This is the first in a 5-Part Series to update you on the latest in food, health, and democracy. Here I share a little bit about my background and how our food system came to be so unhealthy for citizens, family farmers, and our environment.
By David Murphy,
It’s been a while since you heard from me, and I wanted to give you an update.
In 2018, after years of poor health as the result of chronic health conditions, I was forced to retire from active campaigning and leading Food Democracy Now! to take care of my health. I’m writing now because my health has gotten better. Still, in all things, we never know how much time we have to spin on this globe, so I thought it would be a good time to weigh in on the seismic change that’s taken place in the last two decades or so with the conversation on food.
In the past six years since I retired, I have continued to work behind the scenes, advising family farmers, non-profits, elected officials, and organic food companies about the importance of good food, healthy soils, and organic and regenerative agriculture.
It’s been a long, slow climb back to reclaiming my health, and I wanted to share my thoughts on the food movement and what we accomplished since 2008.
When I founded Food Democracy Now!, there was no national conversation on GMOs, pesticides in our foods, and the importance of healthy soils.
More importantly, what’s currently happening in the fight to reform our food, health, and democracy here in America and around the world? Now more than ever, we need a united voice to fight Big Food and Big Ag in Washington D.C. and beyond.
From Humble Beginnings, Unexpected Results
I started Food Democracy Now! after a conversation with Iowa hog farmer Paul Willis, the founder of Niman Ranch Pork. We were concerned that the national conversation on food, agriculture, and the environment was leaving many people behind, especially America’s farmers, rural communities, and children.
Unlike most hog farmers in Iowa today, Paul rejected the factory farm model that has decimated rural communities and Iowa’s waterways. He raised his hogs in the pasture because he cared about the environment and his animals’ welfare. I met Paul in the summer of 2006 when we were both working to stop factory farms from moving into our communities and decimating the local economies.
At the time, politicians were regularly using America’s family farmers, rural America, the environment, and most importantly, the health of everyday Americans and our children as props in their political campaigns and then forgetting about us once we voted them into office.
The same is pretty much true today, but at least some are starting to see the importance of these issues as food prices continue to rise as the result of unchecked monopoly power and the increases in drastic weather extremes such as droughts and floods are beginning to make headline news more regularly.
I was also greatly concerned about the impacts of industrial agriculture, factory farms, GMOs, and pesticides on the livelihoods of America’s farmers, their livestock and the land, and the health of the average American.
Iowa, Factory Farms, and the Loss of Democracy
In the summer of 2006, I moved back to Iowa from Washington, D.C., to help my family fight a factory farm hog confinement that was being built next to my sister’s farm. I then learned how corrupt our food and political systems were.
Barely two months after I moved back home, someone shot a bullet hole in my parent’s office window in the downtown of a small town located in the Northwestern corner of the Hawkeye state as a warning that we needed to be quiet. My parents had had an office in the small downtown for over 20 years and something like this had never happened before.
The beginning of my career as an investigative journalist and food, ag, and environmental activist:
The bullet hole appeared in my parent’s office window less than a week after a local agribusiness lobbyist and land speculator had written an editorial that painted my family, my sister and father, as environmental terrorists because we dared stand up and speak out against the threats that factory farms posed to local landowners, family farmers, their families, and the environment.
After seeing this level of political betrayal, I met many family farmers and rural Iowans who had been negatively impacted by factory farms and had faced similar threats to their businesses or livelihoods simply for standing up for what they believed in.
When I witnessed this level of attack on our democracy by Big Agribusiness, I decided to stay and help fight for democratic representation.
How Politicians, Big Ag, and Factory Farms Rigged the Game — The Loss of Local Control
Rather than allowing common-sense regulations to determine the distances a factory farm could be built from a neighbor’s home, a school, church, or even a cemetery to be decided by local elected officials, the state of Iowa removed that authority from the county board of supervisors in 1995 and remanded that legal authority to a state-level board that often ruled against the wishes of local citizens and county officials.
These giant factory farms have had a massive negative impact on the lives and economic well-being of family farmers in Iowa and beyond, and has robbed rural America’s formerly prosperous small towns of economic opportunity as farmers are forced off the land.
That year, I met many family farmers tired of being bullied by the agribusiness cartels that ran the state legislature. During the winter and spring of 2007, I witnessed this myself firsthand as I attended the Iowa state legislature every day for six months and watched as the Farm Bureau, the Iowa Pork Producers, Corn Growers, and Soybean Association worked day and night to shut down and refuse any legislation that would help protect the health of Iowa’s citizens or the polluted waters of our state.
Today, 18 years after I first moved home, Iowa has become a state that is synonymous with industrial agriculture’s worst abuses. Iowa also now boasts the fastest-growing rates of cancer in the United States, coming in at number 2 in the country for rates of cancer, and produces the most factory farm waste of any state in the nation. It didn’t have to be this way.
As a 6th generation Iowan, I find this heartbreaking. Iowa has the richest topsoil on the planet. Still, it has been turned into an extraction zone for industrial agriculture profits, which increasingly puts family farmers out of business and hollows out Iowa’s rural communities, leaving its residents poorer and less healthy in the process.
All of this was done in the name of public policies and false economic “efficiencies” that the states and national politicians promoted at the request of corporate agribusiness in exchange for political donations.
This is the first in a 5-Part Series to update you on the latest in food, health, and democracy. Please like or share with your friends and make sure to tune in next week for the latest update.
About the author: David Murphy, the founder of United We Eat, is a leading American policy expert, food and environmental activist, and social entrepreneur dedicated to reforming our global food, agriculture, and public health system.