COMMENTARY: Something Smells Rotten in the State of Iowa

If Mother Nature could speak, I’m convinced she would bellow at the top of her lungs every morning: “Every day is earth day, you nincompoops!”

Since Mother Nature cannot speak, at least in an English-only dialect that translates to duplicative forms, I imagine She may be inclined to vent her frustrations by other means — say a weather-related calamity such as a tornado, an earthquake or a flood. Oh yeah, she already delivered these messages to Iowans this past week — with the impending deluge mounting a river crest near you.But nobody seems to be listening, including our elected politicians, who are inspired by another green movement: the flood of cash that fills their reelection coffers each year.

It’s no secret that money is the only green that reigns supreme in this year’s General Assembly session. Look no further than the livestock odor study bill, House File 2688, which passed the House late Thursday by a 69-30 vote and now moves to Gov. Chet Culver’s desk. The five-year study will cost Iowa taxpayers $23 million to tell us, at least Iowans who have lived near a hog lot, what we already know: sh*t stinks.

Hogwash!

Feeling the tightening of the purse strings from the Boss Hogs in the Corporate Livestock Industrial Complex (CLIC), the Democratic trifecta, although Culver has yet to say whether he will veto the bill, is using the odor study to buy time and fend off constituents’ concerns about corporate hog lots — Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO).

Besides, anyone who knows anything about a bureaucracy, political or otherwise, knows that the fastest way to guarantee that nothing will ever get done is by forming a committee. Euphemistically speaking, assigning a committee to accomplish a pragmatic task is equivalent to my mother’s patented catch-phrase growing up, “We’ll see,” which means it’s never going to happen. In defense of my mother, she had to thwart demands from six children, so “We’ll see” was her only defense after a nine-hour shift.

Worse, the lawmakers punted the issue to a study group and we all know what happens at study groups, right? Not only does nothing get accomplished, but everyone wakes up with a hangover. I certainly would hate to be on the receiving end of that hangover after a five-year study binge.

I can’t imagine living near a corporate hog lot, especially on a windy day. While living on a small farm outside of Tipton, our neighbor ran a small pig farm operation a quarter-mile south of us. Since he was the only one running the entire farm, he only had a couple hundred head of future pork products running around the lot at a time. Despite the occasional chorus of squeals in the middle of the night and the metal feeder doors flapping shut, I never really had any complaints.

However, when the wind blew up from the south on a hot, humid summer day, I knew better than to step outside of my farmhouse fortress. Had the pig farm been a 2500-plus-hog CAFO, I probably would have put up solid-steel siding, rather than opting to coat my house in cement board.

Smells aside, the odor study will not address the other environmental problems stemming from CAFOs, including the adverse contamination effects associated with manure runoff, manure spills, fish kills, impaired waterways and nearby water wells used to supply families with drinking water.

But I’m sure our elected officials, armed with their fully loaded H.F. 2688, will ward off constituents for the next three election cycles: “Don’t worry; we are in the process of studying the problem right now.”

Meanwhile, in a top-secret lab located somewhere near Iowa State University, experts, prohibited from releasing information that would identify the location or the livestock producer participating in the research, will study livestock odors.

This puts a new slant on Homeland Security. I can’t imagine trying to mask the whereabouts of the lab, nor can I imagine a marauding band of eco-terrorists breaking into the top-secret manure factory with the intent of stealing information that finally explains what they already know.

Hmmm