atlas of the corn belt

ATLAS OF THE CORN BELT

The University of MichiganA.Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning

Master of Architecture 2012-2013

Thesis UnitDavid De CespedesJohn EwanowskiJared HemingLi LiDanielle McDonoughDaniel McTavish

Thesis AdvisorRania Ghosn

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following individuals for their contribution to the Corn Belt Thesis Unit:

Iowa State University College of Design faculty members, and in particular Marwan Ghandour, Nadia Anderson, Clare Cardinal-Pett, Silvina Lopez-Barrera, Matthew GordyTCAUP Architecture Chair John McMorroughLuke and Sally Gran (Table Top Farm)Tamsyn Jones (Practical Farmers of Iowa)LaVon Griffieon, Craig Griffieon (Griffieon Family Farm)Harvey GriffieonShannon Textor, Carrie Dodds, and Don Mason (Iowa Corn Growers Association) Mark Rasmussen, Mary Adams,and Laura Miller (ISU Leopold Center) Erin Olson-Douglas (City of Des Moines Community Development) Rod Stevens and Tori Bailey (Dupont Pioneer) Kay Gammon and Don Brown (Lincolnway Energy Ethanol Plant, Nevada)John HilmesTCAUP faculty: Will Glover, Joy Knoblauch, Kathy Velikov, and Robert Fishman

Table of Contents

The Corn Belt Rania Ghosn 012

Corn is King 016World Production of Corn 018Get Big or Get Out 020Timeline 022Historical Geographies of the Corn Belt 027Crop Land 028Harvested Corn 029Daily Corn Harvests 030Rectangular Survey of Land 032Hybrid Seed 034Market Value of Farm Equipment 036Total Program Payments 037Nitrogen Fertilizer Application 038Family Farms 042Farm Size 043Farmer/Operator 044Meat Packing Plants 052Ethanol Plants 053Corn Derived Food and Products 054Corn Belt Soils 056

Iowa Road TripTable Top Farm 062DuPont Pioneer 066World Food Prize 068Griffieon Family Farm 072Iowa Corn Growers Association 084Lincolnway Energy 092Iowa State University Leopold Center 096Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge 104

Territorial NarrativesAn Architectural Fantasia of Constructed Grounds

Danielle McDonough 108The Vertical Element

Jared Heming 126 Agronomic Fallout: An Ahistorical Account

David de Céspedes 140Archipelago Nebraska: Project(ing) Territory

Daniel McTavish 148 Iowa State Fair: The Country and The City

Li Li 178Twenty Bushels of Corn on Four Legs

John Ewanowski 186

The Corn Belt

Rania Ghosn

012

Atlas of the Corn Belt

Corn regularly made the headlines this past summer with record heats and droughts hitting the central plain states the hardest. National and global media covered news of damaged crops: farmers seeing lower-yield, commodity prices rising, and predictions of higher prices for grocery products across the globe. How was the Corn Belt produced to acquire such national and global significance? Currently, The United States is the largest producer of corn, and corn is the predominant crop farmed in the U.S. with an agricultural output of 332 million metric tons annually. Approximately 50% of the corn produced in the U.S. is grown in what is referred to as the Corn Belt, in the states of Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota, Indiana, and some of Ohio, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Michigan, Missouri, Kansas and Kentucky. The geographic appellation refers to the region in which corn and soybeans are the dominant crops, and more generally to an intense farming region that produces an agricultural surplus vital for the country and the globe. For consumers, the corn belt may be imagined as a simple ‘commodity-supply zone’ – an ‘asocial void, a depopulated space without socio-ecological complexity,’ as the geographer Gavin Bridge refers to such geographies.

However, the story behind corn’s abundance is one of technological interventions and infrastructural systems from the continental scale to that of the seed itself. In the era from 1860, agricultural technology and infrastructural developments greatly transformed the Corn Belt from a mixed crop-and-livestock farming area to a highly specialized, high-yield, cash-grain, monocrop farming area. Although the history of corn in the Americas is ancient, the rise of industrial corn –and the genetic species as we know it– is a fruit of modernization. The major gains began in the 1920s and 1930s, when scientists began breeding hybrid strains of corn with bigger ears. The industry has subsequently risen into what Vice President Henry A. Wallace, a politician and pioneer of hybrid seeds, proclaimed in 1956 as the “most productive agricultural civilization the world has ever seen.” At the territorial scale, the federal government undertook a series of initiatives to boost U.S. corn production. Following the western expansion of the United States after the Louisiana Purchase, the landscape began to be parceled out into 160-acre farms. In the movement westward, corn found its major home in the woodland clearings and grasslands of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and adjacent states. Followed by grain elevators to store crops rather than sell them in a weak market, and railroads to transport food to cities, mutually constituting in the process the country and the city. As Cronon advances in Nature’s Metropolis, Chicago grew by exploiting its hinterlands’ resources, which included the corn that farmers cultivated successfully on Illinois prairies.

Ghosn

Opposite PageEl Lissitzky. Building the USSR, Nos.9-12 photographic study. 1937 (President and Fellows of Harvard College)

013

Chicago’s growing marketplace, he explains, turned corn—a grain which farmers had, prior to the 1850s, either fed livestock on the farm or sent to market in individual bags from their farms—into an abstract commodity, a “golden stream” which the city’s elevators graded and stored and members of the exchange bought and sold on futures contracts. Subsequently, the creation of nineteenth century Midwestern grain palaces, such as the Corn Palace in Mitchell, was linked by some art historians to the fact that the Industrial Revolution was, for the first time, regularly providing food to the common people in abundance.

However contemporary corn farming is beyond corn on the cob, corn flakes or food. Currently, Yellow Dent represents 99% of all Corn grown in the USA, bred and grown principally for its ability to yield a high amount of starch. The designed surplus of corn production is industrially managed through further processing to become industrial additives, food, feed, or fuel. Most corn enters thus a long and varied chain of transportation and processing, to turn the grain into economic value. High fructose corn syrup, livestock feed-grains, ethanol fuel, as well as a long history of government subsidies have comprised an agricultural territoriality complex in the American Midwest.

This thesis unit examines the dialectical relationship between a territory and architectural design. It responds to a condition in which designers are increasingly compelled to address and transform contexts that had been confined to the domains of engineering, ecology, or regional planning. Through a foregrounding of territory, this project aims to open up a range of formal repertoires and political agendas for architecture.

Why is Territory a relevant lens to investigate the Corn Belt?

Territory lies outside the binary of city and country. It describes a form of settlement beyond the traditional boundaries between cities, suburbs, countryside, productive landscapes, and wilderness. It is decentralized, diffuse, and not guided by one master plan.

Territory is also the interrelation of representational practices and physical interventions in space. It is not merely description or revelation but a marking and inscribing of the earth into building and vice versa. As representation, territory embodies the political will of a variety of actors and their tools to measure, modify, and situate. As a project in physical space, territory is the anti-thesis of tabula rasa: it is layered, negotiated, and constantly transforming. It marks the land through architectural objects, such as bridges, lighthouses, dams, and settlements. As such, territory is the coupling of a political and aesthetic project on space.

014


Project Territory investigates the historical and spatial production of the Corn Belt to propose architectural issues and strategies of intervention in the geography. The Corn Belt Atlas is the outcome of the Thesis Preparation Seminar in Fall 2012. The Atlas seeks to construct a spatial knowledge on the Corn Belt highlighting its manifestations, implications, and opportunities. It is structured into three parts: a collective mapping section, extracts from the unit’s road trip to Iowa, followed by the individual territorial narratives. First, the mapping section, along with the accompanying time lines, explores the impact of its farming on the quantitative and qualitative transformations of the territory. Looking into the past and current conditions of corn, the first section examines how the Corn Belt has been produced by industrial practices, federal incentives, and images of an agrarian nationalism in nineteenth and twentieth-century America.

In the Territorial Narratives, each member of the thesis unit outlines an architectural issue and strategy of intervention. Some of the issues raised questions such as: How can we alternatively fantasize about the relations of technology and the landscape? What is the navigational and symbolic significance of vertical elements, such as the grain elevator, in the generic and flat landscape? How are extreme agricultural practices and historical episodes, such as the Dust Bowl, informative to future environmental scenarios? What are the forms of the collective in such a dispersed territory? What is the significance of the state capital and the state fair in such a diffused territory? How are the productive relations of the Corn Belt experienced in Chicago, Nature’s Metropolis? Through these territorial narratives, and the Atlas more generally, the Corn Belt Thesis Unit seeks to rethink architecture’s engagement with a territory.

Ghosn

015

Corn is King

016


...Corn takes precedence in the scale of crops, as best adapted to more soils, climates and conditions; is used for more purposes; furnishes more nutritive food for man and beast; has more commercial cultural and economic value; gives more grain to the acre than any other cereal; more fodder than any other of the grasses; puts our beef in prime order; fattens our pork; is the basis of our butter and cheese supply; furnishes immense manufacturing material; has twice the value of cotton; worth fifty per cent more than wheat; its influence on the prosperity and wealth of the United States is greater than that of any other cultivated plant; and to the transportation companies it has “millions in it”.

Robert W. Furnas. ‘“Corn is King!” Corn: its origin, history, uses, and abuses, being the substance of addresses’

Project Territory

Opposite PageCorn (Not Cotton) is King. Pictorial Envelope. (Civil War Treasures from the New York Historical Society)

017

United States

32%

Brazil

8%

Argentina

3%

World Production of Corn

EU-27

7%

Source: USDA Foreign Agricultural Servicehttp://www.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/psd-Download.aspx

018


China

24%

EU-27

7%

Project Territory

A good aggressive bunch of American agronomists and plant breeders could ruin native resources for good and all by pushing their American commercial stocks... The example of Iowa is about the most dangerous of all for Mexico.

Carl Sauer, Letter to the Rockefeller Foundation, 1941.

019

“GET BIG OR GET OUT!”Earl l. Butz, 18th Secretary of Agriculture 1971-1976

Production of dextrose from corn starch

DeKalb introduces Round Up Ready corn hybrids

US Farm incomes fall 60 %

First manufacture of refined corn sugar and corn gluten feed

First commercial production of corn oil

Holden first observes single-crossed hyrbid

Crystalline dextrose hydrate introduced

First commercial shipment of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)

First competitve corn based sweetners developed forcommercial enterprise, such as maltodextrin

Large scale production of ethanol introduced

1866 1882 1889 1898 1921 1950’s 1970’s 19981967

Self-propelled Combine Harvestersold commercially

1732 1862 1887

Cooperative Credit System Organized(New London, CT) Homestead Act

Land Grant of 1850

18501848

Chicago Board of Trade Established

Country Life Commission

1933 1934

Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933

Emergency Farm Mortgage Act

reduce crop surplus and therefore effectively raise the value of crops

recapitalized the land banks and cut interest rates in reaction to the Depression

Farm Credit Actnew production credit system for farmers and ranchers through local Production Credit Associations

1916 192319221920

European Relief Council established

1908

Federal Farm Loan Actprovide long-term credit to farmers to develop and expand farms

Hatch Actfederal funding to create agricultural research stations in each state land-grant colleges

Union Stockyards Open

Federal Farm Loan Act

Grain Futures Act

created 12 Federal Intermediate Credit Banks (FICBs) and served as banks of discount to agricultural cooperatives

regulation of trading in certain commodity futures, including Grain Futures

Federal Meat Inspection Act

Grain Standards Act

19391938

Federal Credit Administration falls under USDA pervue

Commodity Futures Trading Commission created

1971 1974

Farm Credit Act of 1971

Agricultural Act of 1956authorized short- and long-term removal of land from production with annual rental payments to participants

1948 1949 1956

Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008

2008

Agricultural Act of 1954

Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954

1954

Food Security Act a 5-year omnibus farm bill, allowed lower commodity price and income supports

600,000,000

400,000,000

200,000,000

800,000,000

1,000,000,000

1,200,000,000

600,000,000

400,000,000

200,000,000

800,000,000

1,000,000,000

1,200,000,000

PRODUCTION IN BU

HARVESTED AREA (ACRES)

PRODUCTION IN BUUS $/BU


1985


Agricultural Act of 1949mandated that surplus food can be donated to friendly overseas countries as development aid purposes

1937

Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act created a credit program to allow tenant farmers to purchase land acquired by the fedreal government Tenant Farmer: an individual who resides on land owned by a landlord

Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938established the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation

19361934

Commodity Exchange Actreplaced the Grain Futrues act of 1922 and provided federal regulation of all commodities and futures trading activities and requires all futures and commod-ity options to be traded on organized exchanges

Frazier–Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Actrestricted the ability of banks to repossess farms and delayed foreclosure of a bankrupt farmers' property for five years

Federal Credit Union Act

1866 1882 1889 18981732 1862 188718501848 19161908

1.00

2.00

3.00

4.00

5.00

6.00

7.00

022












1866 1882 1889 1898 1921 1950’s 1970’s 19981967


1732 1862 1887


Land Grant of 1850

18501848



1933 1934






1916 192319221920


1908





Grain Futures Act




Grain Standards Act

19391938



1971 1974



1948 1949 1956


2008



1954


600,000,000

400,000,000

200,000,000

800,000,000

1,000,000,000

1,200,000,000

600,000,000

400,000,000

200,000,000

800,000,000

1,000,000,000

1,200,000,000

PRODUCTION IN BU




1985



1937



19361934




1921 1933 19341916 192319221920

1.00

2.00

3.00

4.00

5.00

6.00

7.00

Project Territory

023











1866 1882 1889 1898 1921 1950’s 1970’s 19981967


1732 1862 1887


Land Grant of 1850

18501848



1933 1934






1916 192319221920


1908





Grain Futures Act




Grain Standards Act

19391938



1971 1974



1948 1949 1956


2008



1954


600,000,000

400,000,000

200,000,000

800,000,000

1,000,000,000

1,200,000,000

600,000,000

400,000,000

200,000,000

800,000,000

1,000,000,000

1,200,000,000

PRODUCTION IN BU




1985



1937



19361934




1950’s19391938 1948 1949 19561954193719361934

established the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation

1.00

2.00

3.00

4.00

5.00

6.00

7.00

024












1866 1882 1889 1898 1921 1950’s 1970’s 19981967


1732 1862 1887


Land Grant of 1850

18501848



1933 1934






1916 192319221920


1908





Grain Futures Act




Grain Standards Act

19391938



1971 1974



1948 1949 1956


2008



1954


600,000,000

400,000,000

200,000,000

800,000,000

1,000,000,000

1,200,000,000

600,000,000

400,000,000

200,000,000

800,000,000

1,000,000,000

1,200,000,000

PRODUCTION IN BU




1985



1937



19361934




1970’s 19981967 1971 19741956 20081985

1.00

2.00

3.00

4.00

5.00

6.00

7.00

Project Territory

025

All ecological projects (and arguments) are simultaneously political-economic projects (and arguments) and vise versa. Ecological arguments are never really socially neutral any more than socio-political arguments are ecologically neutral. Looking more closely at the way ecology and politics interrelate then becomes imperative if we are to get a better handle on how to approach environmental/ecological questions. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference.

1997

026


The Corn Belt

Source: USDA Yearbook 1921; “Agricultural Regions of North America Part IV - The Corn Belt” Oliver E. Baker

Project Territory

027

Crop Land

90-100%

80-900%

70-800%

60-700%

50-600%

40-500%

30-400%

20-300%

10-200%

00-100%

Source: USDA Agricultural Census 2007

028


Harvested Corn

258 226 - 396 552

182 788 - 258 225

136 163 - 182 787

98 565 - 136 162

68 880 - 98 564

44 551 - 68 879

26 160 - 44 550

13 546 - 26 159

4 344 - 13 545

0 - 4 343


Project Territory

029

10 bushels/hour

2.43 acres/day

YIELD24.3 bushels/acre (1866)

2.43/

Daily Corn Harvest 1866

030


203.804 acres/day

3,000 bussels/hour

147.2 bussels/acre (2011)

160/160 43.804/

Daily Corn Harvest 2011

Project Territory

031

1234567

123456

A B

C

C

C

C

C

D D

B B121110987

131415161718

242322212019

252627282930

363534333231

Township

6 m

i

6 mi

1 m

i

1 mi

1 m

i

1 mi

1/2

mi

1/2 mi

1/4m

i

1/4 mi

660

ft

660 ft

330

ft

330 ft

4 Sections 640 acresSection

160 acresQuarter-Section

40 acres10 acres

2.5 acres2.5 acres/day

Rectangular Survey

032


29

Township48

0 ch

ains

480 chains

160

chai

ns

160 chains

80 c

hain

s

80 chains

40 c

hain

s

40 chains

20 c

hain

s

20 chains

10 c

hain

s

10 chains

5 ch

ains

1 ch

ain

5 chains

4 Sections 640 acresSection

160 acresQuarter-Section

40 acres10 acres

2.5 acres

66 f

eet

Gunters Chain

Project Territory

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781.

033

OTHERSEEDSCOMPANIES

THREATS TO YEILD

TRAITS

Above ground insect protectionBelow ground insect protectionRoundup Ready Technology(resistent to Roundup herbicides)

INSECTSEuropean Corn BorerSouthwestern Corn BorerNorthern Corn RootwormWestern Corn RootwormMexican Corn RootwormCorn EarwormFall ArmywormWestern Bean CutwormBlack Cutworm

PLANTSVelvetleafLambsquaterPurslaneKochiaMorningglory

TRAITS

SEEDSWEEDS

Western Corn Rootworm

Velvetleaf

Hybrid Seed

034


Change in Cross Section of Corn

Once farmers turned to planting hybrid corn they had to buy seed from a commercial seed producer every year instead of picking, at harvest time, the healthy and productive ears from their own corn fields for next year’s seed. In other words, the adoption of hybrid corn transformed seed into a commodity.

R. C. Lewontin and J.P. Berlan, The Political Economy of Hybrid-Corn. 1986

Project Territory

035

Market Value of Farm Equipment

$0 - $19,304

$19,305 - $44,895

$44,896 - $56,838

$56,839 - $68,307

$68,308 - $80,735

$80,736 - $94,384

$94,385 - $108,439

$108,440 - $136,273

$136,274 - $191,313

$191,314 - $461,482


036


Total Program Payments

$0 - $834,225

$834,225 - $2,315,421

$2,315,241 - $4,244,891

$4,244,891 - $6,491,588

$6,491,588 - $9,391,704

$9,391,704 - $12,853,635

$12,853,635 - $16,883,219

$16,883,219 - $23,166,134

$23,166,134 - $35,581,842

$35,581,842 - $65,816,728

Source: USDA Economic Research Service

Project Territory

037

Nitrogen Fertilizer Application

>7

3-7

1-3

<1

Source: USGS National Water Quality Assesment Program

038


US Ammonia Distribution Systems

500-1,000

1,001 - 2,250

35-500

Pipeline Terminal

Magellan Pipeline

NuStar Energy Pipeline

The great discovery by Haber and Bosch made immediately possible the growth and cultivation of similar flora at almost all points of same latitude and in profuse abundance. An endless supply of fertilizer promised an endless supply of vegetal output.

William J. Hale, The Farm Chemurgic, 1934

Source: Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, ESRI, USDA, Economic Research Sevice using data from IFDC

Project Territory

039

Agricultural Anhydrous Ammonia Usage 1964

POUNDS PER ACRES: 58

Source: USDA Economic Resource Service

040


Agricultural Anhydrous Ammonia Usage 2010

POUNDS PER ACRES: 140

Source: USDA Economic Resource Service

Project Territory

041

Family Farms

90-100%

80-900%

70-800%

60-700%

50-600%

40-500%

30-400%

20-300%

10-200%

00-100%


042


Farm Size

40960 - 47420

30720 - 40960

20480 - 30720

10240 - 20480

7680 - 10240

5120 - 7680

2560 - 5120

1920 - 2560

640 - 1920

480 - 640

320 - 480

160 - 320

0 - 160


Project Territory

043

Land Owner Farmer / Labour Land

Seed Fertilizer Chemicals

Machinery Livestock Crop

Mills Transportation Government

















































044


The farmer has been changed from a primary producer into an intermediate converter of manufactured goods. Farming, carried out by millions of petty producers, is now completely dominated by the total system of agricultural production under the control of a few oligopolies, who sell farmers their inputs, and buy their outputs, and control (directly or indirectly) their conditions of production. In 1910 farmers gathered their own seeds from last year’s crop, raised the mules and horses that provided traction power, fed them on hay and grains produced on the farm, and fertilized the fields with the manure they produced. In 1986 farmers purchase their seed from Pioneer Hybrid Seed Co., their “mules” from John Deere, the “oats” for their “mules” from Exxon, their “manure” from American Cyanamid.

R. C. Lewontin and J.P. Berlan, Technology, Research, and the Penetration of Capital: The Case of U.S. Agriculture. 1986.

045

LAND OWNER

PLANTTILLHARVEST

100% YIELD OF CROP(CORN AND SOYBEAN)

50% TO OWNER 50% TO FARM(ER) “OPERATOR

FARM(ER) “OPERATOR”

LABORMACHINERY

CROP SEED

CHEMICALS

FERTILIZER

LAND RESOURCE

LAND OWNER FARM(ER) “OPERATOR”

50/50 Crop Share Lease

046


PLANTTILLHARVEST

LAND OWNER FARM(ER) “OPERATOR”

LAND OWNER


LIVESTOCK

50% TO OWNER 50% TO FARM(ER) “OPERATOR


LABORMACHINERY

CROP SEED

CHEMICALS

FERTILIZER

LAND RESOURCE

LIVESTOCK + BUILDINGS

50/50 Crop & Livestock Share

Project Territory

047

LAND OWNER

PLANTTILL

HARVEST


72 -78% TO OWNER 22 -28% TO FARM(ER) “OPERATOR


LABORMACHINERYCROP SEED

CHEMICALS

FERTILIZER

LAND RESOURCE

100% TO OWNER + ALL GOVERNMENT PAYMENTS

Modified Crop Share Lease

048


LAND OWNER

SALARY

100% TO OWNER + ALL GOVERNMENT PAYMENTS


LABORMACHINERYCROP SEED

CHEMICALS

FERTILIZER

LAND RESOURCE

PLANTTILL

HARVEST


Custom Operation

Project Territory

049

RENT

LAND OWNER

PLANTTILL

HARVEST


60-70% TO FARM(ER) “OPERATOR” + PERCENTAGE OF GOVERNMENT

PAYMENT

30-40% OF CROP TO PREDETERMINED GRAIN ELEVATOR + PERCENTAGE OF GOVERNMENT

PAYMENT


LABORMACHINERYLAND RESOURCE

CROP SEED

CHEMICALS

FERTILIZER

RENTED LAND RESOURCE

50% RENT DUE MARCH 1

PLANTTILLHARVEST

Percentage Rent

050


LAND OWNER

100 % YIELD OF CROP TO FARM(ER) “OPERATOR”

(CORN AND SOYBEAN)


LABORMACHINERYLAND RESOURCE

CROP SEED

CHEMICALS

FERTILIZER

RENTED LAND RESOURCE

50% RENT DUE MARCH 1

PLANTTILLHARVEST

50% RENT DUE AT HARVEST

Cash Rent

Project Territory

051

Meat Processing Plants and Number of Cattle per acre

50-127

25-50

15-25

5-15

0-5

Source: USDA,

052


Ethanol Plants

Source: USDA

Project Territory

The restoration of the farm to a chemurgic course –that of expanding the supply of raw material to industry, offers the only solution to the farm problem…Talk of farm surplus is utter nonsense… In abundance of food we discern true by-product status in the chemical world.

William J. Hale, Farmward March: Chemurgy Takes Command, 1939

053

CyclodextrinDecyl glucosideDecyl polyglucoseDextrinDextrose (also found in IV solutions)Dextrose anything (such as monohydrate or anhydrous)d-Gluconic acidDistilled white vinegarDrying agentErythorbic acidErythritolEthanolEthocel 20EthylcelluloseEthyleneEthyl acetateEthyl alcoholEthyl maltolFlavoringsFood starchFructoseFruit juice concentrateFumaric acidGerm/germ mealGluconateGluconic acidGlucono delta-lactoneGluconolactoneGlucosamineGlucoseGlucose syrup (also found in IV solutions)GlutamateGlutenGluten feed/mealGlyceridesGlycerinGlycerolGolden syrupGritsHigh fructose corn syrupHominyHoneyHydrolyzed cornHydrolyzed corn proteinHydrolyzed vegetable proteinHydroxypropyl methylcelluloseHydroxypropyl methylcellulose pthalate

Corn-derived food and products. The items in this list can each be derived from corn. Some can also be derived from other sources besides corn.

Acetic acidAlcoholAlpha tocopherolArtificial flavoringsArtificial sweetenersAscorbatesAscorbic acidBaking powderBarley maltBleached flourBlended sugar (sugaridextrose)Brown sugarCalcium citrateCalcium fumarateCalcium gluconateCalcium lactateCalcium magnesium acetate (CMA)Calcium stearateCalcium stearoyl lactylateCaramel and caramel colorCarbonmethylcellulose sodiumCellulose microcrystallineCellulose, methylCellulose, powderedCetearyl glucosideCholine chlorideCitric acidCitrus cloud emulsion (CCS)Coco glycerides (cocoglycerides)Confectioners sugarCorn alcohol, corn glutenCorn extractCorn flourCorn oil, corn oil margarineCorn starchCorn sweetener, corn sugarCorn syrup, corn syrup solidsCorn, popcorn, cornmealCornstarch, cornflourCrosscarmellose sodiumCrystalline fructose

(HPMCP)InositolInvert syrup or sugarIodized saltLactateLactic acidLauryl glucosideLecithinLinoleic acidLysineMagnesium fumarateMaizeMalic acidMalonic acidMalt syrup from corn (barley malt is fine)Malt, malt extractMaltitolMaltodextrinMaltolMaltoseMannitolMethyl glucethMethyl glucoseMethyl glucosideMethylcelluloseMicrocrystaline celluloseModified cellulose gumModified corn starchModified food starchMolasses (corn syrup may be present; know your product)Mono and di glyceridesMonosodium glutamateMSGNatural flavoringsOlestra/OleanPolentaPolydextrosePolylactic acid (PLA)Polysorbates (e.g. Polysorbate 80)Polyvinyl acetatePotassium citratePotassium fumaratePotassium gluconatePowdered sugarPregelatinized starchPropionic acidPropylene glycolPropylene glycol monostearate

054


SaccharinSalt (iodized salt)SimethiconeSodium carboxymethylcelluloseSodium citrateSodium erythorbateSodium fumarateSodium lactateSodium starch glycolateSodium stearoyl fumarateSorbateSorbic acidSorbitanSorbitan monooleateSorbitan tri-oleateSorbitolSorghum (not all is bad; the syrup and/or grain CAN be mixed with corn)Starch (any kind that’s not specified)Stearic acidStearoylsSucroseSugar (not identified as cane or beet)Tocopherol (vitamin E)Treacle (aka golden syrup)Triethyl citrateUnmodified starchVanilla, natural flavoringVanilla, pure or extractVanillinVegetable anything that’s not specificVinegar, distilled whiteVinyl acetateVitamin C and Vitamin EVitaminsXanthan gumXylitolYeastZea maysZein

Other products that may contain corn.

Adhesives and gummed papers (envelopes, stamps, stickers, tapes)Body powdersBounce dryer sheetsBreath spray and candiesChickenCoffee, instantCondiments (mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup)Contact lens solutionsCreamDairy products (cottage cheese, cheese, sour cream)Fresh fruit/vegetables that are coated with wax (which can be derived from corn)Frozen fruit (blueberries, cranberries)Frozen vegetablesHair products (spray, mousse and gels)Herbal Essence productsLotion (including those that contain Vitamin E)MargarineMeat products (hot dogs, sausage)Orange juice (the frozen kinds appear to be okay)Paper containers (boxes, cups, plates)Peanut butterPicklesPorkRicotta cheeseSalad dressingsSoaps and dishwashing detergentsSuntan lotionsTeasTomato productsToothpasteTuna fish

Project Territory

055

Soil Types

Atlantic & Gulf Coast Lowland Forest

California Subtropical Fruit, Truck, and Specialty

Central Feed Grains & Livestock

Central Great Plains Winter Wheat & Range

East & Central Farming & Forest Region

Florida Subtropical Fruit, Truck Crop & Range

Lake State Fruit, Truck Crop & Dairy

Mississippi Delta Cotton & Feed Grains Region

Northeastern Forage & Forest

North Atlantic Slope Diversified Farming

Northern Great Plains Spring Wheat Region

Northern Lake States Forest & Forage

Northwestern Forest, Forage & Specialty Crop

Northwestern Wheat & Range

Rocky Mountain Range & Forest Region

South Atlantic & Gulf Slope Cash Crop, Forest, & Livestock

Southwestern Plateaus & Plains Range & Cotton

Southwestern Prairies Cotton & Forage

Western Great Plains Range & Irrigated

Western Range & Irrigated

Source: USDA,

056


Rate of Soil Loss from Erosion

0.5-1.5

Greater than 4

1.5-4

Less than0.5

All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not of robbing the laborer but also of robbing the soil.

Karl Marx, Capital, 1867Source: USDA, National Resources Conser-vation Services

Project Territory

057

United States Populated Places

Source: ESRI

058


Much of the ease and happiness of the people of the United States of America is ascribable to the absence of grinding taxation; but that absence alone, without the cultivation of Indian Corn, would not in the space of only about one hundred and fifty years, have created a powerful nation, consisting of twelve millions of souls...This plant is the greatest blessing of the county...the greatest blessing that God ever gave to man.”

William Cobbett, A Treatise on Indian Corn, 1828

Project Territory

059


Table Top Farm

42°58’35”N 93°23’39”W

062


42°58’35”N 93°23’39”W

TableTop Farm is comprised of two young farm families –Chris and Kim Corbin, and Sally and Luke Gran, working together with complimentary skills and a shared vision. 2012 was their second season as TableTop Farm growing vegetables. Their mission is to provide high quality certified-organic produce to local and regional markets while earning fair wages and embodying the principles of community involvement, innovation, and ecological resilience.

063


064


42°58’35”N 93°23’39”W

065

DuPont Pioneer

41°40’21”N 93°42’52”W

066


41°40’21”N 93°42’52”W

DuPont Pioneer, formerly Pioneer Hi-Bred is the largest U.S. producer of hybrid seeds for agriculture. In 1926, Henry A. Wallace –farm journal editor, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (1933-1940) and U.S. Vice President (1941-1945) along with a group of Iowa businessmen, founded the “Hi-Bred Corn Company”. Headquartered in Johnston, it has operations in 90 countries around the world.

067

World Food Prize

42°35’16”N 93°37’08”W

068


42°35’16”N 93°37’08”W

Dr. Norman E. Borlaug; Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Father of the Green Revolution. The man who saved more lives than any other person in history. Who founded the world food prize in 1968 with the goal that it could one day come to be seen as the “Nobel Prize for Food and Agriculture.”

Plaque at the World Food Prize building

069

Calling for an Iowa-style corn belt in Russia, the Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev visited seed corn salesman Roswell Garst in his farm in Coon Rapids, IA in 1959.

070


42°35’16”N 93°37’08”W

The huge supplies of American grain that flowed into India during the 1950s and early 1960s accomplished the function intended by Nehru’s government, to keep Indian grain prices down. In fact, prices were so low that Indian domestic production stagnated. Indian farmers simply could not compete against grain sold at a loss by the American government, so they stopped trying and Indian production failed to rise fast enough to meet increasing domestic demand.

John Perkins, Geopolitics and the green revolution: Wheat, genes, and the cold war, 1997.

071

Griffieon Family Farm

41°46’24”N 93°36’32”W

072


41°46’24”N 93°36’32”W

The Griffieon family has been on the farm for six generations and has a diversified livestock and row-crop operation. LaVon has been battling with the City of Ankeny, resisting its desires to create a new highway that would effectively encircle the farm and make it a “farm island.” Our interview begins after group introductions and a chat in the farmyard.

Project Territory: Can you can tell us a about the history of the farm?

Craig Griffieon: (To LaVon) Go ahead I’ll let you go. (Laughter)

LaVon Griffieon: It’s his family’s farm. I grew up in northwest Iowa. Our kids are the sixth generation to be on the land, fifth generation to live in the house. When I married Craig we lived three miles away from Ankeny and now we’re surrounded on three sides by Ankeny. We have kids. Our oldest daughter is 29 and our son is 26, another 22, and a daughter 20. One of our sons started raising chickens and has for some years and he and I started marketing them ourselves. So pretty soon Craig came along and said, “You’re sure made a lot of money on these chickens.” And I said “Well I can sell beef like this, but I can’t sell poison beef. So he knocked off the growth hormones and the antibiotics and started feeding everything non-GMO with the corn that we grew and we mix our own feed. And so, we started direct marketing. I buy his cows at Chicago Board of Trade prices and then I take them over to the locker, get them butchered, bring it home. We sell them by the piece or by the quarter or by the half. And all that money is gravy, its money we would have never seen. Basically we have vertically integrated the farm. All I need is one of those darn kids to become a chef but they won’t even fix their own TV dinner. (Laughter)

LG: So Craig farms 1120 acres just conventional row crop. How many corn and how many soybeans?

CG: About half and half. 550 of each. You should rotate your crops so you have corn and soybeans. The soybeans leave nitrogen and it just makes for a better soil health, cause the soil – it’s not dirt it’s a living organism. It needs to be nourished.

LG: Also we have had a fight with Ankeny over the last ten years especially as they tried to annex us, or tried to figure out different deceptive ways to get us into the city. Ankeny is a bedroom community for Des Moines. We’re right at the crossroads of I-80 and I-35 so we’re at the crossroads of America and we got some people in city council that just had a pro-growth agenda and between 2001 and 2007/2008 they annexed 6000 acres of prime farmland.

073

They also ran a 1.6 million dollar waterline past us. Polk County has an ordinance that says that if you have a water line run past your house, you have to hook up to it. So Ankeny passed an ordinance that said if you hook up to our waterline you have to annex into the city. And the next thing that they passed I call the LaVon Ordinance, which said that once you annex into the city you have five years to get rid of all your livestock. And so, we dug a new well because the only way they have to police the actual, whether you are on or whether you are off is that if your well breaks you have to get a well permit from the county to get it fixed. And so we just dug a new well. That ought to work for some time. The only way that they’ll get us now is that they want to put a beltway in, three miles parallel to the interstate. That’ll be a long time happenin’. Federal government doesn’t have any money to do that, so that’s good for me. They have eased off since the housing bubble but they are starting to pick up again.

We had a neighbor that was in the paper the other day. They sold their land on a 1035 program, which is a federal program that allows you no capital gains. So they sold to developers, but the developers went out to another county and bought farm ground. So what they did was; they traded land ten to one so they went from a five hundred acre farm to a six thousand acre farm. So they were asking them in the paper, ‘where did you come up with all this land?’ And he said, ‘well, we picked some up back in the eighties, during the farm crisis’ and I was like (smacks her forehead imitating being dumbfounded) ‘yeah right!’ You know, it’s a federal subsidy that’s often misused I think. There was actually an article in a farm magazine. If you’re going to trade on a 1035 program, it suggested to get your next farm next to town, so when that town grows you can do the same thing and so somewhere out in rural Iowa there’s a young man that thought he was going to get to farm this amount of acres and now it’s gone.

CG: Well that’s what has caused the price of ground, out away from the city to go higher in price, not only the price of corn but there’s a lot of investors that are going out, investing in farmland right now and so just like he did the 1035 exchange – that made the price of that farm ground out in the country more valuable because he was able to pay more because he was getting more for his in here next to town. That all changed there, about four or five years ago and there wasn’t as much of that being done. I think there’s some starting to happen again now.

LG: We’re seeing a lot of that, land price going up because you can’t invest in the stock market. It doesn’t pay you to leave your money in the bank. So, invest in land; land will always be valuable.

074


41°46’24”N 93°36’32”W

CG: Cause if you look at land over the years, it maybe has its peaks and then it goes back down, but as it goes up, it keeps going up. It doesn’t ever go down and stay down. Back in the late seventies it got up to 3000 dollars an acre, and we bought some for 3000 dollars an acre and shoot, two years later it was worth about 1000 dollars an acre. But now that ground today is worth 10000 dollars an acre, so that’s just to tell you that lands going to get more expensive as time goes on. There’s only so much of it.

PT: How did you go about acquiring the land that you own? Did you start with one plot and acquire it around you?

LG: The Sexauer family, Craig’s family, came here from Indiana in 1868. And settled a mile down the road. And the Flemings settled up here. And the Fleming daughter married the Sexauer son and that got everything going. And we’ve added on to that. So that’s the six generations in a nut shell. Craig says it’ll only take one good divorce to knock out all they had.(Laughter)

PT: Can you tell us how you plant your crops?

CG: So then, before we plant the corn, we usually do one pass with the field cultivator to break up the soil and to incorporate the grasses. And then, after the corn is up, usually it’s between two and three leaves, we put on a broadleaf herbicide, and that’s about all we do with the corn until harvest unless we run into an insect problem or something else that we might have to spray for, but most of the time with the corn we get through pretty good without doing anything extra. The soybeans, the same way with it, we’ll do a pass with the field cultivator before we plant the beans. Then we’ll come back and put on a broadleaf herbicide when the beans are about ankle high. And we might have to come back and cultivate the soybeans in a couple of weeks to knock down any other weeds that are coming up later. We usually start harvesting soybeans second week in September. Usually we’re done with soybeans by the first or second week in October and then we start on the corn, and we are usually done with the corn by the end of October, first week of November.

PT: Can you maybe explain to us the difference between conventional versus GMO and what repercussions that has on your farm, or your practices in general?

075

CG: I don’t do GMO beans, I just do conventional. Same way with the corn. GMO stands for genetically-modified organism. And basically your round-up ready gene, your BT which is an insecticide gene and your corn rut-worm gene which is for corn rut-worm. Well, and if you put all three of them together, that’s your stack. Basically they’re a man-made gene . . .

LG: Well, they take a gene out of the corn and then they put some trait that they like into it. Monsanto had the patent on it, the problem started when the federal government allowed anything, a life-form, to be patented, and suddenly they have all these agreements you have to sign that you’re going to grow this seed and you can’t keep it and, of course, the seed is sky high.

CG: Well, you sign a licensing agreement. And a bag of GMO seed is about 300, 350 dollars a bag, it might be higher this year. I haven’t priced any yet this year. A regular bag is about 200, 180 to 200.

LG: And the soybeans, we just keep. We grow and plant them again next year.

CG: Now GMO beans, you can’t do that. It’s against the law. A lot of seed companies don’t even have conventional corn. Most of the little companies will have three to four conventional numbers, but they’ll have like 20 GMO numbers because advertising and everyone’s getting talked into the GMO and it’s a better deal because it protects you against insects and you can use round-up which is a cheap herbicide, you can spray it anytime. With a lot of the herbicides that I use on conventional corn the corn has to be sprayed before it hits five-leaf stage. But, we haven’t sprayed for corn borer (European Corn Borer Moth, Ostrinia nubilalis) in eight to ten year now, so it has decreased it. So it’s a good insurance policy. But that insurance policy costs you money. So, if you lose yield on the deal, is it a good insurance policy?

LG: Tell them about the Pioneer test plot.

CG: Oh, there was a just a farmer that had planted Pioneer. And Pioneer come out and put their signs, their little signs all along the road, they put them about every twenty or thirty feet along this field and we had a windstorm one night . . . the next morning the field is just flat, by 8 o’clock that morning those signs were all taken down.

PT: Is it the same price for the different corn?

076


41°46’24”N 93°36’32”W

CG: Same price. Now I do sell some non-GMO corn in Des Moines to a feed mill and I get a 25% premium for non-GMO corn and I have to haul it to them. There are some people out there looking for non-GMO corn because everything from the elevator has GMO corn mixed with it. So it’s just a matter of finding a market.

PT: So if the conventional gets a better yield per acre and over the last ten years, as the amount of corn produced has exploded, we see more and more acres planted in GMO, how can we account for the growth? Is it just that more acres are being pulled into production?

CG: Well the more acres you farm, the Roundup is a better, easier deal, because you can cover more acres, you can spray it whenever. It can be ankle high or it can be knee high – you can go out there and spray it and kill the weeds. So your window of application is a lot larger. And when these guys are farming 5000 to 10000 acres they can’t get over it all in a week. And that’s why they went to the GMO.

PT: So the capital costs are the same, machine is the same but they have more acres.

CG: Most of the time they’ll have bigger sprayers that cost more money. (Laughs)

LG: And bigger corn heads and more rows and everything just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

CG: But the bad part about that is, as those guys get bigger, the little guy that wants to get started farming can’t do it because it’s so asset intensive.

LG: No banker in his right mind would lend a young man around here the kind of money it takes to get started farming. You’re either handed that farm, down from your grandparents or parents, or somebody won the lottery because there is no way. A tractor costs so much.

CG: You’ll need probably at least two. Combines are close to 300,000, each head is another 100,000. And a planter is 100,000 dollars now. You can blow 100,000 dollars now and not even blink.

LG: We were looking at a combine and then corn hit eight bucks. We were looking in the fall and we went back in the spring and were looking at the same combine and . . .

CG: The price of the combine had gone up about 50,000 dollars. When corn hit 5 dollars, it took a jump. And now when it hit 7 or 8 dollars it took a jump.

077

PT: Is there an average size of farm?

LG: Well what they say, for an average in Iowa, is 350 acres. But that’s your little old lady whose husband died and she now lives in Boca Raton and she’s considered a farm at the ASCS or the FSA office. It’s still considered an independent farm, but it’s being farmed by someone that’s farming 3000 acres.

CG: I would say between two and three thousand is an average farm now. We’re probably considered little at a thousand, 1100. Where when you get up to 8000 or 10000 you’re probably considered a big farmer.

PT: Can you give us a sense of the economics of the farm? What are costs and how does it roughly divide. Not in numbers, but in percentage. Cost of the seed, equipment, labor?

LG: People don’t get paid that’s the first thing. They just live here and eat.

CG: As far as the income, I’d say 70-80% of the income goes back into the farm, to plant the seed and repair machinery. Probably 15% of it will go to living cost. To give you an idea: to put an acre of corn in you’ve probably got around 800 dollars an acre in fertilizer, seed, chemicals, land cost, machinery cost. And you figure if it yields a hundred and fifty bushel at 7 dollars, you end up with somewhere around a 1000 dollars or 1100 dollars an acre, gross. So if you got 800 dollars tied up in cost, you’re making about 300 dollars an acre, profit.

PT: Do you only farm your own land?

CG: Of that 1100, 300 I custom farm. The rest I rent or own.

PT: What is custom farm?

CG: Custom farm is where I go out and cultivate and plant it. And he pays me for doing it.

LG: The owner’s making the decisions: what seed gets planted, whether he sells it or keeps it. He’s making all the decisions.

CG: He gets all the grain. Basically he’s paying me to do an operation. That’s what custom farming is, which is good for me because that’s guaranteed cash in and no expense out other than my machinery expense and I tie that in with my operation end.

078


41°46’24”N 93°36’32”W

PT: So with these big farms, is it a similar story? Are they renting a lot of land as well?

CG: Most of the big farms rent a lot of land. Some of the cash rents around here are getting clear up to 500 dollars an acre, and you know the guy that rents that is going to try and get by with the least amount of fertilizer that he can put on and he’s probably even going to, what I call, ‘mine it,’ in other words if the soil buildup is there he’s probably going to put not quite enough [fertilizer] to take a crop off and then he’ll take some out of the soil too and if you do that for a number of years the soil stops producing because it’s just not, there’s no organic matter there...

LG: It’s depleted.

PT: So you were talking earlier about government subsidies that affect farmer’s practices and the land. What are some of the other ones that have a direct repercussion on you?

CG: Most of the farm program subsidies have been eliminated. They still exist for planting a corn base. They pay you 20 or 30 cents an acre in direct payment for planting a certain amount of corn. For the most part, the farm program is geared that if the price of grain goes way down below the cost of production, you’ve got some protection. And some of that is federal crop insurance that we take out every year. We still pay a portion of it but the government subsidizes some of it. As far as the program you sign up for, it’s somewhere around twenty cents an acre. If you sign up in the program, the reason they want you to do that is so that they know how many acres is going to get planted to corn and how many acres is going to get planted to soybeans, so that they can come out with their USDA report and cause the markets to go down or go up. So it doesn’t really amount to too much unless we have a disaster.

LG: The really sad thing is that they aren’t requiring any kind of conservation practices to get whatever little goodie you’re going to get.

CG: You know, we don’t really need any subsidies when we have 5, 6, 7 dollar corn. Now we go back to two dollar corn then everybody out here is going to be losing four dollars a bushel just putting the stuff in the ground.

LG: And I would say locally, Tax Increment Financing is probably the biggest headache because it’s a subsidy for developers to get their infrastructure put in and they don’t have to pay county taxes or our school taxes and it’s really gutted a lot of our schools. Entire towns in Iowa have been declared a tax-increment finance area.

079

And so all that money stays within the boundaries of that tax-increment finance and they never sunset them even though they are supposed to - they just keep signing back up. And so that I think has really been a detriment to the education, to schools in Iowa. It’s tough for schools to get any kind of money when they’re not on the tax rolls.

Well, I shouldn’t say that because the state of Iowa back when they had four TIF districts and were inventing this idea said that they would reimburse school districts, so I want to say 38 million, I think, came out of the state government coffers each year to reimburse schools. So, that way, local development, basically, is getting paid for by every taxpayer in the state. So that’s a huge subsidy.

PT: How is the price of corn determined?

CG: It’s the open market, it’s the Chicago board of trade and it depends on who’s buying corn that day. When Chicago Board prices open the elevator prices it usually runs 30 cents lower what Chicago Board price is here. It depends too, sometimes these ethanol plants are paying right at Chicago Board price and it gets to where sometimes it’s only a nickel below Chicago Board. Most of it lately is the fund buyers that got out of the stock market, got into the grain market, and they bought into the grain market for the last two years, three years, well now they’re deciding it’s time to take their profits out of the grain market and put it someplace else and so that’s why we are seeing a lot of fluctuation right now.

LG: When [Tom] Vilsack got in as Secretary of Agriculture, he was our governor, and he was so in bed with Monsanto he flew around on a Monsanto jet for seven years and started the Biotech Governors Association, which had like 27 governors. Think of the impact of that in the fifty states of the United States when your governor calls up the congressman and says vote this way, vote that way. And so you see Monsanto is trying to get more genetically modified species of plant because they know that if proposition 37 passes out in California and we have to start labeling what we are eating, people aren’t going to buy it. And it’s hard to make people understand how political it is but it’s really about control of the world’s food supply and whether you have to buy that new seed every year. And so when you go into an African nation and you lure them in by giving them genetically modified seed then you have basically contaminated that place and that pollen can go anywhere.

CG: And most of the food they grow over there is actually for food.

080


PT: Can you tell us more about the farmer’s crisis in the eighties?

LG: That’s when the federal government set acreages, Secretary of Agriculture Butts said “Get big or get out.” And that is when they basically weeded the human trash out of farming, cleared the way for large machinery.

CG: The government had a reserve program, where you could seal corn for the federal government and if you stored it for them they paid you three cents a bushel a month for a contract time . . . it was either a 1 year or 2 year reserve deal, throughout the seventies the government started storing up this corn because they were afraid they were going to run out of corn. This made it lucrative if you wanted to build a steel bin. It meant you could pay for it in three years by storing the corn for the federal government. And that’s what a lot of people did. We did it too. What happened was in 1981 and ’82 most of those reserve programs came due and so the government started dumping all that grain onto the market, well at the same time, Jimmy Carter put an embargo on Russia so we couldn’t sell any grain to Russia. Well we were selling a lot of grain to Russia at that time so okay, federal government dumps all this grain onto the market, our export sales go to pot, so we have all kinds of corn and soybeans and it’s worth – corn got down to, I think, a dollar a bushel.

LG: Well and of course you got people who have taken out huge loans

CG: And in the seventies, everybody was expanding, people were buying more ground and they were all doing it on borrowed money but the other thing that hit in the eighties was the interest rates went up to 19%. Well if you had 200,000 dollars loaned, interest rate was 19%, and you weren’t making any money on your crop. You were selling corn for a dollar, dollar and a half, and beans for three or four dollars, you were losing money there. Plus there was a surplus of meat, hog prices were down to nothing, cattle prices were low. Used to be, if you were losing money on the grain you were making money on the livestock. Or vice versa. In the eighties you couldn’t make money on anything you did in farming

LG: And then the banks started pulling the notes, they were over-leveraged.

41°46’24”N 93°36’32”W

081

CG: See what happened was, just like that 3000 dollar an acre ground that we bought, went to a thousand dollars an acre; we lost equity because it wasn’t worth as much and so it took more land to cover that note. Well if you didn’t have the other land to cover the note then the bank started foreclosing on you. And that’s what happened in the eighties. PT: Many times we talk about farmers as one big category, but how is it? What is the relation between a farmer and another farmer?

LG: They used too neighbor. So one guy had this piece of equipment and they would all work together. We grew up on a very small farm and aspired to 80 acres. You know, and I think we had a hundred and sixty that my dad farmed. But everybody neighbored...

CG: When you bailed hay, you helped each other, when harvesting corn you know...

LG: The eighties turned us into competitors. We became operators...

CG: Well it changed-

Harvey Griffieon (Craig’s brother): It’s a business...

CG: And it’s more cutthroat.

HG: That’s right. Cause you got your own family intact. Your family did everything instead of going to the neighbors.

LG: You just got bigger equipment and take care of it yourself.

CG: But you get more cutthroat, that’s why land prices are 500 dollars an acre.

LG: When somebody dies expect there to be one butthead that comes to the funeral home and asks ‘Can I rent that ground next year?’ I mean it’s tacky, but on top of it.

PT: How do you imagine the future of land in Iowa?

CG: That’s a good question. It’s going to depend on the public. There are going to have to start demanding to know where their food is coming from and what’s in it and when that happens the big farms, they aren’t going to be able to farm as big as they are because to do conventional farming takes more time and if you’re farming ten thousand acres you don’t have the time.

082


I mean there just isn’t enough time to cultivate your crops and do it the old way. You got to use chemicals, you got to use insecticides, you got to rely on that stuff.

HG: Well, and I think, in the future you’re going to see them have to get a little bigger because of the equipment but you also have more family involved so you have to get somebody else a job, so you get more jobs involved and so you got to get bigger to justify having the family there. I don’t really look for big corporations to buy because they have to hire any ol’ Tom, Dick, and Jones off the street to come out and farm for them. And they get a salary; they don’t give two hoots what the farms look like. They’re out there for a paycheck.This is our family living. This is a way of life, for us, as a family, we farm. We still want everything to look good, we got to have everything working right and we got to be enjoyable and have fun doing it too.

PT: One last little question, why are all the barns and outbuildings in Iowa white?

LG: Because red bleaches out faster and you have to repaint it sooner.

CG: And it reflects the sun better, it doesn’t retain the heat.

LG: I hate it.

CG: Most of them used to be red but the problem is the red paint fades and every couple of years you’re having to repaint.

LG: This is Dutch-German nature.

PT: Great, thank you. Can we look around, see the animals?

LG: Sure.

41°46’24”N 93°36’32”W

083

Iowa Corn Growers Association

41°39’36”N 93°44’24”W

084


41°39’36”N 93°44’24”W

The Iowa Corn Growers Association (ICGA) is a membership organization lobbying on agricultural issues on behalf of its 7,000 members. The ICGA’s lobbying and legislative efforts are financed through membership dollars to build relationships with business and industry and provide corn growers with a voice in Iowa, Washington, D.C., and around the world. The Iowa Corn Promotion Board (ICPB), works to develop and defend markets, fund research, and provide education about corn and corn products. Both organizations work on the joint mission to create opportunities for long-term Iowa corn grower profitability.

Shannon Textor: I apologize for running a little bit late trying to get the package together and everything organized. So I have been working with Iowa Corn Grower for 10 years. And I grew up in a farm, here in Iowa, which had corn, soybeans and also a feedlot. So, farming has being part of my life style. It’s not only a job, it’s, you know, a lifestyle and the way you live your life. And all of our farmers feel the same way. I’m thinking you will find here that Iowa corn has a passion of agriculture, and for providing feed and fuel for the world. So Who are we? We are not-for-profit organization. We are collectors of the check-off. So for every bushel of corn that is sold in the state of Iowa, be it to an ethanol plant, elevator, feed mills, we will get one cent of every bushel. And it is a voluntary check-off which is different than all the other check-offs here in this state. So, if we are not doing a good job with the farmer’s money, they can ask for it back. Very few farmers actually ask for their dollars back. And the thought behind the check-off is that you use the money collectively to help create markets for research and for education about our industry. And as I mentioned I do market development, I work a lot with the US Grains Council. I work a lot with the National Corn Grower Association, which is the industry’s national organization obviously. We collect the dollars here in the state and we get funding up to NCGA. We have an aggressive servant so our state decides what program we want at the national scale. As the National Corn Grower Association, we do a lot in state research, in finding new uses for corn. So we research ethanol, for instance, and found that it’s a good opportunity in markets. So we did the research behind it to help formulate the best way to move forward in that industry, and we obviously have now moved it to the market development department. We have a good relationship as well with the livestock industry. They remain our number one customer for feed, which then obviously becomes food; when we talk about food and feed, this mostly what we are talking about.

085

The Grain Council is an export arm, and they have international offices across the world. Also, we work in India, Japan, Korea, China, Mexico, Canada, and are trying to continue developing of markets, teaching people how to feed, to get better meat, milk, dairy, poultry available to their consumers. We similarly work with the US meat export federation in export market. As you know, most of the population growth is outside the US border, so we really see export as an opportunity for our product. So this is a snapshot, this is all in your packet as well.

[the PowerPoint presentation begins]

So this is the Iowa corn supply. We have over 4,000 products that are made from corn. Most of the ethanol plants in Iowa remain farmer-owned, which means a community member, a banker, a teacher, and an insurance salesman, or farmer, are all invested in an ethanol plant to help build the industry, their community, and a market for their corn. So it has been a great industry here in the state of Iowa. We have 40 plants and growing, as you can see, until 2018/2020. When I first started 10 years ago, we couldn’t get anyone to talk about ethanol. Now you can pick up a paper and you will see ethanol in there. And usually it’s very positive.

Project Territory: For how long have you had these statistics?

ST: We started in 1978. So we do have statistics that go back. This chart is a smaller snap of the last 20 years and the next 5 years ahead. And we do have the statistics all the way back to when we started at 1978.

PT: Can you tell us a bit more about how ICGA started?

ST: Sure! The farmers decided that they wanted a voice. We have 7,000 members, which is about 10% of the farmers we have here in Iowa. So rather than one farmer going to talk to their legislator, they wanted a collective voice of all farms. The farmers come together to help set policies for the state, and all growers from across Iowa are invited to come in and help to determine what polices they want to work on this year. Promotion dollars cannot be used to lobby; it can only be used for research, education and market development. So, the grower’s arm is our lobby organization. They do the work both here in the state and in DC. This is Don Mason, our director of grower association membership.

086


Don Mason: We are somewhere between 10 and 15%, depending on who you call a “farmer” because, according to USDA, there are a lot of farmers in Iowa. But some of them just have farm income, they don’t manage farms. We feel like there are about 45,000 farmers in Iowa, who depend on farming for a good share of income. So you are talking 1/6, 1/7 or something like the farmers in Iowa are members of the association. We started so that the farmers have an opportunity to rally together, have a collective voice. We then started working together in logistic activities and in the education in the consumer section. And that’s when ethanol started as well, so they started building that market.Our feed usage, as you can see, has remained very consistent. Though a large percentage of our corn goes into feed, the percentage might have gone down because some great percentage of Iowa’s corn goes into ethanol. And the yellow line shows DDG (Dried Distillers Grains). So for every bushel that goes into an ethanol plant, a third of it comes out as feed. So 1/3 becomes ethanol, 1/3 becomes DDG or corn glut feed or corn glut mill, and the other third is actually carbon dioxide. That is used a lot in the soda industry or in frozen foods. They use it in a lot of different ways, so none of this corn goes to waste.

PT: What about the discussion earlier on ethanol subsidies?

ST: Today we don’t have ethanol subsidies in the US. There is renewable fuel standard because the oil industry isn’t very happy that the ethanol has taken off 10% of their market. But the renewable fuel standard allows us to depend more on our domestic sources of fuel and energy as a nation. Today we need that renewable standard to help have market access. So it’s really more about market access into the fuel and energy sector.

PT: So would it be in Iowa’s interest to expand domestic oil production, or would it be against the ethanol interests?

ST: We would be supportive of all domestic fuel sources, but we would prefer renewables. We even have Brazilian ethanol, although we don’t necessary want it to be imported to the US because we can produce that fuel. It’s still been imported. As far as the renewable fuel, it’s better for the overall environment, and it’s better for moving forward to the future.

PT: Can you maybe speak about some of the implications of larger production scales on social relations in Iowa?

41°39’36”N 93°44’24”W

087

DM: Farms are getting larger in Iowa, just like consolidations in almost every industry. Corn started in Iowa back in the 1850, and I’ve seen farm numbers decline every year since the early 1900s to 1920s because people consolidate, take more acres. Farming always has been a very high investment sort of proposition. I used to farm myself, so I kind of know some of these realities. A tractor can easily cost 250,000 dollars. A combine can easily cost with all its equipment close to half million dollars. If you have a thousand acres, you spread the cost of the combine over 1000 acres. If you have two thousand acres, you spread the cost of the combine over 2000 acres, and of course your force structures change. So, economic reason is always driven by the expansion or increase in the farm size. I still think we are not to the point where people talk about corporate agriculture. You will find that a lot of farms in Iowa are corporations, but the corporation where I might be the president and my wife might be the vice president, and my son is the treasurer. And that’s the corporation, and we are farming as family unit. And they form because of the tax advantages and the ability to pass land on from one generation to the other. But yes, farms are getting larger. That has impacts on rural Iowa, because as you decrease the number of farm families, you are decreasing that support base out there for the smaller communities, and smaller communities are struggling with that. Some of them much more than others; there are a lot of communities out there in Iowa that are essentially disappearing. There are also lots of communities in Iowa that are figuring out some kind of formulation to replace part of the farm population with a manufacturing population. So, not all small towns are suffering. But some of them are because they haven’t figured out the formula to replace that population.

PT: Another topic that comes up as well is the large percentage of aging farmers. How is the culture going to shift, or will there be more of the consolidation that you are talking about?

DM: I’m interested in figure out what’s going to happen there, too. The actual average age of the farmers has always been higher than the average age of other industries. Farmers tend to stay a lot longer than the other industries ‘cause it’s a life style. You know, I know guys who farm until they are 85, and they do it because they love it. If they retired, they have no clue what to do. So they farm until their death. Historically, that has been the case. The average age of farmers in our association is 58 or 59. It’s relatively high. What we have though is the huge number of baby boomers who get toward farming at the end of their career. There is going to be a sea change here because there are so many baby boomers now controlling a lot of land.

088


ST: We actually see more and more people interested in coming back to the farm. And maybe some of them still work in town and have another job, and work part time for the farm. We see more opportunities just because there has been the demand for the products and the growing market. This is the usage of livestock, it has always been the entry point for younger farmers. They’re expanding the business enough to allow for another family to be supported there on the same acres.

PT: In some context we see the relation between urban land and agrarian land kind of unfolding. Has there been some of the negotiation in Iowa?

DM: There are probably three or four places in the state where that’s the issue. Certainly here in the Des Moines area. Especially as you move west of Des Moines, where there is lots of good farm land that has been turned into housing developments. The same is happening in the Cedar Rapids area, in Waterloo area, a little bit. Again, you call it negotiation, and that’s what it is. It’s economic negotiation in terms of what that land will bring. In some cases urban development is winning the negotiation.

PT: How does the association view the increase in land price?

DM: The land price increase of the past few years is very positive because it has put a lot of equity into the agricultural industry and updating machinery. There is some newfound wealth as well. It’s not exaggerated wealth. Land prices, like everything else, tend to moves like pendulum. It’s going to swing back, there were some land sold in the county where I used to farm for $13,000 an acre about three weeks ago. That’s a pretty crazy price for land. It’s going to swing back from that while you keep getting some growth. Farms are in a great position right now. The last huge swing was the farm crisis in the 1980s. Farmers had gone out, purchased a lot of land with borrowed money. And when the swing back came, it actually did a lot of harm to a lot of farmers. This time around, farmers actually own that land, much cleaner, they don’t have a high percentage of debt going on.

PT: Do you see any down side that you wouldn’t like to see necessarily in production mode, or in the economic growth model? Are there side effects to the story?

41°39’36”N 93°44’24”W

089

ST: Technology has definitely benefited us. You know we will meet all our market demands. But, if you talk with Monsanto and Pioneer, they are talking about 300 bushels an acre by 2030, maybe. So we have a lot of growth to achieve, we have to double our market demand if technologies continue to expand. So, that’s a challenge for us. We are trying to make sure that we are continuing to find a demand for the product, because otherwise we will have piles of corn everywhere. And then the 13,000 dollars an acre wasn’t a very good investment! So that is a challenge: the technology continues to increase and increase, what are we going to do with all that corn? So that is the challenge we have to continue to find those markets.

DM: Fortunately, technology is also making corn that is much more efficient in using fertilizers, so we really have had the increase. If you look at nitrogen usage over the last 20 years, while corn has been increasing, the nitrogen used per acres is actually going down because corn is much more efficient about using nitrogen and other fertilizers. But it’s still an issue. Our transportation system for example is 77 years old now, if we get to the point where we have a huge export demand, it needs some really major investment in infrastructure.

I farmed for 25 years, every winter I will spend days actually looking at all the yield result from the previous year, for all the companies. And I was there to pick up my seed corn for the next year. I always picked the corn that yield the most. Economically, from a single farm stand point, the best way you can lower your cost is to increase your yield. That’s the way companies are going to following, because they need to response to farmer’s needs. A number of seed companies and there are a number of genetic companies compete for the farmer’s business. So, they are all talking with those farmers very regularly, finding out what they are shooting for. And, there are a lot of things that farmers shoot for. I mean they want corn to actually stand up in the field, because it could be a huge amount of corn that will falls over before you harvest it. That’s a problem. But yield is always, always very important, because it’s such a driver economically on an individual farm bases.

PT: Maybe a couple of words about how you imagine the future? How do you see Iowa’s agriculture landscape in 20, 30, 50 years?

090


DM: I think there is huge opportunity. I think agriculture has always been the foundation of civilizations. Back in the 70s, 80s, because our production got ahead of our demand, there were a lot of issues there with low prices of government subsidies. I think we are pretty much past that right now. I’m looking for a world that needs more food, where developing countries have higher purchasing power and higher quality diet. That’s not going to stop. I’m pretty excited. What’s going to be there in fifty years can be awesome.

41°39’36”N 93°44’24”W

091

Lincolnway Energy

42°01’23”N 93°31’53”W

092


42°01’23”N 93°31’53”W

Lincolnway Energy LLC is a 50 million gallon per year coal fired dry mill ethanol plant. Since 2006, Lincolnway Energy has been processing corn into fuel grade ethanol and distillers’ grains. The site was chosen for its central proximity to an ample supply of feedstock, as well as major national transportation corridors of Interstate 35, US Highway 30, and Union Pacific’s Class 1 Rail Road.

093

094


42°01’23”N 93°31’53”W

Lincolnway Energy generates additional revenue with minimal operating costs from the co-products of ethanol; it extracts corn oil from the syrup and has entered into an agreement with a third party to collect the carbon dioxide gas.

095

Iowa State University Leopold Center

41°01’36”N 93°38’47”W

096


41°01’36”N 93°38’47”W

The Leopold Center is a research and education center on the campus of Iowa State University created to identify and reduce negative environmental and social impacts of farming and develop new ways to farm profitably while conserving natural resources. The Center is named for Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), a Burlington, Iowa, native known internationally as a conservationist, ecologist, and educator. He saw the need for development of a land ethic, outlined in his 1949 book A Sand County Almanac.

On the campus of Iowa State University, Project Territory met with Mark Rasmussen (Director), Mary Adams (Outreach, Policy Initiative Research Program), and Laura Miller (Communications).

Mark Rasmussen: The mission of the Leopold Center was mandated by the legislature back in 1987 and the primary source of funds comes from a tax on nitrogen fertilizers in Iowa as well as some pesticide registration fees. As was stated by the legislators at the time, this is not a punishment tax on nitrogen. However, the consequences of nitrogen utilization in row-crop funding, especially corn, and the downstream impacts, from the state [Iowa] to the Gulf of Mexico are very large. So the center has been involved in concerns over resource utilization, how we’re using the resources of the state and whether there are alternatives that won’t be so impactful.

Our big concern is that with global markets. We’re putting an awful lot of pressure on our resources to produce corn and soy. Even the soybean organization is concerned with the imbalance of economics between soybeans and corn. There’s approximately 13. 5 million acres of corn and only 9 million of soybeans, so traditionally, the balance between half and half has been gradually replaced by significant acreage of corn-on-corn croplands, which leads to several biological and resource problems.

Project Territory: How do you experience agriculture in the landscape of Iowa?

MR: In Iowa, you literally live and breath agriculture. In the fall, it’s dust from the combines, and on some evenings you can see a haze hanging in the air; all these combines are out there churning out this dust and it just hangs there. In the fall, there’s a fairly pungent, musky odor, especially in North-Central Iowa, because they empty all of the hog-confinement lagoons once a year, and that is all injected into the ground. But depending on the moisture conditions of the soil, the ground doesn’t always seal tight, and out-gassing occurs as a result.

097

Poultry production carries more of an ammonia smell, simply because of the composition of poultry waste; you’ll see piles steaming on the landscape and that of course is being spread in the fall as well. Depending on the weather, there is a particularly narrow window when the row crop comes out and they can get onto the ground to spread or inject this waste. In some years when it’s wet, it can be quite difficult to get this work done.

Concerning Iowa, about 85% of the state is farmland, because of its soils, climate and productivity. Two-thirds of the acres of the state are devoted to corn/soy row-crop production. So Iowa has one of the least amounts of public-use alternative land of any state. Traditionally, grain crops – corn and soybeans – were used in livestock production. Historically, Illinois and Iowa fed the grain, you fed the grain to livestock then walked the livestock out to Chicago as your economic activity. Then, the railroads came along and then the interstate [highways]. Ultimately, the meat processing plants moved out to the livestock production centers rather than being in centralized cities like Chicago. So the impact on the land is quite great. The North Central part of the state, where it’s glaciated and very flat, witnesses less sever soil erosion problems than Southern or Western Iowa, where the soil is very prone to erosion.

PT: Can you help us think through what’s driving this exponential increase in desire for more yield, more productivity for corn, more corn?

MR: Well, it is simple global demand with population, but also with improvement in diets, whether it be for dairy products or meat products or soy processing. 40% of Iowa’s hogs go to Asia, so we have long ago outstripped the demand and requirements of the state plus the United States. That’s why all of the commodity groups are always pro-trade, pro-export, because a large factor in terms of the economy and these various commodities is being able to export.

Back in the 60’s and 70’s, [the United States] had problems with production surpluses, and so international aid gave countries a way to buy our commodities. Some would say that it was problematic, that it damaged our local agriculture by having us supply their needs, but in fact we solved our surplus problem by getting it overseas. Agriculture has a long history about worrying about price declines due to overproduction. If you look at the years since the 1940’s, that’s been a bigger problem. This is the mindset of the Corn Growers Association, even with corn at $7.50, the anxiety over price declines persists, and this is part of the reason why ethanol became so appealing.

098


It is really difficult right now with the current corn market, plus with the policy decisions in Washington with regards to crop insurance, because it essentially guarantees an income regardless of risk, and one of the criticisms of the Crop Insurance Program is that it stimulates the conversion of more fragile lands into row crop production, such as in Western Iowa and further up in North and South Dakota where they have traditionally had a lot more grazing and rangeland. And with new technology and new hybrids for the shorter growing seasons, they can grow corn and soybeans that they couldn’t 30 years ago, simply because they didn’t have hybrids that were developed for that.

In Iowa, 60% of the [raw bushels of] corn crop goes to ethanol. The ethanol industry will point out that one-third of that comes back to the livestock industry, distilled grains, but that’s mostly fiber and protein, and very little starch. Therefore, its value is diminished for chickens, hogs, dairy cattle; if there is too much oil in it, milk fat production and dairy production in the cow is suppressed.

PT: On scales of operation, how are small, medium, and large operations defined in terms of size? What would you qualify as a small farm operation and large? Is there a rough idea of how that breaks across the state?

MR: Typically, a grain farmer is probably 3,000-5,000 acres. Large operations can be as large as 10,000 acres. Fred Kirschenmann works on a project called “Ag in the Middle,” which focuses on bi-modal economies, where the large and small can be successful, but middle-scale operations have the most pressure. A lot of farmers have a spouse that works outside the farm, maybe providing health insurance, so they don’t have to buy it from Farm Bureau at higher prices. This has been a multi-decade tendency in agriculture as we’ve had a deflationary process of agricultural commodities. Having twenty steers or twenty milk cows now equates to a ridiculously low amount of income, so farmers have been pressed to keep advancing in acres and number of cattle or hogs in order to still maintain a family income. The USDA has redefined what they consider a farm and have classified then by gross income.

PT: Does the farmer classification bring with it incentive or subsidies that make it beneficial for the classification, perhaps if you have a small farm and making minimum income?

41°01’36”N 93°38’47”W

099

MR: Actually, it’s skewed in the other direction. Large-scale farmers get discounts on seed purchases that only they and the companies know of, but they can be substantial. If they commit to buying all of their seeds from Monsanto or Pioneer and they get it brought in by the semi load, they get substantial discounts. The same happens with Deere. One of the other big industries in the state is machinery manufacturing. With combines at $500,000 and tractors at $300,000 to $400,000, they will actually bring a farmer into the plant to see his machine completed and rolled off the assembly line, before shipping it to the farm. There’s that catering by businesses to large-scale operators. If anything, these kinds of things push the scale more toward large-scale.

Mary Adams: Also, horticultural farmers can’t get crop insurance the same way corn growers can. The Federal Farm Program doesn’t have the risk management for the livestock producers like they do for crop producers. You can get crop insurance but you can’t get grazing insurance or livestock insurance.

PT: What are the repercussions of perpetual growth for farms in Iowa?

MR: With any row-crop production, you always have a leakage in nutrients in the groundwater, and a lot of Iowa, especially in North-Central [the flatter areas] are heavily tiled, because a lot of that was prairie regions where there was internal drainage. When it was prairie, it was a wet, swampy kind of ground throughout most of the year. So, before the time of GPS and laser-leveling equipment, farmers used clay tile, and since that time, the technology is cheaper and easier, so more acreage has been tiled. The latest movement with heavy rainfall events has been called “pattern tiling.” Rather than simply tiling from pothole to drainage to stream, now farmers are putting in 30-60 foot interval tiling throughout a whole field, so there is some concern that we are overdraining the land. Plus, there’s ever greater amounts of nutrient leakage in that groundwater that is drained off the land. So, if we run short of water, which we did this year, draining water off the land is not necessarily the best strategy.

According to the EPA criteria, a large percentage of Iowa’s waterways are impaired, so water quality issue has been a consistent issue for Iowa. One of our approaches more recently has been combining crop rotation with perennializing the landscape to some extent, where you can get perennials back on some of that land.

100


41°01’36”N 93°38’47”W

With the Strips Project, if you have a watershed, you can strategically put perennial grass strips to capture the sediment and the water, with row crop in between. This process is currently being experimented with as an alternative to trying to convince farmers and landowners to convert a whole acreage back to a wetland or to a perennial grass, as a way to help clean the water, absorb nutrients, and keep the sediment from moving on the landscape.

Impact on the landscape, in terms of wildlife habitat, water quality, people...the state government constantly has programs to encourage college-educated people to stay in the state. Universities have programs to encourage their alumni to come back to the state. With the dominance of agriculture and externalities that impact every citizen. There are direct examples of risk. The southern corn leaf blight, which was in 1975 was part of a larger campaign to ramp up seed production, thus creating the Texas Male Sterile seed. The plant breeders didn’t realize that that breed also carried with it a susceptibility to a blight disease. There was one year when production was significantly lower because of this disease that spread across most of the corn belt. You have to think about even with this drought, how things are going to shake out, with the economic balance between grain and livestock. It’s one thing to ramp up chicken or pig production, but we’re down to stock cow levels nationally are down to 1952 numbers. Are beef production is still relatively high because we’re growing bigger cattle, so it takes less cattle to produce the same tonnage of meat. But it takes several years to rebuild a breeding herd for slower animals like cattle. If we lose too many producers or production capability, milk and eggs will be the first commodities impacted by this shortage.

PT: And regarding the aging population of farmers, as well as the growing cost of machinery...

MR: No one really knows the outcome of this. A lot of people have concerns about the next generation. With land at $10,000 an acre on average in Iowa, it takes several million dollars just to own property or even start an operation. So when you have farmers that on average have between 4 to 5 thousand acres in their control, typically landlords own a large percentage of that land. Other than families inheriting farmlands, will we end up with a land-in-gentry class, where only those who inherit land can operate a large farm.

MA: One issue with land being turned over to landlords is whether farmers renting the land operate with short-term gain in mind rather than long-term sustainability. Are they going to take necessary steps to preserve the land or plow everything up?

101

PT: What are the limits of the system? Are there points of collapse?

MR: It depends who you ask. One of the primary roles of the Leopold Center is to ask those types of questions. There are a lot of choke points in our production systems that are worrisome. If we go into this winter with rains as low as they are, we’re still behind last year’s crops by a considerable margin.

Laura Miller: Fossil fuel is another limiting factor, because fertilizers and pesticides are made from fossil fuels, and the tractors run on fossil fuels. 60% of the input energy cost of agriculture comes from fossil fuels.

MR: As we get heavier machinery on the land, it compacts the soil more, which takes more energy – deeper chisel plows – in order to break the soil. If we do get warmer winters, we’ve traditionally relied on the freeze/thaw cycle of the soil with tillage in order to break the soil up for the next cycle, but if the cycle is disrupted, will these clay soils be compacted permanently?

PT: Are there moments other than the environmental, where we can see the externalities of the system on the social as well ? For example, the effect of the change of the scale of the farm on the school system and its relation to population density, tax-base, longer distances to schools.

MR: The state, as well as some of the agricultural community, views this depopulation of the rural areas as a good thing because it frees up more land for the business of large-scale agriculture. The nodes that maintain significant populations and growth usually have established economies of trade. Senior citizens, large-scale farm operators, and the rural poor are the three main populations that make up these shrinking communities.

PT: The geographer David Harvey commonly speculates that ecological and political changes go hand in hand, and if you see that we are in a negative environmental externalities phase, what do you see are the necessary political or social changes to address some of your concerns?

MR: The problem with soil erosion, or climate change at large, is speed. It’s hard to get people motivated especially in the era we’re in. In the 50s and 60s, there was much more of a public concern over building terraces and waterways, or contour farming after the Dust Bowl era. That changed practices dramatically.

102


41°01’36”N 93°38’47”W

We saw this after World War II as well, although this coincided with the first commercial fertilizers and pesticides going on the market. Even so, there was much more of a conservation ethic at the time. The social and financial pressures on today’s farmers further certainly prohibit much of these alternative practices.

PT: What is the reasoning behind the shift in terminology, from ‘farmer’ to ‘grower’?

MR: There’s a difference between the farmer out in the field and some of these commodity groups. The commodity groups are pushing policies from a political standpoint, especially with respect to farm policy in Washington, where the primary objective is production, technological progress, and so on. I wrestle with the question of whether technology displaced labor in agriculture or if technology filled a vacuum of labor. In a lot of cases, people gradually left the farms. Once the cycle starts moving toward bigness, a self-perpetuating process occurs.

103

Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge

41°34’31”N 93°16’26”W

104


41°34’31”N 93°16’26”W

Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1990 with the mission to actively protect, restore, reconstruct and manage the diverse native ecosystems of tall grass prairie, which were the native habitats existing of the Refuge’s 5600 acres prior to Euro-American settlement. The Refuge serves as an environmental education, volunteer and outdoor recreation hub.

105

An Architectural Fantasia of Constructed GroundsVignettes of a Political Ecology

Danielle McDonough

108


McDonough

The relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction and imagination. This…is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.1

Donna Haraway

“Les faits sont faits.”2 Gaston Bachelard

From the “terra incognita” of Ptolemy’s Geographies in 150 CE to contemporary infrastructure-ground transformations, the relationship of humans to land-technology has been a constantly negotiated terrain. Territorial domination has shifted from the realm of Cartesian dominance to technological construction and molecular manipulation. The rise in confluence between technology, science, and landscape —in particular that of agribusiness—can be seen as yet another leap in the rise of man’s dominance over nature’s selection processes. Whether through extraction of resources, genetically modified seeds or cultivated landscapes, contemporary agribusiness forms a realm of processes that is inextricably linked to manipulation of landscape.

Current fertilization techniques, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), including drought resistant breeds, high-yield producing crops, are all modified to reach maximum output due to technological potential. In what political scientist James Scott calls the period of high-modernist agriculture, the ability to control cropland became more prevalent with the advancement of technology and science. He states:

1. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition (Blackwell Publishing, 2003): 430.

2. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991): 18.

Opposite PageApplication of anhydrous ammonia to cropland

1482 Ulm Edition of Ptolemy/Holle map

109

Processes that ensure the success of crop yield, such as the introduction of fertilizer for nutrient rich soils, are essential to the success of crop yield mandated by manufactured markets. Discussions of the anthropogenic impact on the environment have further pushed the realm of this relationship into one ripe for architectural imagination. In his article “Murky Evidence”, Paolo Tavares describes the Anthropocene as “a shifting point in planetary evolution distinguished from earlier millennia by the fact that humanity has become equivalent to a natural force insofar as it actively determines global ecological processes”.3

This project seeks to identify a way to operate with projective vignettes, of both futures and alternative histories, in order to shed light on the political ecologies associated with American agribusiness, in particular the processes of soil fertilization.

Nitrogen and Fertilization: The Rise of the Industrial Process

Liberated from the old biological constraints, the farm could now be managed on industrial principles, as a factory transforming inputs of raw material—chemical fertilizer—into outputs of corn. And corn adapted brilliantly to the new industrial regime, consuming prodigious quantities of fossil fuel energy and turning out ever more prodigious quantities of food energy. Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.4

Michael Polan

The introduction of elemental chemicals to soil for higher yield was universally established by the mid-1800s. Prior to that, the use of crop rotation and other managerial land practices assisted the soil in producing fixed nitrogen for plant growth. One the most historic references to nitrogen fertilizer lies within the one of the driest terrain on earth, in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Since the late 1800s, mining towns developed as extract locations of nitrate for the production ammonia. The Atacama Desert is the only naturally occurring deposit of nitrate in the world and because of this, the exploitation of the natural resources of the land was immensely profitable to miners.5 As natural deposit existed only in Chile and was being rapidly depleted, the Haber-Bosch process, named after the founding chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, was developed as an industrial alternative to nitrate extraction.

3. Paolo Tavares. “Murkey Evidence”. Cabinet,Fall 2011, Issue 43. (Immaterial Incorporated): 104.

4. Michael Pollan, “What’s Eating America”, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2006: 2.

5. Paul Marr. “Ghosts of the Atacama: The Abandonment of the Nitrate Mining the Tarapaca Region of Chile”, Middle States Geographer, 2007, 40: 22-31.

110


In 1913, the process to convert atmospheric nitrogen to a usable ammonia component was first utilized in an industrial capacity. It was this turning point which enabled agribusiness and cultivated land to enter into a new stage of production, and which would change our relationship to crops forever. However, scientific study of the three major inorganic elements in fertilizer production: potassium (K), phosphorus (P), and nitrogen (N), is still being developed today.

The demand for ever-increasing higher yields of Midwestern crops, in particular corn, has rendered common practice/essential the fixation of nitrogen in the productive landscape. The US commodity market for corn intends yields of 300 bushels per acre in the coming years, increasing the need for continually nutrient rich soils in the Corn Belt. The necessity for fertilizer to supplement the non-ubiquitous crop-rotation practices in this area is also enhanced by issues of land management and tenant acres, which are created by growing agribusiness. Because of this, anhydrous ammonia, a key resource to getting fixed nitrogen content to the soil, is needed at an exceedingly increasing rate. Anhydrous ammonia is produced using air, water, and natural gas, and about 4.8 million tons of ammonia containing 82% nitrogen are applied directly, through coulter injection or otherwise, to the soil every year in the United States.6 Today, on average, a typical acre of corn crop will utilize 200 pounds of anhydrous ammonia per year/crop. To understand the spatial repercussions of this process and importance of these practice of control and contingency of land to science, the fertilizer industry becomes and integral player in the economy of agriculture. We can trace the cycle of pre- and post-production aspects of the industry both spatially and in history, across continents and throughout centuries.

Territories of Nitrogen

The land is not a given commodity; it results from various processes…human activity: irrigation, construction of roads, bridges and dikes, erection of hydroelectric dams, digging canals, hollowing out of tunnels, terracing, land clearing and reforestation, land improvement and even everyday agricultural activity turn land into an unceasingly remodeled space.7

Andre Corboz

The industrialization of the Haber-Bosch process brought down the demand for natural nitrate deposits, leaving a vast expanse of ghost extraction facilities in its wake. The site of Santa Laura Saltpeter Works, located 48 kilometers outside of Inique, is now a world heritage site. However, back in the early 1900s it was a thriving location for the extraction of saltpeper, or potassium nitrate.

McDonough

6. Compressed Gas Association, Inc., The Handbook of Compressed Gases (1999): 247.

7. Andre Corboz, “Land as Palimpsest”, Diogenes (1983): 16.

111

Today, the Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works are representative of those towns. They now are under the purview of the UNESCO World Heritage Site, as “the development of the saltpeter industry reflects the combined knowledge, skills, technology, and financial investment of a diverse …[and] became a huge cultural exchange complex where ideas were quickly absorbed and exploited…The saltpeter mines in the north of Chile together became the largest producers of natural saltpeter in the world, transforming the Pampa and indirectly the agricultural lands that benefited from the fertilizers the works produced”8

With the development of the Haber-Bosch process and new fertilizer techniques, the global fertilizer economy has grown as powerful as the oil industry. Production zones throughout multiple continents extract natural gas to produce ammonia, the major chemical in nitrogen fertilizers. This global market of fertilizer is fed by several countries, including China, India and Russia. Trinidad and Tobago has become the largest exporter of ammonia to the United States. Even though, according to the US Geological survey, approximately 90% of the US’s domestic ammonia consumption was for fertilizer use, Trinidad and Tobago supplies the US with an estimated 36% of US imported ammonia. There, 11 major nitrogen facilities transform natural gas through the Haber-Bosch process into liquid ammonia for export. Then, within the US there are several companies and plants that directly produce fertilizer components, mostly anhydrous ammonia and UAN, with this ammonia supply.

Today, with over 50% of the ammonia used in agricultural lands, places of import and national production are also essential to the distribution process. Sites like the CF Industries production plant in Donaldsonville, Louisiana serve in multiple capacities as producer, distributer and importer of this agricultural commodity.

8. UNSECO

Left: Chilean nitrate advertisement from early 1900’s

Right: Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works

112


The Donaldsonville facility is the largest nitrogen complex in North America, and its location at the mouth of the Mississippi River allows access to low-cost river transportation, utilizing its prime location for both import and export capabilities. As a result of CF Industries’ acquisition of Terra Industries Inc. in 2010, Terra’s adjacent facility, which operates an ammonia manufacturing plant, will be folded into the company’s Donaldsonville complex. The four ammonia plants on site can produce 1600 tons of product per day, from raw material preparation to hydrogen generation, gas purification, ammonia synthesis and refrigeration. It has the capacity to produce up to 5 million tons of nitrogen each year, the majority of which are produced for agricultural use. The complex was built in the 1960’s and has continually been expanded, including a future 2.1 billion dollar expansion just announced November of 2012. The facility produces anhydrous ammonia, urea, and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN): three of the most common nitrogen products, which are then shipped by pipeline barge, rail and truck.

Two major pipelines transport and distribute anhydrous ammonia throughout the Midwestern states. First, the Magellan Ammonia pipeline, which runs 1,100 miles of pipe from Texas to Minnesota, has the capacity to run 528,000 tons of ammonia, with a delivery capacity at 20 sites of 900,000 tons. Secondly, the NuStar Pipeline or Kaneb Pipeline, with almost double the mileage of pipeline, has a delivery capacity at 24 stations of 2,000,000 tons. These two vectors collect, produce and distribute directly to 12 states in the United States.

McDonough

Ammonia Plant, Donaldsonville, Louisiana

113

These production zones, distribution centers and transportation lines are essential to the corn agribusiness in the United States. These infrastructures “constitute and artificial environment, channeling and/or reproducing properties of the natural environment that we find most useful. They also structure nature as a resource, fuel or “raw material”, which must be shaped and processed by technological means to satisfy human ends. Thus, to construct infrastructures is simultaneously to construct a particular kind of nature, a Nature as Other to society and technology.”9 These constructions serve as moments within a capital system which allow for new markets to be created, thus advancing the need for higher yields and advancement in agricultural technologies.

Political Ecologies of Nitrogen

Unable to effectively represent the profusion and complexity of real farms and real fields, high-modernist agriculture has often succeeded in radically simplifying those farms and fields so they can be more directly apprehended, controlled and managed…High modernist agriculture [that] courts certain forms of failure. Its rigorous attention to productionist goals casts into relative obscurity all the outcomes lying outside the immediate relationship between farm inputs and yields. This means that both long-term outcomes (soil structure, water quality, land-tenure relations) and third-party effects, or what welfare economists call “externalities”, receive little attention until they begin to affect production.10

James Scott

The externalities of over-fertilization of these lands have led to high nitrate content in the major water way systems of the US. The expansive tile drainage system in the Midwestern states, which serves to reduce root exposure to high water table conditions, agricultural runoff with high levels of nitrogen from fertilization has led to hypoxic zones in the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico. Research done by the USDA has shown promise in the use of nitrate sinks, also known as constructed wetlands, in reducing the environmental effects of agricultural mono-cropping. The ubiquitous application of nitrogen fertilizer is imbedded within a larger research interest of soil fertility and construction of land and land practices.

9. Paul Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems” (2003). 189.

10. James C. Scott, “Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity,” Seeing Like a State:How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1998): 262-264.

114


Proposal: Architectural Fantasia

Fantasia (n): a: a work in which the author’s fancy roves unrestricted and produces something, which is based on reality, but possess grotesque, bizarre, or unreal qualities

This proposal seeks to produce knowledge and investigation through projective futures of these constructed grounds in the agricultural operations. These above-mentioned political ecologies of the Corn Belt have significant regional and global ramifications. The automated landscape has thus further removed the individual, and their ability to understand the forces one enacts on the land, from the land they cultivate. Not only are we further removed from the land, but the farmers removed from their practice as well. Through spatial investigations of soil manipulation land use practices, this proposal seeks to raise awareness, through architectural projection, about several aspects of manipulation of soil for mono-crop agribusiness. The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has documented several projects interested in the fertilization process for agricultural landscapes, including the Monsanto phosphate plant and slag pour, Intrepid Potash, and Muschle Shoals Environmental Research Center. However, the decentralized nature of the fertilizer industry and various capitalist stakeholders leads to inefficiency in the conglomeration of research initiatives.

Beyond the CLUI realist-documentary approach, this project seeks to formulate a series of futures as a way to reinvigorate the imaginative into an otherwise automated capitalist cycle. This would be a projection into the spatial history agenda through vignettes of this political ecology through fantastical realism. The project investigates how architecture can depict global processes in succinct fantasias, and showcase the importance of a territory dedicated to food, feed and fuel.

Fantasia, as defined here, constitutes a series of amplified realities spliced in a bizarre or grotesque sequence to produce a non-linear totality. A distant cousin to Foucault’s heterotopias, which “are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language…destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and opposite one another) to ‘hold together’”11, these fantasias toe the line between linear narratives and imaginative utopic visions. These vignettes will assume a fantastical representational approach to the stories of these political ecologies.

McDonough

11. Michel Foucault. The Order of Things. (Random House, 1970): xviii.

115

Taken with the celebration of the imaginative, this project seeks the poetic nature of what geographer Andy Merrifield defines as Magical Marxism. Held within this is the concept of magical realism, where, “..Imagination is ahead of the formalist game; it drafts a rawer, positive conception of life that ups the ante of mere critique and analysis, of yet another research project...”12 Through projective futures and alternative histories, the political ecology of large scale soil fertilization, these constructed grounds can serve as a reminder of the power of architectural thought.

The sites of intervention could be multiple. From the driest land on earth to a barge on the Atlantic; from port cities of islands of production to a new cultivation agri-city on the base of the Gulf, set to create a series of festivals to celebrate the scouring of the fish to a fungal factory town, dedicated to microbial fertilizer research. All of these are differentiated by their program. The first might be a testing bed for extremities, including the further removal of knowledge from the source of production. The second: a new infrastructure for crop yield, to transport both educational knowledge across the globe. The third might assume the role as an integrator of knowledge, production and societal interaction. The fourth: an investigation into future technological enhancements of soil manipulation. These vignettes seek to produce project imaginations of hubs for new fertilization research, including bio fertilization (fungal, etc.), nitrate sinks (wetlands etc.), and impacts on social/urban conditions associated with the production of nitrate fertilizers. Similarly to Nixon’s description of author Sinha’s narrator in Animal Bodies, these vignettes seek to make “an occluded economic relationship physically manifest through [a] narrator’s body… to give a novel a local materiality while exposing the web of transnational forces that permeate and shape the local”.13 Through this process of architectural fantasia, a new terra incognita will be created, that of the malleable imagination able to utilize turbulent representation to tell fictions of this new imminent landscape.

12. Andy Merrifield, “Magical Marxism”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27 (2009):382.

13. Rob Nixon, “Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque”, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 55 number 3 (John Hopkins University Press: Fall 2009):450.

116


McDonough

Representation of nitrate injection

117

118


McDonough

119

120


McDonough

121

122


McDonough

123

124


McDonough

125

The Vertical Element

Jared Heming

126


19002

In the seemingly flat, or smooth, landscapes of the Midwest, the grain elevator is more than a storage unit for the harvested crop, but a cultural object as well. As such it is far more potent than a simple representation of storage. In other words, its qualities as an object are more than mere utility. The history of granaries is long, but their presence in the American Midwest did not occur until after the westward migration of Caucasian settlers in the mid-nineteenth century. Even after settlement, it wasn’t until infrastructure gave farmers access to markets, that surpluses were produced and the granary became necessary. The granaries began to grow tall in the 1880s, when the vertical-bucket conveyor belt was invented. They were huge boxes constructed of thick planks and massive timbers, and they are almost all gone now, being prone to fires and explosions and thus impossible to insure.1 They were replaced by concrete cylinders, the first being the Peavey-Haglin Experimental Concrete Grain Elevator in 1900. This single test structure fathered the slip-form cylindrical accretions rising across the grain producing states in the early to middle part of the twentieth century. And it was these pure material objects that would inspire the architects of Modernism in Europe and become the obsession of ‘new topographic’ photographers in the late twentieth century. This history hints at a question: how did the grain elevator become an icon of a vast landscape? And how does it operate in relation to the public, the observer, the vast majority of citizens who will never occupy this piece of agricultural infrastructure come agrarian landmark?

Let’s begin with a consideration of the object itself. How did it come to take on this form? Before the material qualities of the grain elevator and its storage capacities are discussed; the spacing of the sites of storage is important. Carney explains that:

The grower wanted the elevator nearby, conveniently located within a day’s round trip by wagon over dirt roads. The railroads, in contrast, wanted the elevators as far apart as possible. Their interest was twofold. One was to build as few miles of track as were necessary to gain the largest possible volume of grain traffic. The other was that rail transport is efficient in inverse proportion to the amount of acceleration and braking required. The compromise was the spacing of elevators from about three to eight miles apart. This is clearly reflected in their location in the Midwest and Great Plains. Spacing is most irregular and densest in the Corn Belt where the towns usually preceded the elevators and attracted them.3

1. Frank Gohlke, Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews, (Tucson, AZ: Hol Art, 2009). p. 65

2. Minnesota Historical Society, “Peavey-Haglin Experimental Grain Elevator.” Accessed November 27, 2012. http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/70peavey.html.

3. George O. Carney, “Grain Elevators in the United States and Canada: Functional or Symbolic?,”Material Culture, 1, no. 27 (1995): 1-24, p. 3

Heming

Opposite PageGrain Elevator in Iowa, courtesy of Danielle McDonough

127

So if the position of these objects in the landscape was largely generated by the interaction between two actors, the farmers and the railroads, what created the form of the elevators? Two developments occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century that transforms the granary into the grain elevator. One was a universal grading system and pricing, of which the former allowed for bulk transport to various markets and the latter allowed trading on the Chicago Board of Trade. The second was the invention of the vertical bucket conveyor which allowed for grain to be lifted and stored mechanically.4 This ability to take advantage of gravity in the movement of grain started pushing the silo skyward. During these developments grain elevators were largely constructed of wood. This could be clad in iron in order to keep out the elements as well as offering some measure of fire protection.5 Towards the turn of the century insurance rates for grain elevators was increasing significantly; grain dust is extremely flammable by itself and its containment in combustible structures was increasingly problematic. This generated a shift to all steel or concrete elevators. In the first half of the twentieth century, concrete rapidly became the material of choice.6 These concrete elevators were constructed using slip form technology to heights of a hundred plus feet which generated a seamless structure for holding the grain.

This technology pushed the elevator even higher above the horizon. Yet this summarization of its development does not address the magnetic presence of the object in the landscape. Gohlke points to this in his writing about his photographs. He states, “to me, the photographs I was making argued that there are deeper impulses lurking somewhere in the functional surfaces and details of the grain elevators, and that subjective choice as well as objective necessity has a role in determining their form. ”7 This consideration is interesting as it seems out of place with our normative views of farmers, as Gohlke notes. Yet Carney argues strongly against the idea that farmers made any aesthetic decision regarding the height of their grain storage. Rather gravity was simply an extremely useful force to help move grain around. Additionally, the physical properties of grain were an important factor. Carney writes that:

4. Ibid., p.4

5. Ibid., p.8

6. Ibid., p.9

7. Frank Gohlke, Op.Cit., p. 133

Art Sinsabaugh. Midwest Landscape # 60

128


...the tall, narrow bins proved feasible because small grain acts neither as a solid nor a liquid. Within the mass of the grain, internal friction produces an arching effect, which in turn is partially transferred by friction to a downward vertical compression in the bin walls. Consequently, little force is exerted on the floor of the bin, and the floor could stand unsupported over an emptying trough. More important is that little outward, horizontal tension-producing force was exerted, as in the case of a fluid, and the walls could be thin. This fact was particularly significant in the early use of concrete, which was strong in compression but weak in tension.8

If farming is viewed purely as a business, especially after the commodification of the grain crop by the Chicago Board of Trade, than Gohlke’s argument loses out to the utility and physics of the bulk movement and storage of grain. It seems the aesthetic qualities of the grain elevator are more a result of the culmination of practical factors than artistic authorship. Nevertheless one cannot deny the allure of the objects that Gohlke finds so interesting.

8. George O. Carney, Op.Cit., p.4

Heming

Diagrammatic Analysis of Grain Elevator Size by Type

129

While the elevator as an object radiates a prominence through its height and form, undeniable affective qualities, one can argue that this prominence would be mute in a rolling topography. A terrain with shifting and unknown horizons obscures the qualities of the object. In contrast, the flatness of the Midwest landscape allows the grain elevator to be the emergent figure on the land. This combination of the flatness and a 360 degree horizon combine to make the tall thin grain elevator the Vertical Element in the landscape.

With an established knowledge of the grain elevator, its material qualities, history and presence in the landscape, how does this begin to inform a methodology for design? Understanding the object and its history, or histories, does not imply a way for architects to act in a vast territory. In other words, we cannot take from reading history alone, a way of understanding the grain elevator and how it exists in the landscape. Again we can refer to Gohlke who argues that if the storage and distribution of grain were the only functions the elevators served, they would not have the prominence with the landscape that they do. A community of practical farmers does not build a concrete tower one hundred feet tall for the sake of a view. Vertical storage has real advantages, but it is nevertheless a choice worth remarking in places where there is little else but horizontal space.9 This raises the issue of how the object relates to its community and points out the possibility for a cultural understanding. One methodology to help delineate how the grain elevator operates aside from its direct infrastructural relationships is the framework Kevin Lynch presents in Image of the City.

In Lynch’s study of cities and their imageability amongst its citizens and visitors he establishes five main elements that contribute to an observer’s image of the city. They are paths, landmarks, edges, nodes and districts. Lynch defines these elements in relation to the observers that occupy the city. They are briefly defined as:

Paths: the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves. These can be streets, walkways, transit lines, canals, etc.

Edges: linear elements that are not used or considered as paths. These edges may be barriers or they may be seams.

Districts: medium to large sections of the city having a two-dimensional extent.

Nodes: points or strategic spots in the city. These can be junctions, breaks in transportation, crossing or convergent paths, or concentrations of some fashion.9. Frank Gohlke, Op.Cit., p. 67

130


Landmarks: another type point-reference but here the observer does not enter within them. These can be particular buildings, signs, a store or even a mountain.

In applying this framework for analyzing an urban condition to the vast territory of the Corn Belt, Lynch’s definition of edges and districts becomes considerably stretched. In the diffuse agrarian/urban condition of the Midwest, clean edges and districts become harder to define. One could argue that this is a result of the topography itself; the seemingly flat landscape offers no barriers to development except the occasional large river. Stan Allen argues that the original ordering of the landscape is a determining factor. He states: “the American cities of the Midwest and the West are local intrications and perturbations to the extended Jeffersonian grid. The town is an elaboration of the order applied to the farmland surrounding it. The grid is given as a convenient starting point, not as an overarching ideal.”10 As such, the townships are free to stop at the gridlines or simply crossover. They are only loose guides in the land to order a township’s edges which sometimes a community will ascribe to and other times not. Essentially, boundaries are not clear or legible, instead farmland and town seem to blur like the meeting margins of grassland and forest.

So, it seems edges and districts are not a clearly defined and useful category in the flat agricultural expanse. However, if its districts are not defined, the Corn Belt does have ample paths, nodes and agrarian landmarks. One can make a strong argument for the grain elevator as the dominant and frequent landmark in the landscape. It fits well to Lynch’s criteria of a landmark in that the observer does not enter them. In fact, it is a surprising facet of the Corn Belt that all of its inhabitants see numerous grain elevators, but the vast majority will never go in them. Another characteristic of the grain elevator that one can argue contributes to its ‘landmark qualities’ is that grain elevators are a pure material condition. That it is usually constructed out of one material, be it steel or concrete, that it has a uniform color, and that it has no fenestration or visible openings when seen from a distance. These qualities create relatively simple and uniform object in the eye of the viewer; which then lends itself to categorization as a landmark.

The paths and nodes of the Corn Belt, and the Midwest on the whole are also rather easily categorized. The streets and county highways of the Jeffersonian grid, along with the US and Interstate Highways intersect and cross over each other with consistent frequency. Add to this multitude of paths, the grain elevator: which occurs every three to eight, at most ten miles, from one another.

10. Stan Allen, “From Object to Field,” A.D. (Architectural Design), no. 67 (1997): 24-31,p. 27

Heming

131

The vertical element reaching above the horizon allows the observer to infer with some accuracy the infrastructure and elements on the ground that cannot be seen. They become points of way finding and one could arguably navigate solely by the elevators they saw along the route. Gohlke describes quite eloquently the relationship of the observer to the landmark. He writes, “at speeds above, say, forty miles per hour, my experience of objects in their spaces changes. I fix my eyes on a single object as it passes; it becomes a point on an axis extending from me through the object to the limit of visibility. As I proceed, the axis rotates around the object I have chosen, revealing a succession of visual relationships. At unpredictable intervals one of those fleeting connections may force me to stop, so great is its promise.11

This structure of paths and landmarks, which sometimes coincide at productive nodes, gives the Corn Belt a subtle but potent structure that proffers a unique identity. This is one of the reasons the ‘new topographic’ photographers found themselves drawn to its qualities. It also makes legible information occurring on the ground which its inhabitants cannot see. One knows where the railroad goes by eyeing towards the horizon down the line of diminishing grain elevators. The farmer can spin around in his field and spot all three locations where he will sell his grain. This legibility is invaluable not just for navigating the land, but in structuring identity and allowing one to position themselves in the broader abstract movements, systems, and forces that play out across the surface of the territory.

If the grain elevator and the roads structure the Midwest so readily, what then is left to add to the agrarian expanse? How or what does the architect do to the place? Gregotti states: “The territory of a nation is divided into privileged zones that are given particular historical or natural characteristics – and zones of no interest or ‘zones without landscape’, as if the latter, because they lack those inventoriable natural or historical riches, must be left to dereliction at a formal level instead of being structured according to figurative objectives that could provide them with substance and meaning.”12 One can argue that the Corn Belt is being left to dereliction at a formal level, even though it is highly structured and regulated. The formal control of the territory only informs what actors are in the landscape and what activities they engage, upon the productive soils. There is no formal control over what the territory looks like and how buildings and objects, i.e. landmarks, sit within it. However, to borrow the words of Gregotti, one can argue that the Corn Belt has “a very powerful morphological dynamic.”13 It presents an opportunity for making apparent an operation in the land.

11. Frank Gohlke, and John Rohrbach, Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke, (Chicago, IL: Center for American Places at Columbia College, 2007). p. 27

12. Vittorio Gregotti, “The Form of the Territory,” OASE 80: On Territories, no. 80 (2009): 7-22, p. 19

13. Ibid., p.15

132


If the grain elevator is the vertical element, the landmark in the flat agrarian landscapes of the Midwest than currently the system of row crop production is highly legible in the landscape. What is not visible are its consequences. The farmer can drive along and see the physical points at which his labor and crop are converted to payment by the Board of Trade. When he looks at the elevator six miles away he can imagine the city and its traders two hundred miles away. What he cannot see are the dissolved nutrients in the stream and what he cannot imagine is the red algae washing over the shores of the Gulf Coast. Soil loss, diminished biodiversity, agricultural runoff and excessive nutrients are unaddressed issues stemming from the system of overproduction. These externalities offer the possibilities for generating a 21st century infrastructure that marks the landscape in multiple ways. Can architecture address these conditions with an object which is designed for imageability, that presences or allows the citizen observer to establish a point-reference? Yet the object must also generate, or spark, knowledge within the observer - a condition prevalent in the landscape that they themselves cannot see. That this knowledge allows the observer to positions themselves within the abstracted systems, either human or natural, that shape the earth and their relations on it. Again I refer to Gohlke:

The view back toward the grain elevator may not be as overwhelming as the view from the top. But for the inhabitants it is more central, and it includes more. The vastness of the space which surrounds the grain elevator is directly proportional to the space it contains. The connections between them are as straightforward as the yield of the land or the price of grain in Chicago, and as mysterious as the monoliths of Easter Island or the mute circle of Stonehenge. In order for the world the grain elevator serves to function and prosper, the space inside must be filled and emptied in the same endless cycle which marks the growth, ripening and harvest of the grain.14

Here Gohlke has pinpointed exactly why the grain elevator offers an example of how an infrastructural object can offer cultural and aesthetic values. The object makes legible an operation in the landscape and also produces a marker – an element for way-finding. If architecture has an agency to address externalities produced by the system of over-production, than any proposal for a solution must also operate like a landmark in the landscape.

14. Frank Gohlke, Op.Cit., p. 67

Heming

133

The solution must offer the observer several things:

One – it needs to afford the observer knowledge of its operations.

Two – it must be informed by a systematic relationship, so it becomes apparent where it locates itself within the landscape. For instance, a grain elevator of a certain size will most likely be on a railroad. A country elevator might have only a road, but access to rail or barge will not be far away.

Three – it must possess verticality or presence in the seemingly flat terrain that generates a legibility of the system. The distant observer can see the object and know that at its base is an element of the system, and then they can see another object and know where the system goes without physically following it. In that way it offers the fourth criteria.

Four - the proposal must offer a means of navigating the territory that was not available to the observer previously. This is necessary to help add to the richness, clarity and legibility which make the subtle complex flatness of the Corn Belt evocative.

Operating from these points, the thesis will explore the new vertical element – a yet to be defined infrastructural landmark that replicates itself across the territory. In establishing a guiding stance for determining the aesthetics of the new vertical element, one can position D’Hooghe and Gohlke as waypoints. For Gohlke writes, “the dignity of grain elevators, the precision, intelligence and grace of their formal language, their majestic presence within the landscape all seem to confirm the faith that, given the right circumstances, we will make visible the best that is within us.”15 The best that is within in us; this open optimism implies ingenuity and creative freedom. And if the externalities from the system of overproduction are damaging the environment, than perhaps the architect can offer the positive vision for addressing the issues, perhaps the externalities of the Corn Belt are the right circumstances. If that is held to be true, than D’Hooghe offers another useful position. He argues that a design should operate as “a piece of labor to formalize artifacts in a manner that does not deny their own, perhaps ugly but nevertheless honest, functional nature.”16 In that regard, the new infrastructural landmark should not reference the landmarks of the City Beautiful movement, nor the monuments of CIAM, but generate its own aesthetic from conditions specific to the system it addresses.

15. Ibid., p. 68

16. Alexander D’Hooghe. “The Objectification of Infrastructure: Elements of a Different Space and Aesthetic for Suburban America.” Accessed November 16, 2012.

134


Overall the project should seek to not only address a systemic problem but offer new forms of cultural knowledge and exchange. In the opening pages of Image of the City, Lynch writes, “to extend and deepen our perceptions of the environment would be to continue a long biological and cultural development which has gone from the contact senses to the distant senses and from the distant senses to symbolic communications.”17 The design of the vertical element will allow the interplay of distant senses with the invocation, or creation, of symbolic communication. As such the vertical element takes up the provocation by Gregotti that “the opportunity to acknowledge that the construction of a landscape is part of the competence specific to the architect, in each case where we wish to act without any strictly functional concerns and aim to realize a daring geography that presents itself as a signifying image of the environment in which we live.”18 This is the challenge of the vertical element. That is the role of the architect in the vast territory.

17. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). p. 12

18. Vittorio Gregotti, Op.Cit., p.11

Heming

135

Frank Gohlke, from the book Measure of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape by Frank Gohlke and John C. Hudson

136


Heming

137

Analysis of the vertical elements along the Nevada-Ames Corridor in Iowa.

Diagram of human vision over the curvature of the earth. The vertical element extends one’s vision and knowledge past the horizon

138


Heming

139

Agronomic FalloutAn Ahistorical Account

David de Céspedes

140


de Céspedes

The thesis uses a fictional narrative to explore architecture’s potentials for arousing larger social, political, and economic discourses within the corn belt territory. The narrative will use quantified trends with respect to the use of fertilizers, chemicals, and genetic modification as the basis for the Agronomic Fallout narrative . By studying agriculture’s prescient facilitators, externalities, and their larger environmental effects, the islands along the Upper Mississippi River become human habitats protected from the harmful particulates which have permeated the ground, water systems, and the atmosphere. The fictional narrative construction relies on three complementary bodies of research.

First, an analysis of the current state of agricultural practice leads to the construction of a future scenario in which industrial agriculture has evolved its present industrial processes, advancing the use of technology, industrial harvesting practices, and consequently, environmental externalities. The proliferation of farming technologies, i.e. combines which drive themselves, have shifted the farmer’s role from laborer to business strategist diffusing the relationship to the land. In similar fashion to the recent threat of influenza due to the volatility of livestock farms, the gradually worsening cycle between stronger chemicals, acutely engineered plant genes, and increasingly resistant pests forms the foundation of the corn belt exodus.

Lastly, the emphasis on specific spatial typologies will reflect the relations between security and risk in a context surrounded by agronomic fallout. The isolation of the Upper Mississippi River Islands allows for new programmatic codependencies. Issues of transport, infrastructure, and waste are approached with severe caution in a futile attempt to mitigate any prolonged effects from the fallout.

Dust Bowl

The cycle of over-production, followed by disequilibrium has been a consistent aspect of Western agricultural practice. The Dust Bowl era of the 1930’s can be viewed as one of the first anthropocentric disasters on a continental scale – a confluence of man-made, environmental, and technological processes leading to a decade of impoverishment, infertile land, and market depression. In the years leading up to the Dust Bowl, the perception of the Southern Plains, or what is now Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma, was psychologically shaped by the fertility of the corn belt; with unperturbed soils and optimal light, temperature, and humidity conditions, the sole inhibitor of agricultural production was irrigation.

Opposite PageMan caught in dust storm, 1934

141

Though the Corn Belt largely relied on the rivers that collectively make up the Mississippi watershed, the thirst of the Southern Plains could only be quenched with rains. As corn belt lands speedily propagated as farmland throughout the Mid-1800’s, the logical expansion of production to the Southwest territory during the 1890’s unfortunately coincided with the end of an almost decade-long period of above-average rainfall. Thus, settlers were met with soils appearing to be far more suitable to agriculture than the Midwest, masking the ebbs and flows of saturation and drought in the Southern Plains. Production expanded unmitigated (not dissimilar from present-day corn production) with the proliferative use of tractors and combines, early ancestors of today’s GPS-controlled harvesters. By the start of the 1930’s, the Great Depression created pressure on wheat growers as lands were already yielding at or above their capacities. Conversely, the early-twentieth century period of rain and heavy saturation ended, creating a confluence of natural, economic, and cultural practices, which would be coined as the Dust Bowl.

The term Dust Bowl refers to a decade-long event exerted over the natural, cultural, and political framework of the United States. Taken literally, the term is a combination of ‘fine particles of matter” and “concave...nearly hemispherical vessel,” essentially taking a ten-year long series of storm episodes, and unifying them into a new term. The unification of disparate particles into one body is spatialized in a symbolically hemispherical territory. In this context, dust literally thrust itself to the far reaches of a country stretching form the Southwest to the East Coast. It was not until one of the largest dust storms swept eastward to the nation’s capital that Congressional legislation acknowledged the drought and dust as a ‘national menace.’

Tilling the soil.

142


Agronomic Fallout:episodes, and the collapsing of time

In the Agronomic Fallout narrative, the Dust Bowl is one of several ‘episodes,’ which, when weaved together in a nonlinear timescale, create the imaginary, quasi-fictional world of the project.

The Agronomic Fallout rests on the failures of empiricism, or quantification of environmental shifts in arousing different sensibilities regarding man’s relationship to both environment and technology. The proliferation of infographics, scientific predictions, and ‘unbiased’ media coverage have contributed to a collective desensitization of environmental shifts, ultimately leading to mental stagnation as well as increased political polarity. Through an anti-documentarian narrative, the world of fallout is solely constructed by the building blocks of foundational episodes, largely focused on precursors, events, or evolutions of agricultural practices. By only using spatial constructs extracted from these episodes, the fictional context allows for space [or architecture] to shed all references to time, theory, and criticality, in favor of a stylized, fictional construct.

Episodes are not historical, per se, but occupy an world where past, present, and future events are in collusion. The project avoids chronological prediction of future events, in favor of constructing a context as a direct result from the social, environmental, and technological qualities of the episodes. Furthermore, the biases in chronology tend to favor events in the past, despite repercussions [futures] of past events are oftentimes easier to conceptualize than the events themselves. In the context of this research, future episodes are constructed with minimal artificiality, as they are inherently tied to the present condition.

If the Dust Bowl period of the 1930’s is viewed as the first physical manifestation of dust as an externality of drought, overproduction, and unsustainable harvesting practice, this research explores the contemporary externalities of agriculture and their relationship to spaces of security and isolation. The primary intention of the project is to classify spatial repercussions of the aforementioned episodes, using generated spatial typologies to lay the groundwork for the narrative’s context. This presupposes that agriculture and its byproducts demand alternative perspectives in which time and scale are broadened as a means to grasp the scape of industrialized practices. Converse to the disjunction between agricultural externalities and human settlement, the controlled, hermetically-sealed interior environments which have dominated architectural production can no longer secure occupants against the shifting health, security, and toxicity of the atmosphere.

de Céspedes

143

Rock Island & The Upper Mississippi

The islands of the Upper Mississippi River, a collection of natural and man-made land, offers a context to test atmospheric manipulation beyond the scale of singular building, without succumbing to a purification of the urban environment in its entirety. Through simultaneous study of regional settlement/transport/production systems as well as the ‘condition’ of the interior and exterior environments of Rock Island, this research attempts to carve out a niche for a third option, investigating strategies of urban intervention, responding to the growing vagary of the atmosphere’s makeup while pushing atmospheric control beyond the air-conditioned space.

Quad Cities encircles the Mississippi River and lines the borders of Iowa and Illinois, encompassing the characteristics of what has been qualified as a non-metropolis. The growth of non-metropolis sites runs parallel to the vast expanse of agricultural production as well as the necessity for centers of production. Access to the river initially as transport corridor, subsequently followed by rail and highway infrastructures, Quad Cities was strategically positioned at a close proximity to a metropolis [Chicago, amongst others] allowing for the potential for growth and stasis. These sites can be considered an ancestor of the suburb, exhibiting sprawl away from the metropolis, existing independently in isolated space. Furthermore, sites such as Quad Cities have a troubled relationship with manufacturing and production. Although some manufacturing or logistics activity remains in Quad Cities, there have also been large defections away from the region in favor of cheaper landwhile maintaining access to multiple lines of transit offered by highways and rail lines. Companies such as John Deere and Alcoa largely scaled back operations in the Quad Cities area.

Panoramic View of Mississippi River from Rock Island, Illinois

144


The manufacturing industry has a long history of swiftly transitioning between military and private enterprises, often applying innovative practices/discoveries between the two realms. Despite the appearance of autonomous landform, Rock Island occupies a medium between infrastructural connectedness and territorial autonomy. The Rock Island Railroad that traverses the island was the first rail line to cross the Mississippi, ushering in a new era of continental transport of people and goods. Decades later, the National Highway System’s construction around all sides of the Quad Cities region bound the economy to the greater midwest, facilitating rapid growth in manufacturing and agricultural production. Most recently, the vacuum caused by decreased munitions manufacturing on Rock Island has been gradually filled with technology and engineering sector production, further diversifying the island’s economy.

Despite the minor vacuum created by downsized operations, Rock Island Arsenal remains the largest munitions manufacturing site in the United States. The dense interchange of transport systems coupled with medium-scale manufacturing make up the infrastructure of the island as a living case study through which spatial models are tested, modified, and deployed throughout safe islands along the Mississippi.

Post-Fallout: The Rock Island Safe Zone

The confluence of various social and political bodies throughout Rock Island’s history provides a contextual layer of social dynamics. The Army Corps of Engineers, role in the manipulation of water flow, sediment collection, habitat augmentation, and artificial island construction, becomes increasingly significant as Rock Island and other River islands become safe zones after the fallout.

de Céspedes

Map of Rock Island Arsenal

145

The Upper Islands, geographically detached from soil contamination, provides refuge for the masses migrating from surrounding agricultural territories. Inhabited architectural constructions hold the responsibility of protecting island citizens from air and water contamination, using the island’s edge as atmospheric barrier. As the islands become the only controllable sites within the corn belt, the facilities which presently function as munitions manufacturing will take on increasingly privatized roles of atmospheric control, remote agricultural maintenance, and environmental diagnostics.

Agronomic Fallout is a discursive addendum to the various controlled-environment projects that sprung up through a confluence of technological and political forces. By placing the contextual emphasis on the Quad Cities area, the overlap of polluting runoff on the Mississippi and Rock Rivers, high particulate matter from remnants of ammunitions manufacturing, far-reaching atmospheric effects from farming and livestock, and a robust system of multi-modal transport, this project searches for strategies of spatial control through the manipulation/calibration of atmospheres based on events, patterns of movement, and moments of stasis. Essentially, there is an innate curiosity regarding several questions: What if Fuller’s Dome abandoned the singular, hermetically-sealed structure in favor of a series of atmospheric negotiations at the scale of the wall section, individual building, and city? How do we negotiate different environments through gradients? If the air-condition ushered a modern era of atmospheric purification, how may a post-natural mutation of the air-condition allow for a new type of spatial experiment, in which the building-in-space model is replaced with engineered negotiations of space based on program, performance, and event?

Amplification Installation, Weathers

146


de Céspedes

The methodology of research most closely mirrors that of Raoul Bunschoten/CHORA, in outlining an alternative means of situating design interventions through four phases: database, prototype, scenario, and action plan. More specifically, the database phase in this case relies less on empirical evidence [although it plays an important factor] but collapses historical episodes as well as projective futures into a quasi-fictional database for which useful spatial queues are extracted. The primary scenario of interest inhabits a timeless space in which all episodes have compounded onto one another, whereas architectural prototypes are developed from individual episodes; if the Dust Bowl led to mass migrations, specific spatial conditions are extracted and used as a component in the construction of the Agronomic Fallout safe zone.

It is undeniable that changes in climate, industrial practice, consumption, and occupation of land have accelerated over the past century. Rather than read this progression in chronological terms – a method which usually entails a doomsday scenario of some sort – Agronomic Fallout favors the unfolding of social, spatial, and political power of individual historical episodes. The project’s spatial construct is solely based on the qualities of the referential episodes as a means to reveal recurring themes, habits, and orders that have subconsciously inflected the corn belt.

Dome over Manhattan, Buckminster Fuller

147

Archipelago NebraskaProject(ing) Territory

Daniel McTavish

148


Prolegomenon

In both the capitalist and the socialist worlds, an unconscious presumption has long since settled into place that the present is ‘better’ than the past and that the future will bring still more betterment. Progress, we are admonished in both quarters, is occurring. This reassuring belief rests securely on statistical charts and tables certifying the steady upward tilt of economic production in every ‘advanced’ and ‘advancing’ nation in the world.

Lawrence Goodwyn Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America

Architecture should have little to do with problem-solving – rather it should create desirable conditions and opportunities hitherto thought impossible...

Cedric Price“Potteries Thinkbelt,” in New Society 2

The state of Nebraska was extensively settled through the 1862 Homestead Act signed into law by Abraham Lincoln. Of the 49,201,920 acres of land that comprise Nebraska, 22,253,314 acres were settled though homesteading (45% of the total land area, the most of any state). Implemented as a way of colonizing the western frontier and strengthening the nation after the civil war, the Homestead Act provided a free one quarter section of the 1775 Land Ordinance Act continental grid (160 acres) to anyone willing to improve and tend the land for five years. Clearly influenced by the Jeffersonian ideals of a society of yeoman farmers, the Homestead Act facilitated the propagation of individual farmers across the American Midwest. The image of the rugged individual tending to the land is the image which dominates our collective imagination about the territory.

But what if this wasn’t the only image of the territory? While the images of a society of individuals bound together through their relationship to the land they tend and the collective image of progress are powerful, they are by no means the only images that exist, that can exist, or that are the most productive today. The following investigation takes as its starting point a simple enough question: where, in the seemingly endless territory of individuation, are the spaces of the collective/collectivities? In asking this, looking where they might exist, and assembling various discourses around the issue the ambition is not to present a comprehensive vision, nor a conclusive statement on the state or existence of such collectives. Rather the aim is to begin to structure or unearth a common ground from which and on which, new and latent collectivities, can emerge through the coming together of multiple individual subjects to address the various social, political, ecological and economic uncertainties of the territory.

McTavish

Opposite Page“Nebraska Gothic,” the John Curry sod house near West Union, Nebraska. Solomon D.Butcher, 1886 (Library of Congress)

149

American Individualism and the Grid

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trail of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

Thomas Jefferson

While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a workbench, or twirling a distaff. Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry: but, for the general operations of manufacture, let our workshops remain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles. The loss by the transportation of commodities across the Atlantic will be made up in happiness and permanence of government. The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor

Thomas JeffersonNotes on the State of Virgina, Query XIX

The assertion that the invention of settlement pattern could solve social problems also reflected Americans’ wider confidence in environmental inventions. Jefferson’s’ 1785 Land Ordinance established a physical grid as a social equalizer...

“The rectangular grid system of land surveying established by the Land Ordinance of 1785 has been described as ‘the blueprint for an agrarian equalitarian society’ reflecting Jeffersonian social ideal of democracy of small independent landowners.

Dolores HaydenSeven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian

Socialism, 1790-1975

General Land Office plan for numbering sections of a standard survey township, adopted May 18, 1796 (Wikipedia)

150


Piecing Together Spatial Practices

The scheme did indeed spread a [checkerboard] of township and range across the continent, visible testimony to the largest scale attempt to design the landscape of a social utopia, but, in its assumption that merely by returning ownership and control to those who tilled the earth a perfect stable society would result, it was fatally flawed. It is not the relationship between human beings and the land that governs their social organization, but ultimately their relationships with each other in the course of production. The social formation of the USA may have had distinctive traits, the yeoman farmer the most significant of them, but the underlying forces of the market in an emerging capitalism were ultimately more powerful than patrician ideals.

Denis E. CosgroveSocial Formation and Symbolic Landscape

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society —which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found with the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted…

Michel Foucault“Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”

Seeking out and defining specific places within the city is seen as both a programmatic and formal process. In the first step of analyzing the city, certain urban areas are found ‘that distinguish themselves by their quality and collective potential in contrast to other areas.’ There are exemplary areas that ‘represent extremely divergent structures in terms of form and content...On this level the City within the City sees the formal definition of an area or a project as central to its ability to attract or enable a collective domain.

Lara Schrijver“The Archipelago City: Piecing together Collectivities”

McTavish

Penny Auction at the Von Bonn family farm. c.1930. (Living History Farm)

151

Collecting Nebraska

…the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of the originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its system of dependencies. We should suspend the typical questions: how does a free subject penetrate the density of things and endow them with meaning; how does it accomplish its design by animating the rules of discourse from within? Rather, we should ask: under what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the order of discourse; what position does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse? In short, the subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse.

Michel Foucault“What is an Author?”

To collect’ means primarily ‘to assemble, to gather together,’ but its second meaning, and one employed by the epistemologist John Locke, is to infer or deduce.’ By putting single or unique entities—objects, memories, anecdotes, stories—into a collection, the collector makes a way of understanding. Assembly thus meaning makes.”

Barbara m. Benedict“Collecting” in

Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine

A Farm Holiday Association protest at the Capitol successfully demanded that the Legislature enact a two-year moratorium on foreclosures. (Nebraska State Historical Society)

152


County Seat

Nebraska’s 93 counties operate under organized county governments that receive their powers from the state constitution and state statutes. Sixty-seven counties are commissioner counties and are governed by a board of commissioners. Counties with township government are governed by a board of supervisors. The 26 counties with supervisors are Adams, Antelope, Boyd, Buffalo, Burt, Butler, Clay, Cuming, Custer, Dixon, Dodge, Fillmore, Franklin, Gage, Hall, Harlan, Holt, Kearney, Knox, Merrick, Nance, Platte, Saunders, Thurston, Valley and Washington. The county boards under each system have similar powers and tenure. The primary difference between commissioner and supervisor forms of government is that supervisor counties have township boards and officers. Boards of commissioners have either three, five or seven members who are elected to four-year terms. Boards of supervisors have seven members who also are elected to four-year terms. Each county has an elected clerk, sheriff and treasurer. Other elected county offices may include an assessor, attorney, clerk of the district court, register of deeds and surveyor. The population of the county generally determines whether additional officials are elected. In some cases, the offices are appointed. Appointed county offices may include: emergency managers, health directors, highway superintendents, planning and zoning directors, transportation officials, veterans service officers and weed control superintendents.

Nebraska Legislature2010-11 Nebraska Blue Book

Flag Day, June 14,1934, saw the gathering of three hundred people on the courthouse grounds of Loup City, a small central Nebraska farm town [the county seat of Sherman County].

William D. Rowley“The Loup City Riot of 1934: Main Street vs. the ‘Far-Out’

Left”

McTavish

Loup City Riot. June 14,1933(Living History Farm)

153

School

The achieved idea of a public land endowment for the support of common schools in the United States dates from the act of April 30,1802, admitting Ohio to the union of states. In this act section 16 of each township was set aside for the support of common schools and the state was made the trustee of the United States to see that this endowment was honestly applied to this purpose. When Oregon was admitted by the act of August 14, 1848, the school endowment was doubled, sections 16 and 36 of each township being set aside as a perpetual fund for the support of common schools. Since Oregon’s admission each new state has received from the United States government an endowment for common schools similar to that granted to Oregon. The effect of this trust upon the future of these states becomes one of the most important themes of our national life.

Addison E. SheldonLand Systems and Land Policies in Nebraska

The Enabling Act, passed by the National Congress in the same year [1864], carried provisions for liberal grants to encourage education in the new State. These included absolute grants of the sixteenth and thirty-sixth sections in every township for the support of common schools, and seventy-two sections for the use and support of a State university…Approximately 1,600,000 acres of this school land still remain and are now owned by the State. Its sale is prohibited by a law enacted in 1897, except for school, church, and cemetery purpose.

Federal Writers ProjectNebraska: A Guide to the Cornhusker State

In most Plains towns Friday night lights illuminate a praiseworthy community spirit. Football does indeed bind a community together, especially since the sport involves not only the players but also band members (who usually outnumber the football players), cheerleaders, and spirit squads, with the latter two groups often representing a female elite with a privileged status comparable to that of the players. Families and friends of all the participants mingle in the bleachers, along the sidelines, and at the concession stand, discussing the weather, the crops, business, children, marriages and funerals, their fears, and their dreams.

David J. WishartEncyclopedia of the Great Plains

154


“Tonight the Society meets at the school house [Fairbury]. Program: questions for debate –‘Should the National Banking System be repealed?’…”

Fairbury Gazette, January 15, 1876from “The Dairies of a Nebraska Farmer 1876-1877”

Fairground

At the fair, town and county meet in lively confusion. It is at once a holiday and farm institute. The crowd looks with pride and interest at great exhibits of livestock, of prize vegetables and flowers, of improved farm machinery and implements. The fair represents all Nebraska.


The farm show looked like a state fair but felt like an industry expo, with barkers urging visitors to increase productivity or cut costs rather than ride a pony or eat corn dogs. John Deere salesmen showed off their largest machinery ever, including a 530-horsepower tractor and a combine that costs $410,000 fully equipped. At the Firestone tent, a rep said the company is preparing a 91-in. (230 cm) farm tire, taller than Yao Ming. TopCon Precision Agriculture exhibited GPS gadgets that adjust your spraying and watering according to the topography of your fields and can even steer your tractor. ADM Financial advisers showed how to hedge risk in futures markets, while a lecturer at Monsanto’s Biofuture tent touted drought-tolerant corn: ‘We’re in a brand-new world here, folks! You’ve got to get more production out of every acre just to keep up!’

Michael Grunwald“Why Our Farm Policy is Failing” in Time

McTavish

Friday night lights in Nebraska. (3 Quarters Today)

155

Grain Elevator

Vital to Nebraska’s agricultural interests was the cooperative enterprise that has its beginnings in the Grange of the [1870s] and the Farmers’ Alliance of the [1880s]. Both of these organizations represented cooperative efforts to improve conditions for farmers: fewer middlemen, lower railroad rates, higher prices for produce, organized buying and selling. They were the forerunners of the 525 cooperative associations that now exist: elevators, stores, oil stations, and creameries.


There is another feature of the Grange that, alone, would make it invaluable to the farmers of America. It is the best means that has yet been devised of cultivating social relations among them, and in its social aspects, it is a perfect success.

James Dabney McCabe“History of the Grange Movement; or, the Farmer’s War

Against Monopolies”

Grain elevators were the first of the cooperative enterprises. During the [1890s], when they were designated to compete with the 15 or 20 chain elevator systems pouring Nebraska grains on the Chicago market, farmer’s elevators were not very successful, owing largely to the sharp practices of the big grain men. In the early years of the present century, however, things went better with the cooperative elevator movement. The Vincent brothers of Omaha, militant farm leaders, used their publication, Central Farmer, to put cooperative elevators on a sound legal and business foundation. These brothers overcame the railroads’ reluctance to grant sites for independent elevator sites law granting locations for new cooperatives. In January 1903 the State Farmers; Grain Dealers Association was organized at Lincoln, and a grain market established at Omaha.


Grange in session, 1873 (Wikipedia)

156


No other organizations reflect the American ideals of democracy and self-help as do cooperatives. Their success, importance, and beneficial impact on the American economy testify to the role they play in all of our lives.

Cooperatives incorporate the ideals which drive the most successful economy in history. Over 100 million Americans own and control more than 47,000 cooperative businesses that provide goods and services in every economic sector.

Cooperatives provide essential services to the American economy with benefits for consumers, producers, and small businesses in urban and rural America. They range in size from small buying clubs to Fortune 500 companies.

Cooperatives are member owned and democratically controlled enterprises created and used by their member-owners to provide goods and services. Members unite in a cooperative to get services otherwise not available, to get quality supplies at the right time, to have access to markets, or for other mutually beneficial reasons.

Cooperatives exist not to generate a profit for themselves or outside investors, as do other businesses, but rather to provide goods and services at competitive prices. Profits -or net income- is distributed to members (patrons, as they are called) in the form of patronage refunds.

Nebraska Cooperative Council

Veteran Rising City farmer Eugene Glock, a former United Farmers board member, admits his surprise the first time he drove by 10 bright red, 30,000-gallon liquid fertilizer tanks and other evidence of the Aurora co-op’s suddenly formidable presence some 30 miles east of its hub location.

‘It didn’t used to be this way,” Glock said Tuesday. “You were very careful not to infringe on your fellow co-op’s territory —and particularly not sticking your finger in their eye by jumping into their headquarters town.’

At the same time, he knows everything changes.

Among farmers, ‘if somebody goes to the hospital and there are no heirs on the land—and this is a fact—there will be people visiting the hospital wanting to know if they can farm that land.’

‘Co-ops,’ said Glock, ‘have kind of gone that same way. It’s a bit surprising, but there’s no law against it.’

Journal Star, “Aurora Co-op takes competition to new level” April 13, 2011

McTavish

157

Church

…any consideration of the problem of rural life that leaves out of account the function and the possibilities of the church, and of related institutions, would be grossly inadequate. This is not only because in the last analysis the country life problem is a moral problem, or that in the best development of the individual the great motives and results are religious and spiritual, but because from the pure sociological point of view the church is fundamentally a necessary institution in country life…The work and the life of the farm are closely bound together, and the institutions of the country react on that life and on one another more intimately than they do in the city.

Report of the Country Life Commission

Projections

Where would you assemble the globe? Certainly not under the golden domes and kitsch frescos, where heroic senators and half-naked clouds…Neo-gothic, neo-classical, neo-modern or neo-postmodern, those spaces were all ‘neo’ that is, trying to imitate some venerated past. But you might need more than imitation to build the new political assemblies…If it’s true that a parliament is a complex machinery of speech, of hearing, of voting, of dealing, what should be the shapes adjusted to a Dingpolitik? What would a political space be that would not be ‘neo’? What would a truly contemporary style of assembly look like?

Bruno Latour“From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: or How to Make Things

Public”

A critical design project will then consist of the creative appropriation of these codes, forms and the entire syntax of bureaucratic order, in order to re-invent and re-build them as authored systems with a human poetic element. Using the same technocratic elements that gave rise to the original form of the infrastructural system, but re-arranging them in a way that multiples their functionalities and directions of potential use, will enable a consciousness of their existence as cultural objects. Doing this would reconstitute the technocratic formalism as a quintessentially theatrical stage upon which the big dramas of America’s suburban life could unfold.

Alexander d’Hooghe“The Objectification of Infrastructure: Elements for a

Different Space & Aesthetic for Suburban America”

158


We need to ask…’Who is the public? How is a culture made, and who is it for?’

Claire Bishop“Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”

Those engaged in all other industrial and commercial callings have found it necessary, under modern economic conditions, to organize themselves for mutual advantage and for the protection of their own particular interests in relation to other interests. The farmers of every progressive European country have realized this essential fact and have found in the cooperative system exactly the form of business combination they need…

Now whatever the State my do toward improving the practice of agriculture, it is not within the sphere of any government to reorganize the farmers’ business or reconstruct the social life of farming communities…The farmers above all should have that power…

Theodore RooseveltReport of the County Life Commission

We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that await us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And of we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, t is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all those particular parts but does not unify the; rather it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.

Gillies Deleuze and Felix GuattariAnti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Action, the only activity that goes on between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspect of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition –not only the conditio sin qua non, but the conditio per quam –of all political life.

Hannah ArendtThe Human Condition

McTavish

159

The people need to ‘see themselves’ experimenting in democratic forms.

Larence GoodwynDemocratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America

Here we see represented the vast capacity of numbers of persons in space – especially in the psychological conditions spanning from distraction to modestly conscious social intention – to reframe their spatial relations to each other over and over again, over a surprisingly short span of time.

George BraidPublic Space: Cultural;Political Theory; Street Photography

The must be some alternative to cheap universalism (‘but surely every human is a political animal”) and to cheap relativism (‘let everyone gather under their own flag, and if they have no flag let them hang themselves!’)…

That we have to find a way out is forced upon us by what is called ‘globalization’: even though the Jivaros, the Chinese, the Japanese, the faithful member of the Oumma, the born-again Christians don’t want to enter under the same dome, they are still,, willingly or unwillingly, connected by the very expansion of those makeshift assemblies we call markets, technologies, science, ecological crises, wars and terrorist networks...The shape of the dome might be contested, because it does not allow enough room for differences and indifference, but that there is something at work that is called ‘global’ is not the question. It’s simply that our usual definitions of politics have not caught up yet with the masses of linkages already established.

Bruno Latour“From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: or How to Make Things

Public”

160


McTavish

Mother Bloor, midwest labor organizerin William D. Rowley, “The Loup City Riot”

161

162


Land

Ord

inan

ce

163

McTavish

Neb

rask

a Su

rvey

ed

164


Pop

ulat

ion

Den

sity

165

McTavish

Sett

lem

ent C

orri

dor

166


Cit

ies,

Tow

ns, a

nd V

illag

es

167

McTavish

Cou

nty

Seat

s

Cou

nty

Fair

grou

nds

168


Scho

ols

169

McTavish

Gra

in E

leva

tors

170


Siti

ng

171

McTavish

OSH

KO

SH, N

EBR

ASK

AP

opul

atio

n: 8

84A

rea:

448

acr

es

172


LEXI

NG

TON

, NEB

RA

SKA

Pop

ulat

ion:

10,

230

Are

a: 1

,920

acr

es

173

McTavish

GR

AN

D IS

LAN

D, N

EBR

ASK

AP

opul

atio

n: 4

8,52

0A

rea:

13,

824

acre

s

174


SCH

UYL

ER, N

EBR

ASK

AP

opul

atio

n: 6

,211

Are

a: 1

,344

acr

es

175

McTavish

View

s of

the

Terr

itory

176


177

McTavish

Iowa State FairThe Country and The City

Li Li

178


Introduction

For a century and an half, the Iowa State Fair has been one of the most important economic, cultural and social events in the state. It witnessed the establishment of Iowa, its capital city Des Moines, and the development of agriculture across the state. By examining the history of the state fair and its representations, this thesis explores the relations of the country (Iowa) and its capital-city (Des Moines). The Fair is a temporary event but it occupies a permanent ground. It attracts the farmers of the diffused expanse of Iowa’s landscape creating a dense-point in the territory. The fair started as an event for agriculture but developed into a most cheerful festival of rural and urban. The provisionality of the event, the density of people, and its role as a festival of the rural-urban lead to the different interpretations of the Iowa State Fair by different groups of people. In the meantime, with the social and economic change of the state, the interpretations of the fair change. How to deal with this change? This project tries to find a clue for this question.

Iowa: The State

In 1833, hundreds of settlers crossed the Mississippi River to take up land in eastern Iowa. Their arrival marked the beginning of permanent white settlement in the state, and for the next forty years Iowa would become home to hundreds of thousands of people from all over the nation and from Europe. Many were attracted by glowing accounts of Iowa’s rich prairie soil, with its potential as a major agricultural and livestock-raising region. Population rose from 10,531 in 1836 to 1,194,020 in 1870.1 By the early 1870s, farms and small towns covered most parts of the frontier. At that time, the state was mostly settled, although certain areas remained sparsely inhabited. By this time, the pioneer era had come to an end in the Hawkeye State; all parts of Iowa had some settlement. In comparison with areas to both the east and west, Iowa’s settlement history was relatively predictable and uniform. No land forms such as mountains or badlands slowed migration. Although the quality of land varied throughout the state—as land valuation would later indicate—all land was suitable for agriculture. The great majority of settlers, moreover, had come from the northeast quadrant of the United States, thus sharing a common heritage that reached back to Western Europe and the British Isles.

Li

1. Dorothy Schwieder. 1996. Iowa: The Middle Land. p. 35

Opposite Page1967 Aerial View of Iowa State Fair. (Iowa State Fair: Country Comes to Town)

179

Major production patterns had also been determined by the 1870s, as farmers began to follow advice to diversify crop production and raise livestock. Even before the Civil War, Iowa agriculturists had urged farmers to raise corn instead of wheat because corn is much more efficient to be used to feed pork and beef, and it soon became the state’s major agricultural commodity. At the same time, significant changes sought to develop rural communities and their connectedness to the territory. By 1900, an increasing number of farm families had telephones, which provided direct communication to neighbors and to town folks. Shortly before 1900 rural free delivery made its first appearance in Iowa; by 1901 Iowa had 292 rural routes. With this service, farm families for had daily mail delivery for the first time. However, some aspects of the isolation of farm life continued well into the twentieth century.

The State Fair

State fairs debuted in the nineteenth century in order to promote state agriculture through exhibitions of livestock and farm products. The first U.S. state fair was that of the New York, held in 1841 in Syracuse. Modern state fairs have expanded to include carnival amusement rides and games, displays of industrial products, automobile racing, and entertainment such as musical concerts, with the largest ones admitting more than a million visitors over a week or two.

In 1854, the first Iowa State Fair was hosted in Fairfield. Although not the very first state fair in the nation, the Iowa State Fair later became the most famous one. The second fair was held again in Fairfield in 1855. For the next several years, the Fair moved from town to town, mostly in eastern Iowa. The Fair was held in Muscatine in 1856-1857, Oskaloosa in 1858-1859, Iowa City in 1860-1861, Dubuque in 1862-1863, Burlington in 1864-1866, Clinton in 1867-1868, Keokuk in 1869-1870 and 1874–1875, and Cedar Rapids in 1871-1873 and 1876-1878.2

2. Leslie, Thomas. 2007. Iowa State Fair: Country Comes to Town. p. 38

The fairground of the 1854 Iowa State Fair (Iowa State Fair: Country Comes to Town)

180


Iowa’s gradual western settlement and the relocation of the state capital to Des Moines in 1855 suggested that the fair might be better located in a more central, fixed home. The Agricultural Society purchased a plot of farmland two miles east of the state capitol in 1885; what had been Calvin Thornton’s farm would become the most important 266 acres of land in Iowa agriculture and eventually the most celebrated fair grounds in the nation.

The State Fair places a great deal of emphasis on the agricultural presence in the state. There are many livestock shows and sales. These include contests for the biggest animals: the Big Boar, the Big Ram, the Super Bull, the Largest Rabbit and the Heaviest Pigeon. There are also livestock shows for sheep, swine, beef and dairy cattle, horses, goats, llamas, rabbits and pigeons, as well as cat and dog shows. Much of its appeal is nostalgic—a tangible link to an agrarian past that most Iowans have been disconnected from for a generation or more. But the fair also provides a forum for the dissemination of new farming technologies and agricultural methods since the first fair in 1854.

The Iowa State Fair is one of the most important social events in the state. One third of the state’s population goes to the fair each summer. Conservative figures indicate the 11-day Fair has more than a million visitors and serves as the catalyst for approximately $60 million worth of spending in travel, lodging, restaurants, shopping, etc.

Li

Lady milking sheep in the state fair (Iowa State Fair: Country Comes to Town)

181

City dwellers have attended the fair in record numbers, helping to push total attendance over one million in each of the last five years, and their expectations parallel those of the event’s urban visitors throughout the twentieth century.3

Although the fair’s major themes relate to agriculture and rural life, the event itself takes place in the midst of Des Moines, a metropolitan area of nearly half a million. Its exhibitors are almost all from the hinterlands, although its attendees represent both rural and urban residents. For most visitors from Des Moines, the fair is the one time each year they come face to face with the state’s primary industries, and “polite friction” between city and country underlies almost every event and space at the fair. Likewise, the fairground includes camping for thousands of exhibitors and visitors creating what annually becomes the tenth largest city in Iowa on Des Moines’ east side.

Temple of agriculture

The location of the fairgrounds is carefully chosen. The topography of the Calvin Thornton Farm and its location just east of Des Moines’s center formed an ideal site for the fairgrounds. Grand Avenue, one of the city’s prime thoroughfares, extends to the farm’s western edge. From there, the front half of the land was dead flat: perfectly suited to the large display buildings that would come to occupy it. The eastern half of the property, however, was hilly, rising about 60 feet above the surround terrain. A single summit offered a commanding view of the grounds and of the city below—in particular, of the bright dome of the recently completed State Capitol building.4

3. Ibid., p. 123

4. Ibid., p. 47

Judging of agricultural products in the 1950 state fair (Iowa State Fair: Country Comes to Town)

182


In the more respectable agricultural pavilions built on the flats of the fairgrounds, an architectural compromise was struck that similarly reflected the paradoxes of the fair. In replacing timber barns for sheep, swine, cattle and horses, and in reconstructing the grandstand, the fair’s builders chose to employ a hybrid language. The new barns were built of steel and wood on the interiors, with roofs that allowed daylight to infiltrate stalls and showrings while encouraging the ventilation of foul air—a pragmatic, almost industrial formulation. On the exterior, however, these barns were dressed up, with Beaux-Arts-inspired brick skins, complete with ornament that emphasized formal entryways and centralized massing. Such a choice reflected the grand civic aspirations of the fair. The resulting character of buildings on the fairgrounds is surprisingly urbane. The new buildings codified the fair’s essential dichotomy—an urban spectacle based on the economy and labor of the hinterland.

Inspired by the central exhibition halls of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, the Agriculture Building was a major statement of the cultural aspirations of the fair. Its monumental entries and imposing elevations suggested that the fair’s rural functions were supplemented by a grander purpose, namely the coming together of the state in its largest city for an event no longer simply economic or educational in nature. The design and construction of the Agriculture Building represented a statewide sense of the importance of the civic and social aspects of the fair. Dressed in a stripped down, brick version of Chicago’s White City, it lent an air of gravitas to the fair’s major crossing point, putting the fair on par, stylistically, with the great Beaux-Arts libraries, civic centers, schools and institutions that were built in the neoclassical style during the era.

Li

Livestock Pavilion (Iowa State Fair: Country Comes to Town)

183

Instant City

The Iowa State Fair is very significant to the city of Des Moines. As an annual event, the state fair attracts more than one million of Iowa’s population to the capital city, tripling the city’s population.5

When Des Moines became the permanent fair location, a special tree-shaded area was set-aside for campers. Fair planners made campground improvements as the years passed, including concrete floors for tents, running water, public restrooms and showers, and electricity. Eventually large mobile homes and brightly colored nylon tents took the place of covered wagons and simple canvas shelters. A lot of people attending the first state fair in Fairfield camped during their stay. The town was too small to have hotel rooms for all who came. Even if rooms had been available, most fairgoers did not have the money to pay for one. Instead, people pitched their tents or parked their wagons on the surrounding prairie lands. At the end of each day the campground seemed to glow in the falling dusk. People gathered around the fire, making new friends and exchanging ideas about raising livestock and grain, about homemaking and about events of the day.

The successful integration of urban spectacles with the fair’s agriculturally based traditions has been its mainstay for over a generation. Daytime at the fair is largely given over to agricultural competition, exhibition of farm machinery and a variety of commercial products, in addition to the midway rides. Night, however, focuses on the Grandstand, where auto races alternate evenings with country and western, classic rock and pop concerts.

5. Ibid., p. 17

1930s’ camp ground of Iowa State Fair (The Iowa State Fair In Vintage Postcards)

184


The Fair’s Different Significations

Farmers come to the state fair to participate in different contests, exhibiting their cattle or hogs. And more importantly, they meet old friends and make new ones during the 11 days’ event. For people whose families have not farmed for generations, they might go to the fair for the dubious prize-wining opportunities on the Midway playground; cheesecake on a stick at the fair’s food stands; auto races; classic rock in the Grandstand. But these activities alone do not explain the hold that the event has on the general public. The unimpeachable nobility of farm life may ironically be the fair’s greatest attraction to the group of Iowans who rarely get their boots dirty.6

Every four years, hopeful presidential candidates as well as their campaign staffs make a pilgrimage to Iowa to enact one of the most attractive rituals of American politics: the Iowa Caucuses. Many of the candidates set up shop in Des Moines and then fan across the state, getting up close and personal with the voters who get the first chance in the nation to choose their president. Hence, the instant city provides a great site for the battle among candidates.

The Iowa State Fair itself is the intersection of these multiple significations. This thesis investigates the possibilities of intervening within the Iowa State Fair. What is the position of the fair as Iowa experiences major shifts in its demographics and economy, as its urban center has slowly grown more diverse and lively and its rural areas have aged and depopulated?

6. Ibid., p. 123

Li

2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the Iowa State Fair (iowacaucus.com)

185

Twenty Bushels of Corn on Four Legs

John Ewanowski

186


To Jurgis the packers had been equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying upon the people. Jurgis recollected how, when he had first come to Packingtown, he had stood and watched the hog killing, and though how cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just what he had been—one of the packers’ hogs. What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the working man, and also that was what they wanted from the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were not considered; and no more was it with labour, and no more with the purchaser of meat.1

The successful resolution of the pork industry’s crisis of consumption pivots on major changes in swine physiology to achieve leaner meat. Continued profitability in the US pork sector thus intimately binds human and animal fortunes. Producers who are unable to afford lean-growth inputs face marginalization and the sector becomes more consolidated, while future industry profits lie in the immune responses, muscle, bone, and fat of living pigs. For humans and pigs alike, this industry today is lean and mean.2

Upon its release in 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle led to immediate changes in federal regulatory practices regarding meat production. However, the legacy of the exposé in regards to class and labor struggles (which, it turns out, was Sinclair’s main concern in writing the novel) was much less successful in its ability to instill paradigmatic changes over the last century. While meatpackers benefitted from a rapidly escalating postwar demand in meat products and labor organization, wage and safety improvements were soon reversed by union busting and hiring of unskilled labor as packing plants moved out of urban centers into rural areas closer to feedlots. Conditions in packing plants have reverted to resemble those of Jurgis Rudkis, with Polish and Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago being replaced by Mexican illegals in towns like Marshalltown, Iowa. Once again, meat processing is one of the most dangerous and low-paying manufacturing jobs in America, and the move to the countryside has created a new set of externalities with social and spatial ramifications. Thus, meat processing plants serve as productive indicators of societal and economic attitudes at large.

Ewanowski

Opposite Page“Hogs going into pen at stockyards. Chicago, Illinois”, John Vachon, 1947 (Library of Congress)

1. Upton Sinclair. The Jungle. 1906. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 2006. p. 353-4.

2. Frances M. Ufkes.“Building a Better Pig: Fat Profits in Lean Meat.” In Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, edited by Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel, 241-255. New York: Verso, 1998. p. 251.

187

As Amy Fitzgerald writes, “Conceptually, an examination of the slaughterhouse as an institution has a lot to offer: it is a location from which one can view economic and geographic changes in the production of food, cultural attitudes toward killing, social changes in small communities, and the changing sensibilities and relations between humans and non-human animals.”3 Furthermore, “the institution which kills the greatest number of [animals] and is summarily obscured from the public’s gaze is particularly worthy of detailed examination.” The processes that have led to this obscuration have divorced the consumptive public from the moral implications of industrial slaughter while malfeasance occurs often in an industry that holds a lot of sway in Washington. Bringing meat processing back into the city and providing visual access would give a degree of Foucaldian control to the public, as well as reconstructing productive relationships between centers of production and consumption by tapping into existing food and waste dynamics. This thesis addresses these issues architecturally, forming a vision where meatpackers, tourists, restaurateurs, swine, an industrial park, diners, wholesale meat buyers, federal inspectors, locals, rivers of blood, the stench, Daniel Burnham buildings, illegal immigrants, the disassembly line, academics, and foodies all exist simultaneously.

Porkopolis

The story of Chicago is inextricably linked to the history of the meat industry in the United States. The city grew explosively from its white settlement in the 1830s, rapidly surpassing one million residents in 1889 with the annexation of Town of Lake and Hyde Park. This meteoric population boom in the metropolis was fueled by the productive potential of both the city and its hinterland.

“Dressing beef (200 an hour), slaughtering floor, Swift & Co.’s Packing House, Chicago, U.S.A,” 1906. (Library of Congress)

3. Amy J. Fitzgerald. “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications.” Human Ecology Review 17:1 (2010): 58-69. p. 58.

188


As new technologies of transportation and manufacturing emerged, Chicago quickly replaced St. Louis as the center of American agricultural trade and officially took the title from Cincinnati as “Porkopolis” in 1862, when meat shipments to the Union Army from Chicago’s vast rail network helped it handle about 30,000 more hogs than their Queen City rivals.4 Prior to consolidating the city’s scattered stockyards in December 1865 under the banner of the Union Stockyards, facilitating the livestock necessary to become the world’s leading producer of meat became very difficult. City streets were full of cattle, hogs, and drovers. Livestock brokers were forced to search up and down the South Branch of the Chicago River for the best prices on animals that were sold in the packing plants of Chicago and the East. The introduction of the railroad to Chicago reshaped the stockyards of the emerging metropolis, and eventually the idea for a consolidated stockyards gained support amongst nine railroad companies who saw the potential of a rail-accessible location outside of the city. The Union Stockyards prospered from its founding, and an addition was quickly made to bring packinghouses into close proximity to their livestock supply. Throughout the 1870s, new advances in mechanized meat packing and refrigeration technology allowed the stockyards to flourish and become the pride of Chicago despite a general recession throughout the nation. The stockyards became a modern marvel in Chicago, as “tourists might hesitate to subject themselves to the stench and gore of the place, but all knew that something special, something never before seen in the history of the world, was taking place on the south side of the city.”5 The same industrialization of food production that left tourists and Chicagoans awestruck, however, was acting to abstract the commodity of meat and separate consumers from the act of slaughter and packing in ways that were unprecedented in the prior age of the local butcher.

Ewanowski

“Union Stockyards. Chicago, Illinois,” 1941. (Library of Congress)

4. Louise Carroll Wade. Chicago’s Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. p. 33.

5. William Cronon. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991. p. 207.

189

The Exchange Building at the stockyards, where the direct sale of livestock occurred, represents this rift between animal and meat on the plate. As William Cronon writes, “The Exchange Building seemed somehow at a distance from the animals in whose flesh it dealt, as if to deny the bloody consequences of the transactions that went on within it.”6 This abstraction and increased vertical integration of the meatpacking industry began to have a profound effect on the way that Americans interacted with their food. Cronon continues, “The growing distance between the meat market and the animals in whose flesh it dealt may have seemed civilizing to those who visited the Exchange Building in the 1860s, but it also betokened a much deeper and subtler separation—the word ‘alienation’ is not too strong—from the act of killing and from nature itself.” Chicago meatpackers were able to commodify and standardize nature like never before in the form of packaged and dressed meat which did not resemble the animal whatsoever to the consumers who bought and ate it far from the place of slaughter.

Urban Sanitization

The highly industrialized packing plants began to have negative impacts on the city, including sanitary and logistical issues, leading to many of the civic responses, from the Columbian Exposition and Burnham’s Plan to William Le Baron Jenny’s park system, which laid the groundwork for the Chicago we recognize today. Visitors to the 1893 World’s Fair turned out to the spectacle of the stockyards in droves, but the axial, symmetrically organized fairgrounds “famously rejected the full-block city of the downtown, carving out lagoons and courtyards and placing an imperial white city around them, a Rome along Lake Michigan,”7 providing an ordered, idyllic image of the city to counter the chaotic reality of the stockyards. Similarly, Jenny’s West Parks were designed at the time of the stockyard boom and “were intent on dealing decisively with a new kind of American city profoundly shaped by the railroad,” a city...

Postcard, “Union Stock Yards, Exchange Bldgs. and Cattle pens, Chicago,” 1910. (Chuckman’s Photos on Wordpress: Chicago Nostalgia and Memorabilia)

6. Ibid., p. 212

7. Michell Schwarzer. “Forms of the Grid.” In Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray, 196-206. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. p. 202.

190


that separated work and residence, created special nodes of commerce and industry, and built enormous ‘process spaces’ such as the Chicago stockyards at the end of trunk lines; a city with a web of arteries that converged on a central commercial and cultural district growing at an unprecedented rate; a city with vast and diverse immigrant populations, polarities of wealth and poverty, and acute problems in public health.8

Jenny’s parks—similar to those of Frederick Law Olmsted and Horace Cleveland—provided residents with air filtered by trees, an alternative to the noisy city to calm nerves, and a place to “diffuse social tension” by bringing together people from diverse backgrounds within the city.9 The ethos of cleanliness continued through the twentieth century in modernist architecture, including that of Mies van der Rohe’s, whose 860/800 Lake Shore Drive project was built in a cultural climate in which, “Following the Great Depression of the thirties and the triumphs of World War II, Chicago appeared to grow out of its earlier downbeat image as, like Cincinnati, a pig city, a porkopolis, bereft of real (read European) culture.”10 Simultaneous to this project of postwar image making, the elements that brought meat production into the city (rail networks, the labor force, consolidated stockyards) became outmoded with new inventions and social dynamics of modernization. Specifically, “Technological and regulatory developments in the 1950s, including the emergence of refrigerated trucks, large supermarket chains with their own cold-storage facilities, and a new federal meat-grading system, spurred processes of decentralization in meatpacking, which had been centered in the major railheads of the Midwest.”11 The Union Stockyards died a slow death beginning with plant relocation in the 1960s onto the Plains and culminating with its official closure of the in 1972. In the time since, the projects of sanitization and beautification have been canonized in architectural history while the stockyards have been forgotten and replaced with a bland industrial park.

Ewanowski

Left: “Exposition grounds, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago,” 1893. (Library of Congress)

Right: “A Bit of Garfield Park, Chicago, Ill.,” c. 1907. (Library of Congress)

8. Reuben M. Rainey “William Le Baron Jenney and Chicago’s West Parks: From Prairies to Pleasure-Grounds.” In Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray, 37-52. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. p. 38.

9. Ibid., p. 38-9

10. David Dunster. “Selling Mies.” In Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray, 93-102. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. p. 95.

11. Frances M. Ufkes. Op.Cit., p. 245

191

Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray undertake a reevaluation of this history in Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, in which they attempt to “assist in this process [of scrutinizing Chicago’s modernist history], through a kind of critical delamination, a stripping away of sedimentary layers of mythology, a freeing of the many cultural strata forming the city’s urban, architectural, and artistic landscape.”12 They offer an alternate reading of history:

Fed from within by post-Civil War migration, and from without by wave after wave of European immigrants, in this tale modern Chicago’s unbridled urban growth and social unrest formed a dialectical opposite to the clean instrumental logic of its idealized architectural counterpart. Moreover, unlike the history of Chicago architectural modernism, which ceased to have new prophets and apostles as Fordism waned, the broader history of Chicago’s modernity has continued and mutated.

They continue, writing, “As Chicago’s civic identity has come to stand for multiple cultures, economies, and political constituencies, so other architectural histories are emerging.

“Apartments at 860 Lake Shore Drive,” 1951. (ARTstor)

12. Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray. “Introduction: Chicago is History.” In Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray, xiii-xxiii. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. p. xv.

192


Ewanowski

These celebrate and legitimize spatial representations, agencies, and practices hitherto excluded from the modernist master narrative and promise a richer if more contradictory picture of Chicago’s architectural history.”13 While the modernism that developed in Chicago following Mies’s arrival is nonetheless spectacular, the truly amazing architectural feats of the city lie in the hastily planned and built sites of industry scattered through its geography and past, including the stockyards, lumberyards, and railyards that directly facilitated the unprecedented growth of the metropolis.

Ineradicable Obsession with Ignominy

Moving meat production to rural America has further divorced consumers from the animals and acts of violence that create their food while straining small communities. The current food regime in America began as “IBP, ConAgra, and Excel expanded their share of the US beef market by building large plants in rural areas near large cattle supplies, using nonunion workers in meat fabrication, deskilling tasks, and increasing line speeds. Wages in meatpacking fell and the production workforce shrunk 10 percent.”14

JBS Pork Processing Plant, Marshalltown, Iowa, 2012. (David de Cespedes)

13. Ibid., p. xiv

14. 11. Frances M. Ufkes. Op.Cit., p. 247

193

Research on the effects of moving slaughterhouses to smaller towns has revealed negative impacts, including “increases in the number of minority workers, low-paying jobs, offensive odors, demand for low-cost housing, strains on local infrastructure, crime, persons utilizing social services, the homeless population, health care strains, and linguistic and cultural differences.”

Sociologist Amy Fitzgerald groups these impacts into three major categories: “the impact on the physical environment and human health, the impact on the workers, and the social impacts on communities.”15 In other words, by inserting slaughterhouses in a rural context, companies have reverted to practices similar to those outlined by Upton Sinclair. Eric Schlosser paints a grim picture of the industry today in his foreword to The Jungle, writing that

Management tactics described in The Jungle have become commonplace again: the relentless pressure to speed up production, to minimize the severity of injuries, to get rid of workers who can no longer keep up the pace. Today roughly 80 percent of the nation’s meatpacking workers are Latino. Most of them cannot speak English, and many are illegal immigrants. Like the Eastern European immigrants that Sinclair depicted, they are vulnerable, fearful, and unlikely to complain. They have one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States. Thanks to the influence of the big meatpacking companies, the federal government no longer shows much interest in preventing—or even counting—the serious injuries that occur every day.

Under pressure from the meat lobby, including the American Meat Institute, the federal government is more concerned with deporting illegal laborers in packing plants than enforcing food and workplace regulations. The Swift plant in Marshalltown, Iowa is indicative of these priorities and the negative impacts of relocating meat production in small town America, as the plant is raided frequently to round up illegal immigrants and the social space of the town has been damaged. The health of the countryside is sacrificed for the sake of an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind,” “not in my backyard” public, who, in the words of George Battaille, “exile themselves, by way of antidote, in an amorphous world, where there is no longer anything terrible, and where, enduring the ineradicable obsession with ignominy, they are reduced to eating cheese.”16

15. Amy J. Fitzgerald. Op.Cit., p. 63

16. Georges Bataille and Annette Michelson. “Slaughterhouse.” In October #36, George Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing, edited by Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, 10-13. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. p. 10.

194


Ewanowski

Grounding

Little remains of the Union Stockyards as they were at their heyday in the early twentieth century, when the workforce topped out at about 40,000 people worked on the 375 acre site. It is bound by Pershing Road on the north, Halsted Street on the east, 47th Street on the south, and Ashland Avenue on the west. Racine Avenue runs north-south and served as the dividing line between the stockyards and the meatpackers. Even in its new life as an industrial park, the site has remained the high-grain, low density urban condition of the stockyards, creating empty expanses and parking lots that contrast with its dense residential surroundings. Gone are the belching smokestacks of Armour, Swift, and Cudahy, which have been replaced by small factories, warehouses, and commercial enterprises.

Architectural Provocations

This thesis addresses the aforementioned historical and theoretical issues in the form of a new slaughterhouse on the site of the former Union Stockyards in Chicago. The Stockyards Industrial Park is ground zero on the trajectory of the city from industrial megacenter to an “improved” and “modernized” white-collar metropolis. The stench emanating from Bubbly Creek has been eliminated by filling the polluted, stagnant branch of the Chicago River with concrete, and the stockyards themselves have been paved over and replaced by bland light industrial boxes and parking lots. Only the security gate exists as a lasting symbol of the authoritarian power Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Patrick Cudahy wielded over their proletariat workforce. Now is the time to critically examine the effects of Chicago’s process of sterility and the relocation of slaughter to the least visible places available.

“Union Stockyard Gate,” present condition. (http://chicago101.freeservers.com/index/stockyards/stockyards.html)

195

It is time to introduce friction to a system that has become too efficient for its own good and the good of the consumptive public. It is time to construct a new model of human-animal interaction that considers the social implications of mass slaughter, mistreatment of labor, shielding the murderous act of meatpacking form public view, and the obsession with sanitation. According to Lefebvre, “The task of architectonics is to describe, analyse and explain this persistence [of primary nature within second nature], which is often evoked in the metaphorical shorthand of strata, periods, sedimentary layers, and so on.”17 Architecturally, this concept of persistence is evident in projects like OMA’s museum in Zollverein and the competition for the Italian National Museum of Ferrara and the Holocaust. Carnivorous human nature is represented artistically, as well, in the work of Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst and film, especially Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. The goal is to create a productive synthesis on the site of Lefebvre’s “social space,” which is “at first biomorphic and anthropological,” but in which “nothing disappears completely, however, nor can what subsists be defined solely in terms of traces, memories, or relics. In space, what came earlier what came earlier continues to underpin what follows.” With that said, the site of the former stockyards is not chosen simply because of the persistence of its memory or out of nostalgia (although the power and expediency of collective memory did play a role in the decision) but also for its architectural potential as an exurban swath in the middle of an otherwise dense section of the metropolis. Intervention can be staged with little need to completely reimagine the urban machinery of the site, which has been built to support many more inhabitants (human and animal) than the hundreds of industrial park workers, and the work can concentrate more at the architectural scale than broader infrastructural concerns would entail. These architectural questions are yet to be answered but will be explored in depth in the coming months.

Aerial images of stockyards site today, with traces of the past. (Google Earth)

17. Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991. 229.

196


Ewanowski

Modern hog disassembly line (Wikipedia)

How can the heavily industrial process of meat production not only exist within but be beneficial to the postindustrial American metropolis? Can granting visual access of meat production to the public afford a sense of public control over industrial regulation through Foucault’s concept of “power-knowledge”? How can programmatic juxtapositions benefit the multitudinous actors in the industrial food complex, including consumers, producers, labor, and “the public”? What is the role of collective memory (or “collective forgetfulness”) in dramatically neutered postindustrial landscapes? How can the productive potential of both living humans and living and dead nonhuman animals be leveraged to mediate urban issues of waste, pollution, and hunger? How can pop culture and consumer society be satiated by healthier and less destructive industrial food production models? How do these questions manifest themselves in architectural form and how is this form best represented?

197

Sanborn-Perris Bird’s Eye of the Chicago Stockyards, 1901 (Library of Congress)

198


Ewanowski

199

Centralized meatpacking cities, 1916

200


Ewanowski

Swift & Company Plant, Chicago, 1901

Many products were created in the “packinghouse addition,” and the entire animal was used in order to create them.

201

USDA certified packing plants, 2011

202


Ewanowski

JBS Swift & Company Pork-Packing Plant, Marshalltown, Iowa, 2012

Now, plants specialize in one type of animal and waste is shipped out to different plants, leading to a decentralized meat processing industry.

203

1887

1863

1851

1889

1869

1853

Growth of Chicago in relation to the Union Stockyards

204


“Bargain Day on State St., Chicago,” c. 1889 (Library of Congress)

205

One Day One WeekTwo Days Two WeeksThree Days Three WeeksFour Days Four WeeksFive Days Five WeeksSix Days Six Weeks

Travel times to New York City, 1830

206


Ewanowski

One Day One WeekTwo Days Two WeeksThree Days Three WeeksFour Days Four WeeksFive Days Five WeeksSix Days Six Weeks

Travel times to New York City, 1857

207

Change in urban meat supply system over time

208


Ewanowski

209

Figure-ground of stockyards (red) and present day industrial park (black)

210


Ewanowski

211

212


Ewanowski

213

214


atlas of the corn belt

Documents

harvested corn

bushels of corn

corn beltcorn

corn belt soils

corn derived food

world production of

daily corn harvests

corn beltrania ghosn012atlas