“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 […]
Iowa Agriculture
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, […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Refugee-led nonprofit Tapestry Farms fights Quad Cities food deserts with gardens
Half of Iowa’s grocery stores closed in the last quarter of the 20th century, according to the Iowa Department of Public Health. Today, roughly 40 percent of Iowans live a half mile or more from the nearest source of fresh fruits and vegetables—a minor inconvenience for folks with ready access to transportation, but devastating to […]
Posted inCommunity/News
The other, other, other white meat: Why you should consider adding rabbit to your diet
My pandemic project ended up being more unconventional than most. (I tried sourdough at the beginning, but forgot the starter in the fridge until last week.) As an anti-factory-farming activist, I found myself drawn to alternative food sources. I began raising and processing rabbits for meat and fur. Rabbits are a rare meat here in […]
Posted inUncategorized
Book Review: ‘Meatpacking America’ by Kristy Nabhan-Warren
In the popular imagination, the small-town Midwest exists in a state of fixed, unchanging idyll, in which people who have always lived there and always will pass on to their children the rural values and traditions they themselves inherited. For some, often on the political right, these values are hard work, temperance of spirit and […]
Posted inCommunity/News
A lean guide to local meat
You don’t have to give up your favorite fleshy entrees in order to eat ethically — but it won’t be as easy as swinging by Walmart for a $6 pound of ground beef, either. Cutting out the middlemen in the food supply chain takes some legwork on the part of farmers and consumers, but has […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Remembering the Iowa Cow War, 90 years later
The War on Meat (2021 edition) may just be a Republican talking point, but 90 years ago, National Guard troops armed with literal rifles and bayonets were deployed against cattle farmers in eastern Iowa in what became known as the Iowa Cow War of 1931. This largely forgotten incident involved angry people rejecting science and […]
Posted inCommunity/News, Top Story
The ‘War on Meat’ isn’t real, but small Iowa farmers face an uphill battle against Big Ag
By Zoe Pharo and Paul Brennan For most Americans, the 2021 War on Meat was a blink-and-you-miss-it moment in conservative culture-war politics, the kind typically sparked by a red Starbucks cup or the marketing of a slightly more gender-neutral Barbie doll or Mr. Potato Head. By the time Fox News announced on April 23 that […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Federal judge rejects Iowa pork industry’s attempt to crush California law banning pork produced ‘in a cruel manner’
On Monday, a federal judge in Cedar Rapids dismissed a lawsuit from Iowa pork producers seeking to overturn a law in California that prohibits the sale of “the meat of a breeding pig, or the immediate offspring of a breeding pig, who was confined ‘in a cruel manner.’” Proposition 12, passed by California voters in […]
