Jim Yungclas: Thoughts about moving from country to city

In a letter to the editor of the Grinnell Herald-Register, Jim Yungclas writes:

A little over a year ago my wife and I moved to Grinnell from Wright County in part, as Howard McDonough suggested in his thoughtful spin recently, to remove ourselves from the negative environmental clout of living next to a 1.4 million bird laying operation being built less than a mile south of us by Fremont Farms and a Prestage Farms hog factory even closer to the east.

Mr. McDonough points out it is the responsibility of people like us to make way so corporations like McDonalds can supply us with cheap egg McMuffins so we can be obese happy city dwellers. He also insinuates it was our civic responsibility to give up, at a sizable monetary loss, what was featured in the Wright County Monitor as our stately one-hundred-year-old home located on the eighty-acre farm that was lived on and owned by my wife’s family since 1893.

Now, since he took considerable space to offer his thoughts I would like to give mine. My natural gas supplier puts odor in their gas so if I smell it I know there is danger. Would taking the odor out make it less dangerous? Manure has its own built-in odor but is also dangerous and unhealthy when blown into the air. Will taking the odor out make it less dangerous? Science, not spin, says it’s dangerous and unhealthy and also stinks.

Mr. McDonough refers to farms as industries and refers to the confinement industry. I would agree. As a city dweller the industries within the confines of the city are subject to air quality and labor regulation. That means they are relatively safe places. Not so in the country. Never call a factory farm an industry! That means they would have to clean up their air, water and have OSHA safety inspections. They would have to pay property taxes like any other industry!

Surveys show farmers who don’t get manure don’t like factory farms. Most large factory livestock operations are not owned by farmers. They are owned by large corporations. Manure to them is a liability. They sell it cheap to any farmer they can entice into selling them land to build. The farmer then sells a parcel of land where the negative environmental effect is minimized to him and often with very damaging effects to the neighbors.

Mr. McDonough thinks much of controversy is the fault of the non-farmers for moving to the country. Never mind if on an acreage that was sold by a farmer trying to leverage a land purchase.

When we moved to Grinnell my wife gave me instructions on how to be a good neighbor because I have a habit of rising early, making noise in my shop and all sorts of irritating habits I learned in the country. I love it here, I try to be nice. However, I do get upset when people like Mr. McDonough tell their neighbors to go elsewhere when they don’t agree with them.

This issue is not going to be diminished by keeping non-farmers out of the country. It will only be solved when we learn to produce our food in a manner that does not destroy the environment and the resources we use to produce it.

Jim Yungclas