by the monitoring system of Gates. Data mining, says Shiva, is necessary because they don’t actually know about agriculture.
That’s why Gates funds the Farmers Police. He needs to explore their data to find out how farming is actually done. This knowledge is then repackaged and sold to farmers. It is evil genius at its best.
With his funding, Gates now also controls the global seed supply, and his funding for gene editing research has undermined biosafety laws around the world. As Shiva explains, the only country that does not have biosafety laws is the United States. “The rest of the world is doing it because we have a treaty called the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety,” she said.
“While he created the appearance of philanthropy, what he does is give tiny sums of money to very vital institutions. But with those sums of money, they attract money from the government, which ran these institutions. Now, thanks to its influence, it is taking control of the agenda of these institutions. In the meantime, it is lobbying on patents, whether on drugs, vaccines or seeds. “
UN food summit bows to corporate technology
Gates is also linked to the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit, which farmers and human rights groups boycott because of its dominance by corporate interests. The Summit says it is coming together to “launch bold new actions to transform the way the world produces and consumes food”,18 but critics say it promotes agribusiness interests, elite foundations and exploitation of African food systems.19
Agnes Kalibata, former Rwandan Minister of Agriculture, now president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), an organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,20 was appointed responsible for the event.
AGRA is essentially a subsidiary of the Gates Foundation, and while some of its projects appear to be beneficial, most of its objectives center on promoting biotechnology and chemical fertilizers. AGRA was launched in 2006 with funding from the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
After more than a decade, AGRA’s influence has dramatically worsened the situation in the 18 African countries targeted by this “philanthropic” endeavor. Hunger under AGRA’s leadership has increased by 30% and rural poverty has increased dramatically.21
Shiva has also traveled the world warning other countries, including those in Africa, of plans to relocate rural farmers so that investors can turn the land into factory farms to export commodities. She said:22
“A handful of multinational corporations… are behind the extinction of species. The poisons they have deployed lead to the disappearance of bees, the disappearance of pollinators, the disappearance of insects, the disappearance of biodiversity.
Industrial agriculture not only destroys biodiversity, it destroys soils and releases large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere… It is not a food system. It is not an ecological system. It is a recipe for the destruction of the health of the planet and the destruction of our health. “
Living with the land is the key
Regenerative agriculture and animal husbandry are the next and superior stages of organic food and agriculture – free of toxic pesticides, GMOs, chemical fertilizers and CAFOs, and regenerative in terms of soil health, environment, animals and rural farmers.
As Shiva says, “Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy”.23 Cullen also hopes positive change is within reach, even in Iowa:24
“[W]We have the opportunity to return to a philosophy that can support us. The conversation is moving on how we can live with the land. Corn yields and pork production have increased fantastically over the past half century. Yet we have stooped down in the process.
… Leopold’s land ethic has a chance, and it could bring back so many things that died from an anti-life system built for the benefit of the few, taken from the many… Iowa farmers are finding this way by adapting sustainable practices as they can.
On a small scale, you can help by supporting your local organic and regenerative farmers by purchasing their produce from local farmers’ markets or purchasing your meat and dairy products directly from your local farm. A growing number of homeowners are also converting their yards into edible landscaping using organic and regenerative methods.
By acting at the individual level to be agents of change, we can all make waves that move agriculture away from industrial militarization and towards regenerative practices that have real potential to feed the world and heal the planet.
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