I was in Madison County.  Katie Olthoff was speaking.  While she works for the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association, she and her husband raise turkeys.

( Katie’s own blog:  http://www.onthebanksofsquawcreek.com/ )

“We got the opportunity to put up a couple of turkey barns.  This was huge for us.  My husband would be able to leave his job with benefits and farm full time.  We would be able to create something the boys would have the chance to continue.  It was exciting.  I was proud of what we were doing.

I would share the story with the people I knew.   Some asked me how many we would raise.  I told them 120,000 birds a year.  That’s when I heard it.  ‘Oh, it’s a factory farm then.’

I didn’t understand what they were talking about.  It’s not a factory.  It’s our family.

Factory farms are like the monster under the bed my boys are afraid of.  You grab the cover, pull it back, and show them he’s not there.  He doesn’t exist.  We show people our farm, and then they understand that it’s not a factory. But they still believe factory farms are out there somewhere, just like my sons believe the boogey man is going to get them as soon as I leave the room.”

The article begins immersed in the nostalgia of Norman Rockwell’s America.  Nostalgia is simply the boogey man’s more attractive sister.  We do the present no favors in remembering the past better than it was.

In Norman Rockwell’s actual America, many of today’s conservation practices were non-existent.  Fields were plowed and worked repeatedly and laid bare over the winter.  Terraces were rare, and so were farm ponds.  A wetland was the piece of ground your Grandfather just hadn’t drained yet.  Buffers and no-till were unknown.

The technology revolution some abhor brought all of that to agriculture.  Farm families have been figuring out how to adopt them ever since.  Living and working in the Badger Creek Watershed, a farmer-initiated watershed going back to the 1950s, I get a chance to see that evolution everyday.  Everyday I’m reminded of the work left to be done.

Stowe maintains modern agriculture is the problem.  I’ll maintain modern agriculture, much more so than that of Rockwell’s, is part of the solution.  Modern agriculture has changed not just how we farm.  It invests continually in making scientific assessments about the impact we are having, in finding flexible, non-bureaucratic solutions, and the funding needed to bring them to fruition.

It seems that the smart, affable man at the Des Moines Water Works, who admittedly looks back in nostalgia to Norman Rockwell, also looks back with nostalgia to the environmental policy of the 1970’s.  He can look as he chooses.  It is a policy, however, both the regional administrator of the EPA and the current US Secretary of Agriculture seem eager to move beyond.  Farm families are too.

At the end, Stowe speaks of social justice.  It is an interesting term to throw out by a man repeatedly using the term “industrial agriculture,” a term which serves to dehumanize those engaged in agriculture today.  His own Des Moines Water Works Lawsuit seeks damages from 10 drainage districts which make up a very small part of the Raccoon River Watershed.  These districts have no way to raise funds, save from the few farm families that make them up.  Where is the social justice in that?

Among their few numbers, we will not find the boogey man that is industrial agriculture.  I know he’s not under my bed.  If you pull the covers back, you’ll find he isn’t under yours either.  Mr. Stowe seems convinced he’s at least under his.