It’s been a busy week at FERN, highlighted by the cover story we produced with Harper’s Magazine, “The trouble with Iowa: Corn corruption, and the presidential caucuses.” Richard Manning took to the campaign trail in Iowa to show what keeps Iowa ticking — in a word, corn. (The story is paywalled for Harper’s subscribers until Feb. 1, but we posted a Q&A with Manning here.)
Iowa gets outsized attention in the presidential race, but the state’s dominant narrative, around Big Ag, is rarely heard in campaign speeches. That lack of attention leads to wonderful ironies, such as Donald Trump decrying Mexican immigrants even though, as Manning points out, “agribusiness depends on the Latino laborers who fill the towns that the Midwest calls ‘little Mexicos,’ one of which was just 25 miles from where Trump was speaking.”
Manning weaves a lot of threads into this piece, from the suit by Des Moines Water works over farm runoff fouling the city’s water supply to the desire of Iowa farmers to keep the Renewable Fuels Standard — the government mandate for ethanol which underpins 40 percent of all the corn produced in this country. By coincidence, Manning finds Iowa researchers who note that if Iowa’s farmers took 40 percent of the land devoted to corn and planted it with other crops, or turned it into pasture, “the whole litany of problems caused by industrial agriculture — certainly the nitrate pollution of drinking water — would begin to evaporate.”
In our second piece, produced in partnership with KQED’s California Report, Lisa Morehouse tells a very different story of biodiversity, focusing on an avid collector of heirloom fruit and nut trees planted in California during the 19th-century Gold Rush. Why focus on these relics? The taste, for one, Morehouse tells us in “Preserving Gold Rush-era heritage trees with Amigo Bob Cantisano.”
But the trees have other benefits, too. Pointing to a 120-year-old pear tree standing tall between a community hall and a gas station, Amigo Bob explains: “It is absolutely just the most hearty tree. It’s thrown huge crops every year in the drought. It doesn’t get diseases, it doesn’t get insects. Nobody prunes it, nobody waters it, nobody fertilizes it, and it is just prolific as heck.” Indeed, it may hold the answer to the future of agriculture in a drought-stricken region.