Many units are semi-automated, with feeding run by computer and the animals watched by video, with periodic visits by workers who drive between several operations. In these industrial farming units, pigs, cows and chickens are crammed by the thousand into rows of barns. This collapse has in good part been driven by the rise of concentrated animal feeding operations, or Cafos. Last weekend, the US ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, appealed to the UK to embrace US farming, arguing that those who warned against practices such as washing chicken in chlorine had been “deployed” to cast it “in the worst possible light”.Īcross the state, farmhouses where generations grew up lie abandoned. It’s a story replicated across America’s midwest, with the rapid expansion of farming methods at the heart of the row over US attempts to erode Britain’s food standards and lever open access to the UK market as part of a post-Brexit trade deal. The Denning house, on Walnut Avenue, was bulldozed after the land was sold and rolled into a bigger operation. There are a few relics of the old farm at the place that used to be owned by the Williamses – an abandoned hen house and a bit of machinery – but the land is all corn and soya beans. A little further along, the Watts family’s farmhouse stands empty, its roof falling in. Now the land is rented out and is all given over to corn. “Two years ago, it had cattle, pigs and pasture.” “That’s the Shoesmiths’ place,” she said. As she drives the roads around her farmhouse, she ticks off the disappearances.īarb Kalbach on the land she and her husband farm. Kalbach comes from five generations of farmers and suspects she may be the last. Rural communities have been hollowed out.Īnd while the Kalbachs have hung on to their farm, they long ago abandoned livestock and mixed arable farming for the only thing they can make money at any more – growing corn and soya beans to sell to corporate buyers as feed for animals crammed by the thousands into the huge semi-automated sheds that now dominate farming, and the landscape, in large parts of Iowa. With that came a vast transfer in wealth as farm profits funnelled into corporations or the diminishing number of families that own an increasing share of the land. Barb and Jim are the last family still working the land, after their neighbours were picked off by waves of collapsing commodity prices and the rise of factory farming. Half a century later, Kalbach surveys the destruction within the section of chessboard she shared with other farms near Dexter in southwestern Iowa. “We raised hogs from farrow to finish, and we had corn, beans, hay and oats. “When we very first were married, we had cattle and calves,” she says.
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