Conversation With A Neighbor
How's Your Spring Goin'?
April 22, 2024
Forty something farmer George (not his real name) who rents land across the road to our south: "Hey Denise, how is your spring goin'?"
Me: "Fine until you started spraying. Everything stinks and I have a headache."
George: "Headache?"
Me: "Yes, I get an immediate headache and Larry’s mouth tastes like crap. This happens every spring. We enjoy the smell of the emerging flowers, the birds singing and the smell of freshly tilled soil. That all ends when you and others go to the field to spray pre-emergent herbicides."
George: "It's probably the 2, 4-D."
Me: "You have always been good about letting us know when you will be spraying. I appreciate that. The wind is in the southwest, and the spray is coming from that direction."
George: "Sorry about that. I will move to another field and come back when the wind is in the north."
He moves to another field thus exposing others to his 2, 4-D pre-emergent spray.
I had this conversation with George a couple of weeks ago. Larry and I were working north of our barn when the air turned foul.
"Is that smell coming from the propane tank?" I asked
Larry answered in disgust, "No, it's our farm neighbor out spraying, I can taste it. I heard his tractor as he pulled into the field. .”
Larry drove out to the field to check out where George was spraying. Sure enough, when George saw our pickup, he called me.
One day, several years ago, he saw me taking pictures of him spraying. He stopped his gigantic machine that looks like an alien monster, jumped off the platform and came over to give me a hug like we were old friends. I know him vaguely; he went to school with our children and I knew his mother, but I didn’t feel like we were quite on the hugging level.
"George, you’re not wearing protective clothing." He was in a tank top and shorts.
"Nah Denise, this stuff is safe and we couldn't get along without it."
We talked a long while; me explaining the purpose of our farm and our farming philosophy while he told me how we all need to get along. As he walked away, it dawned on me that I had just participated in a script handed to him from the farm bureau. He is totally captured by the “Iowa farmers feed the world” manipulative propaganda.
George and I have developed a good relationship for which I am grateful. We have had driveway conversations about harmful chemicals and their impact on our farm. I've educated him on human food production and its economic value to Iowa. Never once has he seemed interested in buying my fresh fruits and vegetables. He usually alerts me to his spraying schedule. No other neighbor has been so considerate, but I have yet to convince him of changing his methods of farming.
He is part of two well known farm families that own and rent farms throughout our county. Of course he is a farm bureau member. You know, the organization that keeps farmers best interests in mind. Unless something drastic happens, those farmers cannot/will not change. They are in a system that uses them as instruments for agri-business corporate greed.
This young man and most Iowa farmers are engaged in an extraction economy similar to coal mining. Coal mining eliminates mountains and leaves miles and miles of visual devastation. Iowa's extraction is a bit more insidious. When the fields of Iowa are a vast sea of green, it is hard to comprehend that corn is killing us. Iowans have been convinced by clever marketing, that no matter what agri-business does to Iowa; wearing out our precious soils and poisoning our streams is okay because corn is king. When will Iowans wake up and fight back?
When Larry and I met in 1975, he told me he hoped to be an organic farmer. He came back to Iowa after dropping out of college, traveling and working in the molybdenum mines in Climax, Colorado. We were married six months later and have practiced organic agriculture since that time. We became certified organic in 2013 to meet the requirements of a Natural Resource Conservation Service grant to build a high tunnel. We don’t expect others to make the same decision we made. We wish things were different and more farmers would embrace organic practices. It’s nearly impossible with today’s “modern” agriculture.
For the most part our farm has good buffers that protect our crop fields from chemical drift. The apple orchard though, has suffered and many trees have died from chemical damage but also from our own neglect.
We burned out in the 1990s from managing crops that human beings eat, strawberries, apples, raspberries and asparagus. We were milking cows, raising three children and were farm activists. The other factor was that there was no infrastructure for us to sell our crops beyond our local community of 7,000 people and no help from Iowa's premier agriculture college. That institution was caught up in helping create a food desert and facilitating the deterioration of Iowa's biodiversity. ISUs focus was on corn and bean production that led Iowa down the path of fewer farmers and Iowans becoming sacrificial lambs to the diseases caused by too many chemicals in our environment.
Iowa is dying, literally and figuratively. We are suffering from the effects of the philosophy of man over nature. Dominance of our natural resources as opposed to working with and giving back what has been extracted from the soil, the air and the water.
In my world as an aging female who has lived an activist life, the lack of respect for the environment is wearing me down. Some days I feel that the attack on nature is an attack on me. I am shocked at how people who try to make a living from the land ignore the fact that they are destroying living beings above and below the soil. Many of these people are hard core anti-choice Christians who don't apply their religion to the treatment of the soil. The soil is sacred. It gives us life.
To mitigate how the land is treated in our 640 acre section, our grandchildren helped us plant trees this past Sunday. It was the day before Earth Day. As we planted we talked about trees and their significance in our lives. When they are adults, long after Larry and I are gone, they can venture down to this wildlife habitat and possibly remember our conversations with fond memories. Hopefully they will be in awe of the saplings’ transformation to enormous trees.
We planted saplings native to Iowa. Butternut, Pecan, Chinquapin Oak, Persimmon and Hazelnut - all gifts from a friend whose goal is reforesting the land.
Very powerful and heartfelt piece. I felt like I was standing at your side....
Terrifying. But it is wise to be aware of the ways we still have to go.