“When I was a kid in the 1960s, you could drive from Carroll to Storm Lake, and see cattle lining green hills the entire way,” Art Cullen said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Now it’s all row crops, and cattle in feedlots. It’s a different situation. Those green hills are plowed up.”
That transformation, the economic and political factors that drove and sustain it, and its consequences for people and the environment, are at the heart of Cullen’s new book, Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World. And for decades, they’ve also been at the heart of much of Cullen’s work as editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot.
“It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here. Corn and soybeans, row upon row, with windmills and hog-houses lining the vast horizon,” Cullen writes near the beginning of Dear Marty. Storm Lake’s economy revolves around its hog slaughterhouse, meatpacking plant and turkey processing plant, all of which are owned by Tyson. In the last census, the northwestern Iowa city had a population of just over 11,000. When Cullen graduated from St. Mary’s High School in 1975, the population was about 8,600.
The new book begins and ends with letters to his close friend and former St. Mary’s classmate Martin Case on how Storm Lake has changed, encouraging him to come back for their 50th class reunion.
“We each went up to Minnesota for college,” Cullen writes. “You wound up in the Twin Cities writing and researching on Native affairs. I meandered back to Storm Lake via a series of small-town newspaper hitches.”
In 1990, Cullen and his brother John started the Storm Lake Times, which grew into a model of what a small-town newspaper can be, featuring Art Cullen’s distinctive editorial voice. In 2017, Cullen received the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing for what the prize committee called “editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.”
Almost a decade later, that’s still an apt description of the reporting and expertise underlying Cullen’s new book. His writing is still engaging, making the 185-page book a quick read. And of course, the problem Cullen is describing is the same.
I called Cullen to talk about the new book ahead of its Sept. 28 release. My first question was about the title. It obviously refers to the environmental disaster corporate agriculture has created in Iowa — and beyond, as the excessive nitrates from agricultural run-off in the state’s waterways flow into the Mississippi and to the Gulf of Mexico, where they create the annual deadzone — but after reading the book, I felt “crapped in our nest” also applied to Iowa politics and other aspects of life in the state.
“First, it’s our approach to the land, and how we’ve spoiled the land. Just the topsoil alone — it used to be feet-deep, and now it’s inches deep,” he said about the title. “And with the overapplication of livestock manure, we are literally shitting in our nest. It’s showing up in the Raccoon River, in Saylorville Reservoir, where over-application of manure is causing blue-green toxic algae blooms, such that it’s unsafe to swim. That’s quite literally crapping in our nest.”
“The air — we’re polluting the air, such that children that grow up near livestock operations have much higher asthma rates than other kids,” Cullen continued.
“This should be this beautiful spot between two rivers, which is what the Ioway people found.”
The damage caused by corporate agriculture isn’t just limited to the environment. It’s “spread to our politics,” Cullen contends.
“Although our politics were never pure, Iowa used to be a more moderate place,” he said. “Iowa was first in education, it was the most literate state, it did have the highest rate of newspaper readership in the country, the strongest civic institutions. All that is decaying, because of this corrupt economic system that we have that exploits natural resources and people, and ships them both out downriver.”
“Both literally and metaphorically, we’re shitting in our nest.”
The roots of the corporate agricultural system go back to the post-WWII economic boom of the Eisenhower years. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson pushed for farmers to “get big or get out.” It’s a phrase that summarizes federal ag policy since the ’50s, leading to the decline of family farming and fewer processors for farmers to sell to, as consolidation happened at all levels.
Advances in farm machinery and the chemicals Big Ag thrives on — both of which increased the debt load for family farms — set the stage for large farming operations to buy up smaller farms.
“A single person can manage thousands of acres,” Cullen said. “This has displaced countless farmers and rural communities in the past 50 years. The pace of consolidation has been extremely rapid since the farm crisis of the mid-1980s. And it’s picking up again right now.”
This has all created a lot of anger among white rural Iowa, as Cullen recounts in the book. That anger has been successfully channeled by Republicans and rightwing media, from Fox News to talk radio and podcasts, away from the corporations and politicians profiting from the situation to convenient scapegoats, like culture war targets and the immigrants whose labor the ag economy increasingly depends on and who have changed the demographics of rural areas.
MAGA’s rise in Iowa since 2015 was fueled by that displaced anger, and coincided with the shuttering of small-town newspapers across the state, and the corporate owners of one statewide paper, the Des Moines Register, making massive cuts. It hasn’t just changed politics, it’s severed personal ties in communities.
For Cullen, the last five years have been particularly clarifying.
“The whole combination of MAGA with the past 10 years, and then the pandemic just amplified everything exponentially,” he said. “And I think it just exposes the latent anger and hostility that’s here.”
The last five years have also shown how far Iowa Republicans are willing to go pursuing cultural war issues.
“Terry Branstad was very conservative, and I’m sure he would have welcomed the Iowa Supreme Court rulings on abortion, for example, but he never tried to ban books that I’m aware of,” Cullen said.
He also can’t imagine Branstad engaging in a multi-year attack on transgender Iowans like Kim Reynolds has.
“Branstad would defend the pollution of our rivers, he was fully into that. But he wasn’t personally mean, and he wasn’t out to get people,” Cullen said. “But Reynolds is a whole different deal. She is vindictive and mean. That’s a different thing in Iowa politics. We haven’t had really mean people like that in my experience.”
The massive disruption caused by closing meatpacking plants for two weeks during the pandemic made Cullen realize “this system cannot stand. It’s so highly consolidated and tightly wound.”
“I didn’t realize how precarious this entire economic and ecological system is,” he added. “We’re on a knife’s edge.”
Still, Cullen sees progress is possible and ends his book on a hopeful note.
“During the pandemic, Earth started to heal itself,” he said. “When we quit flying in airplanes for example, and quit driving so much, air quality actually improved. Earth will heal itself, if you let it.”
“Take a farm field that’s been burned up by chemicals, and if you leave it fallow for three years, all of sudden earthworms reappear,” Cullen continued. “The native seeds will grow again.”
“And we can heal our political systems and our relationships with one another, if we can settle on what the facts are.”
Upcoming event:
Iowa City Book Festival: Art Cullen, Iowa City Public Library, Saturday, Oct. 11, 1 p.m., Free
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This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2025 issue.
