Most folks are assuming that the catastrophic floods in Iowa are a natural disaster, caused simply by too much rainfall. But, leaving aside the question of whether climate change is partly to blame for all that rain, a growing number of environmental experts suspects that the flooding may have been caused in part by agricultural practices that have severely impaired the landscape's ability to absorb excess rainwater. As the Washington Post reported last Thursday, "Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed," and added that "Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated...That land, if left untouched, probably would have been covered with perennial grasses with deep roots that help absorb water."
So now that we're looking at some four million acres of washed out crops, the New York Times reports that Senator Charles Grassley (R, Iowa) is calling on the USDA "to release tens of thousands of farmers from contracts under which they had promised to set aside huge tracts as natural habitat," so that they can plant more corn.
This sounds like a really bad idea if the loss of water-absorbing habitat is what made the floods so severe in the first place. But what do I know? I'm not an Iowa farmer. Happily, though, I know someone who is--Denise O'Brien, the organic farmer who ran for Secretary of Agriculture in Iowa in 2006 and nearly won, with 49% of the vote. So I asked Denise for her thoughts on what role industrial agriculture might have played in this disaster.
As luck would have it, Denise just had a letter to the editor published in Sunday's Des Moines Register addressing this very subject, so she forwarded it to me and I'm reprinting it here, in the hopes that more people will consider the possibility that these floods were as much an act of man as an act of God:
In all of my reading about the floods and rebuilding Iowa, there is no mention of the role of agriculture on these recent events. Out of this catastrophe needs to come some understanding that industrial agriculture has caused many of the issues that happen down river from the cultivated land. A deterioration of good conservation and resource management practices over the last fifty years has helped make these "rain events" even more catastrophic.
There was some discussion about this after the floods of '93 but agriculture policy continued to ignore the environment and implemented more policies that allowed Iowa to become the sacrifice area for agribusiness corporations--putting profit before stewardship. Senator Harkin worked hard to get the Conservation Security Program in place but has had to continually fight for appropriations for this project.
A good many Iowans understand the importance of agriculture in this state, but few understand that while Mother Nature may reckon us with gully washers, human beings have added to the devastation by draining wetlands, plowing up waterways and planting only two crops - corn and soybeans.
There are many things that can be done to have an agriculture that is good for the economy, the environment and the people - it is called sustainable agriculture. Many innovative farmers in the state have been working diligently to retain their soil while making a profit. Many, many more farmers need to embrace conservation and stewardship in order to help prevent future catastrophes such as the floods of '08.
We need strong ag policy that promotes conservation and natural resource management in order to curtail the effects of the ravaging and raping of the land. No, actually we need to curtail the corporations control over the natural resource that we all need to provide life and sustenance - the soil.
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