"You don’t see the Trump flags flying in Iowa like you used to.”
Talking with the legendary Art Cullen about his new book.
Art Cullen is editor and co-owner with his older brother John of The Storm Lake Times, a 3,000-circulation twice-weekly newspaper in his hometown of Storm Lake, Iowa. In 2017 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials about agriculture and water pollution in Iowa.
Now he has a new book out. Dear Marty, We Crapped Our Nest, Notes from the Edge of the World is a collection of essays chronicling Iowa’s transformation from bucolic paradise where neighbors helped each other through the hard times, to a bitterly divided state drenched in agrichemicals and manure. Cullen wrote the book to have an impact on the 2026 midterms elections in Iowa.
“Iowa is at a real inflection point. It’s been a one-party state for years, red. It feels like this midterm elections could show a reversal especially in the governor’s race. I think it’s important to focus on what the real issues are. And there is no issue more important to Iowa then climate change,” Cullen said.
Climate change and how it intertwines with Iowa’s largest industry – agriculture – are a major theme in We Crapped Our Nest. A major hurdle to bringing the agriculture sector into the climate fight has been reluctance by many farmers to even acknowledge the problem is human-induced.
“Farmer sentiment is driven by what we call in Iowa cropaganda. They want you to believe what they want you to believe and then you start to believe it,” Cullen says. He thinks farmers were following false narratives told by Koch industries and the oil industry that climate change is an overblown hoax. He used a recent experience with fall fertilizer application as an example.
“We’ve known fall fertilizer application for row crops is a bad idea for at least twenty years. On a recent drive from Storm Lake Iowa to Rochester Minnesota there was a dam army of anhydrous ammonia tanks spreading fall fertilizer. We all know 30% of it gets lost to the environment. Here’s the famers saying ‘we’re not making it’ watching their net income decline yet they’re more than willing to waste 30% of their nutrient cost by doing fall fertilizer. That tells you just how powerful the propaganda is telling farmers that you have it do it this way. When in fact you really don’t.”
“But if you’re one guy controlling as many acres as a Pharoh, then you do have to do fall fertilizer to get all that work done for the spring. You tell yourself the pollution is OK, and I’m wasting this money because I’m too big.”
Chris Jones is a former research engineer and Associate Professor at the University of Iowa. He’s now president of the Driftless Water Defenders after authoring a scathing indictment of factory farming in his state. He’s also exploring a run for Iowa Agriculture Secretary against incumbent Jeff Naig. Does Cullen think he has a shot?
“His name is reviled in production agriculture for writing that Iowa is bathed in hog shit – which it is. But just getting people to reassess their position on water quality is a victory for Chris Jones. The farm bureau will try and destroy him. But the conversation is changing in Iowa because we are the only state with a rising incidence of cancer. Chris is doing us a favor even if he loses. He’s going to force people to think about how we’re crapping in our nest. He’s indelicate about water pollution and that’s going to make people uncomfortable and that’s what we need. For people to be uncomfortable.”
In We Crapped Our Nest, Cullen does a fair amount of writing about the woes that chemical dependent industrialized agriculture has wrought on the landscape and the people of Iowa. Chronic insults that are not going unnoticed. “Where I live in Western Iowa, we have the highest breast cancer and prostate cancer rates in North America. We also have the densest concentration of livestock in North America. Hogs, dairy, eggs and turkeys. There’s a lot of anxiety in Iowa between the connections of water pollution and cancer. Specifically, agriculture and cancer, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides.”
So why not regulate agriculture in the state?
“Government capture by conservatives has been going on for the past 50 years in Iowa. They bought the entire judicial system. And the Iowa supreme court has now said you cannot regulate agriculture. We have a one-party system and the Farm Bureau is calling the shots on everything in Iowa in consultation with Koch Enterprises.”
In his book, Cullen also writes about farmworkers and meat plant workers being deported and what the detrimental effect it has on the fabric of rural communities. He also talks about how Iowa farmers are enduring a second trade war that has deeply impacted the ag economy. With a stalled farm bill, why does Cullen think farmers keep voting for Trump?
“In his first term the trade war really set export sales back permanently and they really had a generous bailout of $100 billion from a multiplicity of sources. Farmers called them Trump Bumps. They think Trump will still take care of them, again.
But you also don’t see the Trump flags flying in Iowa like you used to.”