— a drop in ethanol prices has led to shortages of carbon dioxide, an industrial byproduct of ethanol production, which means we can't freeze our meat or purify our water —there's a county in northwest Iowa that has only a single ambulance, for a square of land 30 miles on a side
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—meatpacking is a monopoly with enormous, dangerous facilities that rely on concentrated immigrant labor. Tyson runs an absolutely gargantuan "beef battleship" in Dakota City, Nebraska. You can read a crazy puff piece about it here https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/19247-tyson-s-beef-battleship ….
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—Iowa, which may have the most fertile farmland on the planet, imports 85% of its food. The only two crops grown at scale, soybeans and corn, are both seeing prices crash. —much of rural Iowa is a food desert, with Dollar General taking over small grocers and local stores
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—The Secretary of Agriculture has been given enormous sums of relief money to dispose of at his discretion —Steve King sponsored a law making English the official language of Iowa. This now prevents COVID-19 information reaching 150,000 Spanish speaking residents in the state
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The most sobering lesson of this interview is that Iowa never recovered from 2008. It never even recovered from 1988—the waves of consolidation and de-unionization that destroyed the good-paying jobs, and the arrival of the big ag monopolies that now dominate the rural economy
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