Don’t believe me? There are trails of evidence.

I don’t fly much these days: I see enough of planes from right here. There was a time though when I waited at ticket counters and settled into an aluminum rocket fueled jet and travelled back to Central Standard Time.

I was flying “home” to Iowa one summer day (home was always assumed by family and friends to mean, Iowa, like once you were born to this monolithic idea, you’d best prepare to die here). Jammed into my aisle seat and nose into some book, I stole furtive glances out the Chicklet shaped porthole to watch the land change as we flew over the 100th meridian. Eastward the dried wheatfields give way to irrigated crop circles to the rectangular patchwork of green corn and soybeans. At the window seat a small boy squirmed and, hand and forehead to the window, asked to anyone, “What’s that?!” In the seat next to me, a grizzled distracted dad pulled aside his headphones and leaned into him: “Farms”. As he repositioned his headphones, he added with confidence, “That’s where they grow shit”.

The boy pondered this, and as other Iowa passengers clucked in disbelief and thought I’m certainly not going to going to say anything I couldn’t help but think his Dad had it entirely right. At the time I had no numbers to tally, or research to quote, I knew, compared to the clear mountain waters of the West, Iowa had a water problem. I had seen family farms flattened to become 1,000’s of acres of row crops, the last remaining wetlands tiled and drained, the explosion in number of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) built. This all contributed to Iowa having some of the poorest water quality in the nation. There was too much shit in our water.

Fast forward thirty years later and thanks to Chris Jones, in his book of essays, The Swine Republic, we have the numbers. Iowa continues to have a relatively low state population of around 3 million residents, however our livestock population has blossomed like an algal mass in the Gulf of Mexico. We are now home to 20 million hogs, 80 million laying chickens, nearly 5 million turkeys, and 2 million beef and dairy cattle. According to Mr. Jones, these five livestock animals generate the amount of waste of 134 million people. Of course human waste is treated before traveling downstream but equally unsurprising is that livestock waste is not. We pollute our waters with affluent equal to the 10th largest country in the world.

There’s a reason we are part of fly over country. From 20,000 feet it doesn’t look so bad. But it’s true, this is where we grow shit.