The Death of My Old Hometown: Sucking Out the Wealth, Filling the Gap with Fecal Pollution

Last summer, on a road trip from Minneapolis to Kansas City, I passed through a town in Iowa where I lived from age two to five.  Here is a picture.

I have limited memories from these years, and most of these are filtered through home movies that I watched later or stories my father told me about his first job there as a Lutheran minister. But I have a strong impression that the town, named Williams, was intact and reasonably thriving—not unlike a nearby town named Kanawha where I spent my high school years, which I remember vividly.

Kanawha, like dozens of others in the region, had a small set of stores, gas stations, taverns, agricultural supply dealers, and independent contractors. It had a bowling alley and a bank. I worked part-time at a mom-and-pop grocery store with four employees. This store probably had less square footage in its four total aisles than the space my local Kroger uses just for beer and paper products—but it was full-service and locally owned. Sometimes our family drove an hour to the nearest McDonald’s and Sears, but largely we shopped locally, especially for food. We had our own school that we were proud of (sadly I found out later how much of this pride was unwarranted) and at least to a kid on the inside looking out, the town felt prosperous. Here’s a picture.

The roughly similar town from my infancy, Williams, is two miles from the route of Interstate Highway 35. This is a powerful historical road that goes all the way from Lake Superior through Minneapolis, Des Moines, Kansas City, Dallas, Laredo, then on to Mexico City and South America as the Pan American Highway. In addition, as all good fans of Bob Dylan know, northern parts of this route map onto HIghway 61, famous among other things for being the place where God tells Abraham to "kill me a son" on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited record. 61 extends the I-35 route north from Duluth to the Canadian border and the two roads are parallel in other parts of Dylan's childhood world. However, 61 doesn't make it into Iowa, having split off off to follow the Mississippi River toward New Orleans.

One of the last sections of the interstate highway system to be finished was I-35 near Williams. I can remember driving on a subsection of this road before it officially opened. This was basically a shortcut from nowhere to nowhere through corn and bean fields, totally deserted except for our car.

When I-35 was completed in 1973, local folks opened a truck stop called Boondocks, USA, at the Williams exit. This was an early version of the sort of travel complexes like Pilot Flying J with restaurants, showers, and the strange combination of semi-grocery-stores mashed up with half-department-stores. When I stopped at a Flying J in Williams last year, I needed a baseball cap (what Iowans call a “seed cap” advertising their favorite corn like an NBA team) and I had hundreds of choices on five separate displays. Almost all of these were variations on Iowa sports teams, US flags, right-wing slogans, motorcycle subculture, or Duck Dynasty, but I managed to find one with an ear of corn that just said “Iowa.”

Such complexes are dime a dozen now—but when Boondocks USA was born it seemed unique. It was famous among a wide spectrum of Iowans, as well as truckers who adopted it. Smallish by today’s standards, it was enormous by 1970s Iowa standards and had its own line of seed caps and T-shirts. It became a tourist attraction with a motel. But eventually the business was squeezed out by chain versions, and the motel is now boarded up.

I decided to drive the two miles over to the town from the Flying J at the exit. I had not visited for fifty years, and I must say I was shocked. Since the entire town has less than two dozen square blocks, I easily found the church where my dad worked—now split from the mainstream Lutheran denomination and part of a fundamentalist splinter group. There were a few dozen houses, smallish but predominantly not in disrepair, probably with many retirees. However, as I looked for businesses, it seemed almost like a ghost town interspersed with a few car repair shops and the like. Even finding the tiny business district was tricky—and I had not expected much, since this “district” in my high school town was only two blocks long. No doubt the travel center with the caps does far more business than this entire town—at least if we make an exception for the trucks carrying hogs to industrial slaughterhouses far away.

At first I thought that the coming of the freeway to Williams was a nice metaphor for small farms and businesses giving way to Walmarts. Unlike my childhood in Kanawha, when the nearest McDonald’s was an hour's drive away and we supplemented local shopping with Sears mail-order catalogs, today I suppose the people of Williams shop primarily either via Amazon or at Costcos and shopping centers down the freeway in Ames and Des Moines. Clearly there has been a severe downward spiral for the (now absent) local businesses.

However, I recently learned more about what happened to Williams, and it led me to change my core metaphor from freeways dispersing people outward. Let’s run instead, with the controlling image of a shit-storm of toxic pollution, pouring downward. Sadly, in either case the imagery includes siphoning things out—both agricultural profits and quality of life.

My revised learning is informed by a recent Nation magazine article called “Rural America Does Not Have to Starve,” in which a reporter named Nick Shaxton also visits my old home town. He confirms that my memories of a thriving town are solid: Williams used to have three grocery stores, three farm implement dealers, a creamery, a doctor, a stockyard, and much more. But above all, Shaxton explains how the arrival of CAFOs—an acronym for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or industrial factory farms, with many thousands of animals—hollowed out the town.

Let’s set aside the horrific quality of life both for the animals and the workers who are contracted to process them. And let’s leave aside the pollution that “rais[es] a stinking haze that can send nearby residents fleeing indoors” before polluting the water that eventually ends up in the local drinking supply and the Mississippi River.

Bracketing that for now, let’s focus on the economic logic that supposedly justifies all of this. As Shaxton summarizes, the raw numbers of hogs and statistical “productivity” have roughly doubled. But the “median on-farm income…averaged a negative $1560 per year from 1996 to 2017” and “the median farm income from hog farming was negative in 2018.” In other words, many farmers must work second jobs to subsidize their work on farms that are losing money. Somewhere near the root of the problem is that 90% of the market in hog flesh is controlled by “vertically integrated meatpacking conglomerates,” several of them Brazilian or Chinese. These companies have kept keep prices at rock bottom.

Although there is profit to be made selling animals, human labor, and environmental quality to urban markets (increasingly in China), the local “CAFO farmers themselves…are often just hog house janitors” with contracts imposed by the big firms. The system shifts the risks to them and often leads to high debt loads. As Shaxton reports, “There is ‘basically no choice’ in the contracts. ‘Everything is dictated.’” Corporations grab most of the profits, part of them from tax-funded subsidies. Meanwhile the circulation of money through local economies (whether from buying supplies or spending the small parts of the profit that trickle down) largely dries up.

In this sense the outward flow of consumers toward travel centers and Walmarts is mirrored by a more abstract outflow of agricultural profits. Shaxson adds the images of a “one-way conveyor belts shipping rural wealth out,” and a “bag of a vacuum cleaner” getting fatter as it sucks profits toward Wall Street. What remains are dying towns, alarming growths in suicide, and a landscape blighted by animal suffering and toxic pollution.

This is the future that big agribusiness says is our only alternative, and which it steadily seeks to expand beyond early adopters like the people in my dying old town.