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The Maginot Line was a continuous series of fortifications built along the French-German border by the war-weary French in the 1930s, with the hope it would deter the fascists from invading.

You know how that worked out.

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I traveled the 225 miles from Lansing to Ankeny on Christmas Eve, a drive through an Iowa landscape left snowless by an Arkansas December. Since the harvest is now long over, every square inch of land is left exposed, and lot of it is really, really exposed. My best estimate is that at least 50 percent and maybe as many as 70 percent of the fields were tilled. I don't have any data on this, but anecdotally fall tillage seems to be increasing, in my observation.

Weallwantcleanwater.

I can also say that I saw visible cover crops on only two fields, one near the town of Orchard and the other at mile marker 139 on I-35.

I posted these observations on my Twitter feed, and not surprisingly, that inspired some lively farmer responses that can be summed up mostly as:
• We want more time.
• We want more money.

Now I’d like to reply with the old joke about people in hell wanting ice water, but in this case, Satan is a sympathizer and these fellows are probably going to be provided with unlimited amounts of both.

Minnesota and its government officials delivered an important lesson recently on how to provide justice — and their lesson should be taken to heart by their neighbors in Iowa.

The contrast is jarring between the way government handled the deaths of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minn., and Autumn Steele in Burlington, Iowa. One was shot to death while trying to evade arrest. The other was the unintended victim of a fatal shooting.

Iowans should be uncomfortable with the questions that grow naturally out of these contrasts. We should be embarrassed by the starkly different ways government in the two states treated the people responsible for these deaths, police officer Kimberly Potter and police officer Jesse Hill.

When I walked out the door at the Des Moines Register for the final time on Dec. 12, 2014, there was an unfinished piece of work tucked away in a box of assorted stuff I carried.

The folder contained a few dozen newspaper clippings, press releases and notes to myself I had collected.

There was a common thread in all of this: They dealt with events across Iowa to raise money or provide other assistance for people in times of need.

I had hoped for several years to travel to a few of these events and then weave all of this raw material into a column for the front of the Sunday Register opinion section that I edited. But retirement caught up with me.

Monday, December 6,2021

Front note: The Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, is an ok movie, but far inferior to the former.

Literally seconds before typing this sentence, I discovered that one of this essay’s subjects is a celebrity, and not just some random millennial in a puffy coat. That person is Drake, who, according to his Wikipedia page, is “Aubrey Drake Graham, a Canadian rapper, singer and actor. Gaining recognition by starring in the teen drama series Degrassi: The Next Generation (2001–08), Drake pursued a career in music releasing his debut mixtape Room for Improvement in 2006; he subsequently released the mixtapes Comeback Season (2007) and So Far Gone (2009) before signing with Young Money Entertainment.”

Try putting that in CV format.

There’s a viral internet meme featuring two photos of Drake in the requisite puffy coat, and the meme is often being used to demonstrate contradictions or hypocrisy, which you may have noticed are a feature, and not a bug, of present-day America. I want to use that meme before it gets worn out, which happens so quickly these days! In fact, I want to wear it out before you’re done reading this essay. So here goes.

Let’s begin our meming (is that a word?) with commercial nitrogen fertilizer. I just checked Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship sales data for the 2021 crop year, and farmers purchased enough of the stuff to cover all our corn acres with 143 pounds of nitrogen, pretty close to the Iowa State recommendation using their N rate calculator and the March 2021 prices for corn (1) and nitrogen (2). In the context of water quality, however, things aren’t so tidy. We have 25 million hogs, 80 million chickens, 4 million turkeys and a couple million cattle that are excreting a shitton (in the science community, a shitton is oh, about a half a billion pounds, give or take) of nitrogen every year. We also have 10 million acres of soybeans that, with the help of bacteria, are fixing (adding nitrogen to the soil from the atmosphere) about 40 pounds of N per acre. Long and short, a whole lot more N meets the field (x) than meets the combine at harvest time (y), and in this instance, x-y=z, where z is pollution. Ag retailers love “x”, farmers love “y”, public drinks “z”.

Of course in Iowa, talking publicly about that equation (x-y=z) can you get in trouble, unless you’re willing to follow various rules of discourse established by the x-ers and y-ers. And that means never touching the third rail of Iowa Agriculture, regulation of nitrogen inputs. Crazy man that I am, I do that sometimes, but today I’m going to let this Drake fellow do it for me. In this and the scenarios that follow, Drake is the Iowa Agriculture Establishment.

Ooo that was fun, let’s do some more.

The death Sunday of Robert Dole was a potent reminder of what we have lost as a nation.

Another member of the Greatest Generation has left us — another of those Depression-era kids who came together to save democracy in the dark days of World War II.

The career of the 98-year-old Kansas Republican reminds us how diminished our nation’s political system has become in the past 25 years. Far fewer supposed leaders are willing to put their nation ahead of their political party.

Of course, Bob Dole was no shrinking violet when it came to politics. He did not shy away from a bare-knuckles fight. He could use a sharp-tongue and sarcasm to cut down an adversary, whether it was a Democrat — or a Republican.

by Kathie Obradovich, Iowa Capital Dispatch
December 6, 2021

News of the omicron variant of COVID-19 was like a bucket of ice water in the face after a refreshingly normal Thanksgiving weekend marked by in-person gatherings with family and friends.

The variant, first identified in South Africa, had already been confirmed as close as Minnesota by middle of last week. Chances are, it’ll show up in Iowa before you read this.

We don’t know much about this strain of coronavirus yet, including how easily it spreads and how effective current vaccines are at preventing infections, hospital admissions and deaths. It could be a relatively benign development, or it could drive a new, disruptive surge.

Either way, it should be a wakeup call. If omicron isn’t deadlier than delta or immune to the current vaccines, the next variants in line might be. How prepared is Iowa to deal with that?

The news hasn’t been terribly encouraging.

Thursday, November 18, 2021
Note: I've had several people ask me to post a text of my remarks to "SOIL 2021 – Our Soils: Our Future" conference at Drake University Law School:

Thank you for the invitation to speak here at SOIL 2021. I’m honored to participate in this meeting and I thank Neil Hamilton, who has done so much for Iowa by articulating the challenges we have.

I didn’t bring slides today but have hundreds, maybe thousands of slides on my website and if you want to look at them, by all means, I encourage you to go there and take a look.

I didn’t bring slides because I have come to realize these past few years that the presentation of graphs, and tables of data, and conceptual models about soil health and edge of field treatments and cover crops and so forth, won’t affect change here in Iowa when it comes to water quality.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about, and I quote: "Take Weaver's discovery that the composition of the plant community determines the ability of soils to retain their granulation, and hence their stability. This new principle may necessitate the revision of our entire system of thought on flood control and erosion control." Aldo Leopold said that about cover crops in 1938. Before I was born, and even before my mother was born. And we have what, 5 percent, 7 percent of our land in cover crops.

The statewide stream load of nitrogen has approximately doubled since 2003. Phosphorus loading, while not increasing nearly as much as nitrogen, is indeed still increasing when we evaluate actual water quality data — 27 percent when compared to a pre-1996 baseline. If you listen to the artfully-named Iowa Nutrient Research and Education Council, housed within the Agribusiness Association of Iowa and funded by the Iowa legislature to track progress for the Iowa nutrient strategy, phosphorus loads are down 22 percent and they tell us, and I quote, “Iowa Agriculture has nearly met the 29 percent non-point source reduction goal”.

Not one shred of water quality data went into this mendacious claim. Not one shred. It’s pretty clear that establishment agriculture is itching to hang the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the Wallace Building, regardless of what our water looks and smells like.

There’s a big birthday coming up in Iowa in about a month.

This place we call home — these 55,800 square miles of farm fields, wooded land, and clusters of housing and commerce — joined the Union 175 years ago on Dec. 28.

This should be cause for a celebration. But it probably won’t be. We have difficulty agreeing on much of anything these days, it seems — including libraries.

The spotlight was on them last week during a committee meeting in the Johnston School District. The topic was whether two novels for teens, “The Hate U Give” and “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” should be available in the Johnston High School library for students to read. The school is the third largest in Iowa, with about 1,725 kids.

You have to marvel at the capacity of the human spirit — especially the ability of people who remain optimistic and upbeat in the face of challenges most of us can’t fathom.

Those thoughts were swirling through my noggin during the recent observance of Veterans Day.

There were many veterans who came to mind — especially Noel Evans, a member of the Army’s 701st Military Police Battalion. When World War II ended, his uniforms were neatly pressed and were tucked safely away in the family cedar chest, where they remained for years.

I found myself remembering two other men whose military service prompts today’s thoughts.

People tell me I too frequently use the word "insanity," but I reckon that is like telling a farmer he uses the word “money” too much. As the old saying goes, write what you know, and I think I know crazy when I see it. So I'm not inclined to change my schtick.

Speaking of "money," some guy named Kevin Cone posted a video on his Twitter feed last week that caught my eye. I don’t know the fellow, but his twitter bio says he is an “Auctioneer-Iowa Auction Group, NW Iowa Farmer, Coach, Ordained Minister, Former World Champion Horseshoe Pitcher," or in other words, pretty much your average Twitter user. For the record, I like pitching leaners and ringers about as much as I like pitching sarcasm, but none of my relationship partners could warm up to the idea of a horseshoe pit in the backyard. So what are you going do. Choose your spouse wisely, I guess. At any rate, at least part of this guy’s schtick is auctioning Iowa farmland.

The video in question features two long rows of rust-free pickups, most of MFP-era vintage (in other words, brand new) sitting atop 127 pancake-flat acres of earth’s best farmland on Iowa’s Des Moines Lobe. The horseshoe king tweeted that the land sold for $18,500/acre, or $2.35 million in total, coincidentally the approximate value of the 50 or so pickups sitting there. Karma, baby. Remember that, if you’re planning to sell some land.