(SB) - This is my final column in 2024, and I will begin 2025 with 19 years of writing for the ADVOCATE. It hardly seems possible that my small world can expand to cover so many columns, but somehow I seem to gather sufficient thoughts to reach 800-900 words a week. If you like something that I’ve written, please let me know. It seems that if someone disagrees with me, they tell me, but far fewer people indicate positive thoughts about my words. Everyone likes a little praise now and again, but I welcome all comments. Only one person (they have done it twice) has hurt my feelings.
A few months ago, my by-line appeared over a column written, I assume, by Randy Feenstra. Assuming that the column reflected my thoughts, my good friend, Elaine Knudsen, appeared at my door one day offering to lend me a book, BARONS:MONEY, POWER AND THE CORRUPTION OF AMERICA’S FOOD INDUSTRY by Austin Frerick. I told Elaine that after I read her book, I would write a column about it, so here it is.
Frerick’s book discusses the legal and policy changes in our government that has led to a concentration in power in the American food industry. The book profiles seven food industry “barons” (Hog, Grain, Coffee, Dairy, Berry, Slaughter and Grocery) whose actions, in collusion with the government, have built empires for themselves. These empires can be traced to families whose actions have made them rich, while at the same time, penalizing the consumer. I could write a column on each of these monopolies, but I will concentrate for this column on the Hog Barons whose impetus is within our state.
Pine Lake State Park near Eldorado, Iowa was for years a wonderful area of parks, campgrounds and trails, but in 2012, the Iowa Department of Resources determined that Pine Lake was unsafe for human use. The primary contributor to this determination is the waste produced by the ten thousand hogs within the Lake’s watershed. Iowa was, for a long time, a state known for its hog farming with the pigs housed in barns on many family farms. Today, however, those same hogs are caged in massive metal sheds, known as “confinements” that allow conglomerates to breed thousands of pigs in a single building. Each building is long and thin with exhaust fans on either end (you know that you’ve seen them!), silos to store grain and a dumpster to store the approximately 10 percent of the pigs that die in the sheds before slaughtering time. One family, Deb and Jeff Hansen, have built an empire in confinement sheds. Their company, Iowa Select Farms, employs over 7,400 workers and brings more than five million pigs to market annually. In order to keep production costs low, the Hansens employ thousands of undocumented workers. Their confinement sheds are in more than fifty of Iowa’s 99 counties. Many rural communities have railed against this massive conglomerate which has all but destroyed the family farm hog production. But the Hansens have courted politicians at both the state and national levels to roll back regulations, and consequently, the “manufacture” of pigs in the state of Iowa goes largely unchecked. Pigs in Iowa outnumber humans by a ratio of seven to one. The waste produced by these millions of hogs annually equals the same amount of waste as a city of 90,000 to 150,000 people. The environment cannot handle so much pig s---! Consequently, this waste has degraded Iowa’s water quality. Most summers the state must close 2/3 of its state parks for at least a week, due to the health risk of toxins or bacteria in the water.
Families living near hog confinements are plagued with the stench, the flies and the health hazards that accompany these facilities. The confinements are often within a quarter mile of farms, schools and businesses. The Hansen family neither sees nor smells these confinements as they live in Des Moines near the exclusive Glen Oaks Country Club. Iowa, desperately wishing not to lose its reputation as America’s top hog producer, lobbied to remove state regulations. Today, two-thirds of Iowa’s hogs are grown on contract with big meatpackers. ( I remember how horrified I was when I walked by the IBP slaughterhouse in Storm Lake hearing the squeals of the pigs and the stench of their waste as they were dying by the second there! There was nothing humane about how those pigs were killed!)
Today, Iowa Select Farms is the fourth largest hog producer in the country! The exhaust fans at each end of a hog confinement building suck out the toxins rising from the manure lagoons therein. If the fans are shut off, the hogs die within hours, as was the case during Covid which disrupted slaughterhouse production and forces Iowa Select to kill hundreds of thousands of its animals.
Still, today Hansen’s company enjoys the privilege of interacting with important figures in the state as they trade government complacency for large contributions to political campaigns in the state. In 2019, Governor Kim Reynolds offered a private tour of the state capitol and the governor’s mansion to the Hansens, no doubt as a thank you gift to the Hansens in exchange for a six-figure campaign contribution. Today, Iowa gets dirtier as families, including the Hansens, get richer, and no one seems inclined to do anything about it. As we freeze in the Iowa winter, the Hansens spend their time in Naples, Florida, counting their millions. Incidentally, the Hansen’s private plane is called “When Pigs Fly.” Exactly.
