Austin Frerick’s captivating and necessary book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry (March 2024, Island Press), is a road trip through America’s heartland — but not the one depicted in Grant Wood’s paintings of rural Iowa. Where Wood depicted an early 20th century lush with rolling fields of green, Frerick’s contemporary […]
Iowa Agriculture
Posted inCommunity/News
Cindy Smith, ICCSD’s liege of lunch, strives to put locally grown food on students’ trays
Have you ever wondered what really goes into making a school lunch? Feeding an area the size of the Iowa City Community School District (ICCSD) requires balancing students’ nutritional needs, dietary restrictions and preferences under a limited budget and federal regulations. I had the opportunity to speak to Cindy Smith, the purchasing and procurement director […]
Posted inStatewide
Small farmers are being the change they want to see in Iowa agriculture
It will take a lot to turn the massive ship of Big Agriculture around in Iowa, even if the benefits — from improved water quality to a more competitive food market — are many. It is important for those who reside in the city and are generations removed from farm work to understand the perils […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Iowa state parks preserve lush corners of a landscape 98% altered by agriculture
Since the onset of Americanization during the early 1800s, Iowa’s environment has changed more than any state in the union. Over 98 percent of Iowa’s lands were altered in service of agriculture. Forever spreading fields of corn and soybeans line highway shoulders, stretching out east to west, north to south. The state ranks second to […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Iowa courts deliver two rare wins for environmental groups
This story originally appeared in LV Daily, Little Village’s Monday-Friday email newsletter. Sign up to have it delivered for free to your inbox. Iowa courts handed down two decisions on Friday that were wins for environmental groups looking to safeguard one of the state’s few pristine waterways, and trying to encourage Iowa’s biggest utility to […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Iowa Senate Republicans maintain status quo spending on state parks, water quality improvements
This story originally appeared in LV Daily, Little Village’s Monday-Friday email newsletter. Sign up to have it delivered for free to your inbox. No state has less public land, such as parks or nature preserves, than Iowa, and state Senate Republicans are working to make sure it stays that way. And despite the heavy nitrate […]
Posted inStatewide
Judge says Iowa’s third ag-gag law is unconstitutional, like previous versions
For the third time in five years, a judge has struck down the Iowa Legislature’s efforts to criminalize the use of cameras in agriculture facilities and other businesses. “The United States Constitution does not allow such a singling out of the exercise of a constitutional right,” U.S. District Judge Stephanie Rose ruled on Monday. She […]
Posted inCentral Iowa
A beekeeper is born: Kara Kelso harvests honey and explains why Des Moines has ‘some of the healthiest bees around’
“Look at this pollen pocket! Look at this girl!” Kara Kelso, co-owner of The Slow Down Coffee Co., excitedly directs my attention to one of her 210,000 bees who is crawling across the frame with big (relative to her size, of course) yellow pockets bursting with pollen. We are in Kelso’s backyard in the Highland […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Amid ‘the most altered landscape in America,’ this 100-acre plot in Johnson County remains rich and wild
Before the first Europeans arrived in what would become Iowa, most of the land here was covered by wild prairie plants. Bison and elk once grazed in the northwest and central regions, and black bears populated the woodlands and brush in the eastern corridor. Around 85 percent of Iowa’s landscape was prairie, but today a […]
Posted inCentral Iowa
Forced to downsize, Sweet Tooth Farm focuses on self-care: ‘We can come back stronger’
In the summer of 2021, Monika Owczarski was informed by the City of Des Moines that the land she was leasing for her urban farm, Sweet Tooth Farm, would no longer be rented to her. Owczarski was devastated. On these two plots of land, she had been able to grow a little over an acre […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Take a walk among the dinosaurs in ‘that one Des Moines garden’ this July
After a four-year hiatus, the Polk County Master Gardeners’ Garden Tour is back, highlighting 11 exceptional gardeners and garden enthusiasts across the county, including Urbandale, Clive, Des Moines and Ankeny. The tour is part of Iowa State University Extension and Outreach in Polk County. One stop on the tour — enticingly dubbed “That One Des […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Muggy out? Blame the corn.
As someone who grew up in semi-tropical south Louisiana, I didn’t think Iowa had anything to teach me about humidity. I was wrong. Iowa, of course, is the most corn-centric of the states. Last year, cornfields made up more than a third of its total landmass. And with corn comes corn sweat. Like other plants, […]
