Iowa subborned

[Dan Scanlan <dscanlan@xxxxxxx>]

Below is an excerpt from an excellent article on the Kucinich Iowa
campaign by William Pitt Rivers. The etnire article can be found at :
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/012604A.shtml

Dan
-----------------------------

100 years ago, agriculture in Iowa was dominated by family farmers.
Each farm raised its own portion of crops and kept a few head of
cattle. Those cattle were fed whatever was grown on the land. It was
a perfect machine, an agrarian society that hummed along in a
timeless harmony. Then came the 1980s, and a new generation of
farmers graduated from agricultural colleges. Their heads were filled
with a desire to purchase the shiny new farming machines pitched to
them in classrooms by corporate agribusinesses. Farms that had been
in families for three generations or more took on hundreds of
thousands of dollars in debt as these new farmers bought equipment
they didn't need. The debt held, however, because the agrarian
harmony paid enough dividends to keep the banks at bay.

 In the 1980s, however, corporate agribusinesses convinced those
banks to call in those debts, and thousands of farms crashed. There
were about two suicides a month for a long period, as farmers who
felt they had failed their families killed themselves out of rage and
shame and despair. The farms went up for sale, and were purchased at
fire-sale prices by corporations like ADM.

 Today, the cattle and crop industries in Iowa are owned by massive
agribusinesses which keep thousands of head in tight quarters. The
waste created by this is extraordinary, and goes straight into the
ground. Likewise, massive industrial pig farms create untold
thousands of gallons of pig manure which are stored in huge
'lagoons.' No material crafted by human ingenuity can contain this
caustic filth, and so these lagoons breach their containers and
further contaminate the water table. The stench from these lagoons is
so extreme that houses a mile downwind become covered in flies.

 In five years, the aquifer underneath the state will be completely
polluted by dung and chemicals. The topsoil, denuded by factory
farming, will continue to disappear, and continue to require chemical
fertilizers to bring forth the crops. The introduction of genetically
modified crops to the landscape, meanwhile, will change the ecosystem
in ways we do not even begin to understand.

 Recently, America endured its first Mad Cow scare. We were told that
everything was under control, but this was a fantastic lie. Mad Cow
is transferred two ways: In the manure or in the feed, two conduits
that are demonstrably connected. Factory cattle farms in Iowa feed
their animals an incredibly dangerous mixture. A massive turkey farm
north of Des Moines composts the corpses of dead turkeys, mixed with
the sawdust bedding they live in. The product of this is sold to the
factory farms, which mix it with rotten candy bars purchased from
candy manufacturers.

 Finally, the brew is spiced with the dross created in the process of
cattle slaughter: Blood and offal sluiced through grates when the
animals are killed. Into this mixture goes neurological material from
slaughtered cattle - brains and spines - and cattle feed is the final
product. It is in the neurological parts of the cow that Mad Cow
breeds. The animals eat this, and then defecate it by the ton in
these massive factory yards, and all the other animals walk around in
it. Because of the profoundly unhealthy manure-filled environment in
which these cattle are kept, the feed is heavily spiced with
antibiotics to keep them from dropping dead because of the diseases
they stand in all day long. Those antibiotics translate into humans,
making us more susceptible in the long run to bacteria.

 This is a ticking time bomb.

 If you think this problem is limited to Iowa, you are dead wrong.
David, the man driving the van, described all of this to me in the
context of Iowa, and in the context of the farm his grandfather owned
there many years ago, but it is a national crisis. When Dennis
Kucinich went on later that weekend to discuss farm policy, the
control of genetically-modified crops, and a process of moving away
from corporate concentrations of power in agriculture, it wasn't just
pandering to the farm voters.

 The fog that morning offered only a postcard. The problems that were
hidden - the wreckage of the environment, the dominance of
corporations, the danger of a poisoned food source - await us all.