It's Time to Find Our Voice
It is hard to be a good citizen, to be active in democracy, and to rise to our civic duties. Keeping up with the issues without becoming overwhelmed and knowing enough about any one topic to speak up about it feels like a daunting task. For me, it is easy to rationalize that it doesn’t matter if I weigh in, because someone else with more knowledge or time will do a better job of making the important points, of doing the dirty work of talking to those in power about what matters.
And, like I’ve said before, there is also my general disdain for politics, the partisan squabbling and the distasteful shenanigans. I often check out completely, not because I don’t care, but because it is the only way I can control my anxiety about the world and to stay optimistic about the human race.
But for once I crawled out from under my proverbial rock and signed up for “Lobby Day” with the Iowa Farmers Union (IFU). As a board member of IFU, it seemed like a safe way to dip my toes into the political quagmire, surrounded by people I respect and trust. Talking to legislators while standing side by side with like-minded comrades felt doable. I wouldn’t need to do it alone.
I will skip the details about how the topics we were to lobby about were chosen by IFU’s members in its own amazing display of democracy (you should really attend the annual convention to see how it works). I won’t bore you with the specifics, but we spent the morning listening to interesting talks about the issues so that we were well prepared.
I also don’t want to spend too much space here talking about how intimidating it felt to walk up all those stairs to the House and Senate Chambers under the grand rotunda. Or how you have to fill out a little form asking for a given legislator to come out into the hall to speak with you, and hand that slip of paper through a hole in the Senate anteroom as if you were begging for admittance into a speakeasy. Then you wait as a clerk goes into the behind-closed-doors chamber and leaves you alone standing in the hall, a system made to emphasize just how small and insignificant you really are. The clerk then sometimes returns telling you your Senator just left when they were supposedly there just moments before your note arrived, disappearing from the room without being seen like a mouse in the pantry.
And I also don’t want to dwell on the fact that we were surprised when Representative Mike Sexton, Chair of the House Agriculture Committee, told us of his troubles transitioning 80 acres of his land to organic and how he is running his sizable sheep herd on the land during that transition. He too has to worry about pesticide drift, he told us, which reminded me again that sometimes people have more in common than you might think.
What I do want to focus on for this blog post are the topics we discussed with our legislators, and the ways you too can talk about them when you call or visit with your House and Senate members (why not this week? What are you waiting for? Here is a tool to locate your legislators).
First off, there is the popular, mostly non-partisan topic of local food. One of the asks this year is to streamline farmers market fees—currently, there are multiple fees producers have to pay to sell meats and frozen food items when selling in different counties. More investment is also needed for successful local programs the legislature has already supported in past years, like the Choose Iowa, Farm to School, butchery and other programs. Thanking your legislator for supporting those bills can be a good way to acknowledge that we can sometimes work together to change the world.
Next, we discussed the unpopular carbon pipelines and the use of eminent domain to blaze their path through the state. At least three companies are asking to use the rule, not for the public good but for company profits. There are many groups working against this bill and the legislators are well aware of it—but the more people who register their discontent with the short-sighted plan, the better.
Third on the IFU’s agenda is the topic of pesticide drift. Because of the now widespread use of Dicamba—a herbicide that can volatilize and travel far off-farm—the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship (IDALS) is backed up at least a year in investigating claims of contamination. There are only a handful of employees to cover claims from across the state, and the fines for those spraying is currently set at $500 (which interestingly is only half of what a farmer would be fined for not having the correct licensing for farmers markets).
Pesticide drift is a food safety issue, not only because it is illegal for food to be sold after it has been sprayed (even accidentally, by a neighbor for example) but because it further consolidates the food system. If your neighbors are all planting Dicamba-ready beans and spraying them, there is little else you can grow aside from Dicamba-ready beans. That gives farmers few options of what they can plant and encourages everyone to grow the same thing—making the food system even more vulnerable because of a complete lack of diversity. If we want a resilient food system that can weather climate change, obesity, pandemics and more—we need to give farmers more opportunity, not less.
Lastly, a simple change in the Iowa code from “soil conservation” to “soil health” would broaden the definition of what makes a “good farmer” from one that cares only about erosion and the presence of three nutrients (Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium) in the soil in order to grow corn, to soil with organic matter, ready to withstand a changing climate. Pose the analogy to your legislator: would they define their own health by only one metric or is a good bill of health one that takes into account the overall well-being of their entire body?
The end of our Lobby Day was perhaps the best part—we came back together to discuss what we learned and to eat some dang fine cookies provided to us by Main Street Bakery in Ankeny. The mood was positive, we felt good about the small successes we had and above all, we found camaraderie in doing it together. We might not have changed many minds, but at least we didn’t sit at home and complain about the world without doing something about it.
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I am told HF 69 is the soil health initiative. John Whitaker spoke to us about the changes and would be a good resource for more information. Thanks for asking!
I am told HF 69 is the soil health initiative. Thanks!