The Farm Bill is our chance to save Iowa’s farm industry

My husband and I run a 4th-generation family farm south of Dexter, and we are former cattle producers. We used to raise hogs, just like tens of thousands of others across the state who were also driven out of the hog business by the handful of giant meat companies that took over the industry. If we don’t do something soon, the rest of Iowa's independent cattle producers could go the way of Iowa's hog producers.

Our senators and members of Congress have an opportunity to halt this unsettling trend in its tracks. They can use the Farm Bill to finally rein in these giant corporations taking over the meat industry and help preserve what is left of our family ranches and ensure rural communities can thrive.

Without addressing corporate consolidation, I am deeply concerned that the very farms and ranches that helped build our food system, feed people across the country and create strong rural communities will become a thing of the past. On our square mile, there used to be six family farms. Every farmer had kids, cattle, hogs, chickens, milk cows and a variety of crops. All six families did their business in surrounding towns: parts, livestock equipment, veterinarians, as well as groceries, clothing, medical and dental care and more. All that economic activity spelled tax revenue for rural communities. It helped us thrive.

During the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, Iowa was at the epicenter of a confluence of things — failed policy, mountains of debt, land and commodity price booms and busts, and two droughts — that crushed the livelihoods of generations of farmers. We lost thousands of farmers in a short period of time.

In the 90s, industrial scale livestock production started to develop. Before that happened, you could call nearby buying stations for a bid on your hogs, select the best bid, sell around 50-head at a time and haul them to the buying station by trailer. By the late 1990s, most of the buying stations closed. I could still sell my 50-head to a packing plant, but there were no competitive bids to offset the costs of shipping them a considerable distance by semi-truck. Since that didn't do much for our bottom line, pretty soon, most farmers, like us, stopped raising small herds of hogs.

As factory hog farms took over Iowa, independent hog farms have disappeared. In 2017, Iowa sold 2.5 times as many hogs as in 1982. Today, one out of every four U.S. hogs comes from Iowa. Yet the state lost almost 90 percent of its hog farms over this same period.

In our small towns there are no more feed stores, supply stores, clothing or, often, even a grocery store or cafe. The factory farm industry likes to claim that its industrial model creates jobs, but the rise of Iowa’s factory farms coincided with significant job losses both on and off the farm. Factory farms send their animals to major meat producers like Smithfield or Tyson for processing, hire their own veterinarians and haul their own feed, so none of that income stays in the community.

As a result, a once thriving town is now hollowed out. Families have left, and local schools have consolidated.

Our last holdout that hasn't fallen to vertical integration by big meatpackers is the cattle industry. It's headed that way, but there are still a lot of independent cattle producers in Iowa. We want to keep cattle in the hands of independent farmers to graze our land and diversify our farming.

What Congress includes in the next Farm Bill could determine if independent cattle producers in Iowa can hang on long enough to diversify our farming. Iowa cattle producers, and producers across the country, need Congress to make sure that this Farm Bill actually reins in the giant meatpackers who created such an unfair system and changed the fabric of rural communities like mine. Sens. Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley and Reps. Randy Feenstra and Zach Nunn all sit on the agriculture committees who will write this bill this year.

A status quo Farm Bill will not be enough to protect the independent producers we still have. We need a Farm Bill that requires big meatpackers to buy more animals on cash markets, restores mandatory country of origin labeling for meat, and gets the USDA to finally enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act to prevent big meatpackers from rigging the marketplace.

In rural communities, we know how to work together. If we work together now to fight back against corporate greed and call our members of Congress to tell them what kind of Farm Bill we need, we can start to rebuild and revitalize strong, independent family farms in Iowa.

Barb Kalbach is a fourth-generation family farmer, registered nurse, and the president of the board of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement.