Denise O’Brien (Former Candidate for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture)

How long have you been farming?

We’re on the farm of my husband’s father; and so he’s the fourth generation of farmers in his family, and we met in 1975, and got married, and moved here and started farming. And we’ve been here now for 31 years. We’ve been married for 31 years. And so we live in the house my husband grew up in and he’s pretty proud of that, and I am, too. I think it’s a really nice place to be.

Why organic?

Well, that was mostly his decision. When I came back to Iowa, I had been gone for about 10 years and I came back for a summer; and met him in a bar and he said he had moved back home to be an organic farmer, and I said, “Wow, that’s pretty political.” And we got to know each other and six months later we were married, and so he would the person to ask that question to.

Why did you run for Secretary of Agriculture here in the state of Iowa?

I ran for Secretary of Agriculture because it was another avenue of getting the issues to the table, and so I’ve been this farmer for 31 years. We were politically active during the ’80s and into the ’90s doing some local state, regional, national, international work, and it just seemed like the right next step.

I’ve always felt like I was a person on the outside trying to make the politicians do what they’re supposed to do, and I thought it would be really neat to have a title behind my name. I could be influential and take the issues to another step.

The reason I ran is because Iowa’s environmental issue is agriculture; and the conventional agriculture folks refuse to recognize that.

And coming from where I have, from 31 years of being an organic farmer, I thought that we just really needed to face those issues head-on. So, my campaign was about safe and healthy families, safe and healthy farms, and a safe and healthy Iowa. And you can take those safe and healthy in any way you want to, but it seemed to resonate. It did resonate with a lot of people.

Conventional agriculture is in denial about certain environmental issues. In what ways do your views differ from theirs, in terms of how to make farm policy in agriculture?

Well, my philosophy about farming, which I learned from Larry, is more about how you work in balance with nature, in accordance with nature, not man’s domination over nature. And it’s very clear that the evidence over the years now has resulted in when humankind tries to dominate, nature just stays that one step ahead.

And so when they’ve developed, they being the agribusiness industry, a chemical that will take care of this; well, or the pests become resistant. So, when you don’t use the proper farming practices to keep in balance, then you’re continually having to use, use chemicals that are harmful to people and/or water in our air, and that’s pretty much how we differ.

And back to one reason I wanted to run, too, and I said this in the very beginning of my campaign. I wanted to one, run to bring issues to the table, two, to address the issues, and I wanted to take Farm Bureau head on. They just, they just so dominate ag, agribusiness and, I hate to say agriculture, because they’re not about culture; it’s the agri-industry that their voice is so dominant that someone has to stand up and speak for the voice that’s not heard very loudly.

What’s the relationship between Farm Bureau and agribusiness?

Well, Farm Bureau insurance is an insurance company hiding under the guise of a farm membership organization, although they do have county chapters, and they do have a semblance of a democratically run organization. But they sell inputs to the farmers. They sell chemicals; they sell tires; they sell insurance; they’re an input.

They represent industry as opposed to farmers.

What kind of support did you have from family farmers throughout Iowa for your candidacy?

When I first started running, I didn’t know what kind of support I’d have, and I ran in a primary. There was a big primary that took place, and it was one of those things where, actually, the person I was running against was someone I have known since he was five years old, and that a lot of the people who knew my opponent and I, it really tore them up about who to support; and my reply to them was, “You know, why not put your money on both of us and you’re going to be, you know, a winner either way.”

First of all, it starts with raising money. And so, as I started getting my lists of people together to start making calls to, I was really surprised when I got on the phone and asked people for $100, that they said, “Sure. Where do I send it?” I had very few refusals. So it was an encouraging thing.

It was a difficult thing, but the more I got used to it, the easier it got, and I say easier; I’m not so sure it was ever very easy, asking for money. So, and then once I got out on the road, people really showed up and supported me at a lot of the meetings that were sponsored by Farmers’ Union, or AAUW.

Even though it’s an Iowa Department of Agriculture position, a lot of people from the urban areas were very interested in it as well, and I think because they understand the connection with the environment and agriculture. So it was surprising to see how much momentum that there was out there; and I traveled all over the state and met tons of people and stayed at a lot of houses, and talked into the night with a lot of people.

People get the connection between Iowa’s environment and what agriculture has done over the last 50 years.

The connection, I believe, that’s happening now is people wanting to recreate in the state they live in, and the barriers that are now beginning to be apparent, and people say, “Well, when I was a kid, I could swim in this river and it was clear.”

Now, 50 years after this kind of agriculture, the rivers are muddy, they’re full of pesticides, they’re full of chemicals, and they’re full of nitrogen and phosphorus. We’re asphyxiating the Gulf of Mexico with the hypoxia; so people know who want to recreate and be in Iowa and be outdoors are turned away, are horrified by the smell of the large animal confinement operations and the conditions of our water.

It’s just not the same; to canoe or kayak down a river that was once clear and now is extremely muddy.

The polls showed you ahead by a certain percentage just weeks before the election.

Well, about three weeks out from the general election there was this big event that happens every year in Iowa, the Jefferson-Jackson event, and it’s where all the Democrats come together. It was announced at the very end of the evening that I was ahead by 14 points. And there was a lot of cheering, a lot of celebration, Culver was ahead, so we were looking good at that time.

What happened to lose this 14 point lead?

Well, it’s all sort of blurry in a way. We came out of that 14 points ahead, and kept working, being on the road, going to every event, running my ads on TV, everything a campaign does. We had a very good campaign staff, and they were doing everything that needed to be done. And actually, we were doing quite well.

But just about the Thursday before the Tuesday of the election, we started hearing things happening, one was that the radio station, WHO, was giving a lot of ads and a lot of time to the farm show, the big show.

It’s called “Everyday”, and it was giving a lot of attention to this, and there seemed to be people calling in and making comments about the race, and Senator Harkin and I went on. My opponent was on with Senator Grassley, I believe on one day, and they really hadn’t extended that invitation to me, but we found out about it, and so we called up and said, we’d like to be on there.

So Senator Harkin and I went that day to the radio station and it was very peculiar. We were sitting with our earphones on and everything, Senator Harkin was answering a question, and when on and on to say, “I’ve always supported Denise…”

“She’s been good, I’ve known her for a long time.” And then they started up this music and like the show was over; it was coming to an end, and Senator Harkin asked them, “Did you play that? Did that get in there?” And they said, “Oh, it did, Senator,” and it didn’t. And so there was just some manipulation that was done that was peculiar, and I wish I could be more forthright about what happened.

So, and I don’t know if anybody recorded that. So we left the station, assured that what Senator Harkin had said on the end was on there, and then found out later it wasn’t.

WHO has always been the radio broadcaster of the State of Iowa, and so everybody has always listened. It’s had a very good reputation, and a few years ago, it was bought by ClearChannel Communications. And there’s been some shuffling around in the way the shows are done in that there’s always been a prejudice against organic farming and alternative farming.

It’s really a promoter, and their sponsors are agribusiness; so there was a vested interest in where they were coming from.

Thursday night before the election, we had heard that there was this phone call that had gone out and that there was this press release from Iowans For Agriculture PAC.

That night, on the Channel 8 news, I’d heard that there was a press conference, and someone called me up and they said, “Denise, this is what happened. You’re being accused of having animal cruelty charges.” And then I watched the 10 o’clock news that night, saw this man from Southern Iowa, close to here, I saw him on there making the charges, and showing this check that we wrote, and showing the website that showed the charges we had, and it was pretty devastating.

And I wasn’t quite sure what to do, and we had some calls during that time to Harkin’s people to see what we should do. And the decision was to let my staff handle it, and that I was going to be on a road trip with the Governor. We were on this motorcade to go rally the vote for the last 72 hours, and so the decision was left to let my staff take care of that.

Well, I was listening to the radio, WHO, again, to see what they were saying once this broke, and they kept saying on the radio, “Well, we haven’t heard from the O’Brien campaign yet.” And they just really made it an issue, that they hadn’t heard from my campaign yet.

And then when they heard from my staff, the words that they used were very clear that they just felt I was fraught with guilt and this was a real big issue. And, “We’ve made calls to the campaign and they haven’t called us back yet.”

And so I was off on the rest of the trip with the motorcade, and then the next day we heard that the phone calls began; people were getting them, Democrats and Republicans alike, people starting calling my staff in Des Moines and saying, “We got this phone call and it’s saying that Denise is an animal killer.” And then I had phone calls from people around the state saying, “Denise, you’ve got to talk to these people because they’ve had this phone call and they want to hear from you that it’s not true; what’s the deal?”

In Iowa, cell phones don’t work that well, so I ended being on and off calls all throughout the state of Iowa. And so yeah, the last 72 hours was an intense, I don’t know what money was spent on this, but there was an intense telemarketing campaign to defeat me, to call me an animal killer, and from what I understand, that tactic is used to keep people from the polls; not to change their minds, but to keep them from voting.

Nineteen years ago, my husband was charged with animal cruelty. It stems out of hiring a man to take care of our animals; him not taking care of them, and a neighbor reporting this to the county sheriff.

The push poll, whose voice was it?

From what I understand, the phone was a little old lady, saying hello, this is so-and-so, I’m 90 years old; “Did you know Denise is an animal killer?” And basically, that’s what’s been reported to me. I never heard the ad.

How did that make you feel?

Well, it was really awful. Being on the motorcade through this, now going through the state of Iowa, every stop we made was lights and music and lots of people getting out the vote; it was GOTV; and in my mind, it was like, “I hope I’m not the only Democrat that loses.”

I had to not let people know, of course. I had to put on a good face, rally and get people riled up to go; but in my heart, there was a real sinking feeling.

Did you ever anticipate these tactics?

I sort of had an inkling. My life isn’t clean. No one’s lives are perfect, and Larry and I had talked about this. We both knew it was in the past, and it’s one of those things they tell you as a candidate, “Get all the skeletons out of the closet.” Larry and I talked about it, and we decided that no, that’s really a long time ago, and so I didn’t inform my campaign staff, and we could have probably worked through this in a different way; that’s maybe my only regret.

But given the way politics are in the United States, it didn’t surprise me that dirty pool would be a part of this. We advanced so far without it happening; but I always had this sense of foreboding, that there could be something that could erupt and there are a number of things.

I don’t need to mention any of them, but there are a number of things that people could have picked on, and escalated it or exaggerated it, just like they did with this, and probably 4 or 5 things; and I think it’s very unfortunate that we think people who are running for public office have to be perfect; because no one’s lives, no human being has a perfect life.

And in fact, when you have issues like that happen in your life, it builds your character. It changes who you are, and you can set the course right. There’s a number of things that go along with that.

You and Northey raised about an equal amount of money; did money play a role in this?

I think money did play a part, especially in the very end. I didn’t know the intricacies of how you buy political ads and how buy time and all that sort of thing, but learned a lot during my campaign, so you use your money to buy spots on the radio and on the television. It was very interesting to us as a campaign as we watched the ads.

It was my opponent who used the nasty ads, and it was the Iowans For Agriculture, the political action committee that formed, that played the good ads, about Mr. Northey. If you look at the ads, you’ll see that this says, “Paid for by Iowans For Agriculture.” And they played the ones that played up his character and his expertise in agriculture.

And it was Mr. Northey’s ads that were the Berkeley ad; the deep, dark ad that said, “Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, California; animal rights activist.” So those came from him. But with the two of them together, no one could believe that a political action group made good ads.

And, Senator Harkin said, “What?” But with the two of them, they outspent me 2 to 1. And so they planned the strategy very carefully and it was our theory that if I had won, the Iowans For Agriculture hadn’t dissed me, but could still make inroads with me, because they hadn’t run against me negatively. That was our theory.

Given the 527, the advice you got, the message to your staff, in the last 72 hours, would you have liked the money to be able to respond to that?

I think that, actually, my advisors gave me the wrong advice. Of course, it’s always hindsight, but I believe that if I would have done a press conference and faced to the cameras that I would have gotten a lot of press, and that it would have made it more interesting than if I would have maybe hidden behind my staff. And my observation of political things, when you let your staff do it, it kind of puts you at a disadvantage.

And I believe that if I would have faced it head on and explained it, that I would have gotten enough press that maybe would have kept me in the lead. I don’t know. And if I would have had more money, at that last minute, we probably could have run some more ads, but to counter a telemarketing campaign strategy like that, I’m not sure.

I mean, the question is in the air about whether or not we could have overcome that. That was a pretty really nasty ad.

They cite you for both activism and abuse.

Well, I was really puzzled by that. The ads that were running on TV were saying I’m an animal rights activist, or I hang out with animal rights activists. And then to have them say I was abusing, I think it was a real nasty strategy to confuse people; and to really bring those questions in their minds when they went to pull the lever or fill in the space or whatever when it came to my name.

And, again, I think that’s that campaign strategy, to keep people from voting, and leave that question in their minds. So there’s a question of doubt, if you want to use a legal term; am I beyond a question of doubt qualified to do this, and obviously they were putting the question there.

The majority of the [527] money came from Farm Bureau to form the political action committee; the Iowans For Agriculture’s address was Farm Bureau in West Des Moines. When you looked at who gave money to it, the majority of the money came from Farm Bureau.

And then you also have the Corn Growers; Monsanto, Ciby-Geigy, Sygenta; it’s very clear, and it’s public record so anyone can go there and look. But the majority of the money did come from Farm Bureau.

Why would the Farm Bureau cast you as a Berkeley hippie?

Framing me as an animal right activist and raising the money to help pay for those ads, it would be because I support local control and I’m against confined animal feeding operations, CAFOs.

So with my stand on local control, and if I would have gotten elected, I could use my influence as the Secretary of Agriculture to at least influence some of the legislation that would take place in Iowa.

I would have worked hard with the legislators that worked for it. I mean, again, this is an interesting thing, because what happened in the legislature was so disappointing to so many people, because the Democrats that were elected failed to take this on as an issue.

My campaign was about local control on large animal confinement operations, so there were many Republicans that crossed over to vote for me and many Democrats because of their disgust with the legislature over the last few years of not dealing with the issue of local control; not allowing local communities to have input on what was happening in their backyards. So my campaign was about that, and that is one reason that Farm Bureau worked so hard to defeat me.

Are an activist or an abuser?

I’m a person who understands animals’ place in the world. There are animals that are companions for human beings; and there are animals that are raised for our nourishment.

I believe in taking good care of animals, whether or not they’re our companions or for our nourishment; and the way animals are raised in Iowa, in large confinement operations, we call them factory farms, is not humane, and that’s actually abusive. So it’s very interesting to me that they would apply being an animal abuser to me when animals are abused every day in the state of Iowa.

I imagine that coalition to support family farmers is Farm Bureau. But they have the Iowa Soybean Association, the Iowa Corn Growers, and those are people that continue to polarize the state of Iowa.

In my campaign, I actually talked about going around to every county in the state of Iowa and bringing with me people who were skilled in mediation and conflict resolution so we could start to resolve this issue.

Because what’s happening in Iowa isn’t either/or; and so we have to put ourselves together and work on, on the issues; and that wedge there with The Coalition to Support Family Farmers, and Iowans For Agriculture, and all the money that Farm Bureau is spending to put down anyone who questions what kind of agriculture’s done in Iowa continues to keep the polarization at a heightened level, and it does a disservice to the people of Iowa.

Should everybody in the country be concerned about runoff from agriculture?

The crops that are grown in Iowa are highly dependent on nitrogen, and nitrogen is put into the soil in a gas form, anhydrous ammonia, a very dangerous substance, by the way.

And people can die from it if they don’t connect their tanks up correctly. And the runoff that happens from corn into our water system puts nitrogen and phosphorus into our water that’s carried from our farmland into our rivers, to the Mississippi River, and the Mississippi and the Missouri River come together.

They go down to the Gulf of Mexico, and there are 7,000 square miles that there’s no oxygen. And so, that area is where a lot of our fish come from that we eat. And I stopped eating fish a long time ago because I am at the source here in Iowa of what happens in the Gulf of Mexico, and people need to be concerned.

People need to encourage farmers to use different practices. And the unfortunate thing about it, right now, is that we’ve increased the acres of corn because ethanol is such a big deal, and corn-based ethanol. And so, we are escalating the problem at this point.

And, again, I’ll take this back to my campaign, and I was delivering that message around the state of Iowa, and it was another message that Farm Bureau doesn’t want the public to know about; they sell the anhydrous ammonia and the chemicals that the farmers are putting in the land.

They have a vested interest in keeping agriculture the way it is in Iowa because they stand to lose their profits if they don’t make sure that this agriculture stays in place.

Was the cancer issue part of your campaign?

When I started farming a long time ago, I wasn’t from a farming family, so I needed to learn about a lot of things, and one of my first lessons was there’s a village about ten miles from here that’s very small, it’s probably 1000 people or less, they had to bring their water into their village because of the high nitrate level. And what was happening was a condition called blue babies.

The nitrates in the water rob the red blood cells of oxygen. And so in order to protect pregnant mothers and babies, they had to first import water into their community, and then dig a deep well in order to have better water. But that level of nitrates infiltration is going deeper and deeper into our aquifers that are underneath us.

So, it’s a real issue. And that was my first lesson, when I heard about blue babies. And then in relationship to cancer, there are different places in Iowa, that there’s clusters of breast cancer and testicular cancer, and there’s a neighborhood I know of in the next county, where there’s been a lot of deaths on this.

If you could just go down this road, and there’s been a high number of deaths due to breast cancer, and never directly related back to the chemicals, but those things have been really hard to prove when you’re not documenting it. So, those are things, and then things that I’ve read, and I’ve had issue with atrazine.

Atrazine is an endocrine disrupter, and there are places in Iowa where it’s banned, but there are people like Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute that said there’s no different land forms where that chemical will go right to the water, and that land forms that’s highly susceptible is karst.

And that’s where you’ve got big holes in the limestone and this water will go directly to the water source and that’s the issue around the hogs as well, is that the manure will go right to these places and pollute.

And, this whole philosophy of man’s dominion over nature is so harmful to us, now and in the future, that it concerns me about my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the people who will be here after us.

In your campaign, did you ever speak about atrazine?

Not atrazine directly. People can go through my archives and find all the articles that I’ve written about those things. My campaign was about safe and healthy families, safe and healthy farms, safe and healthy environment.

And that had to do with clean water, clean air, and the ways that that could be taken care of is to have local control, to let people make the decisions in their own communities about what will affect their lives, and I was always asked the question, and I was grilled at Farm Bureau meetings if I believed in fall application of nitrogen.

I would answer that with that scientific studies show that it’s a waste of money to put anhydrous ammonia on in the wintertime, and we continue to do it in Iowa because farmers are farming such vast amounts of land that they don’t have time to care for the land properly; so fall application happens.

How do we get out of this mess, and to what degree do publicly financed elections play a role in this?

Well, the way public financed elections would play a role is that it would level the playing field, and that’s what we’ve got to do. This is outrageous that we spend so much money that could be used for other things to win someone a seat not based on qualifications, but based on the amount of money they can spend to convince people they’re the best person.

Public financed elections would be so good because people could spend their time on the issues, not on the phone. So much of my time had to be spent on the phone, three or four hours every night, and to talk to people about giving you money. Well you can talk to people on the phone about your issues, but to take the money out of it would be such a bonus.

And people are getting tired of being asked for money. I, I just, if you look at the presidentials now and you see now everybody’s released their amounts of money that they’ve, that they’ve raised and for what? And mostly I’ve heard, it’s mostly about payroll, at this point, but then it’s going to be about ads. So absolutely, I support voter-owned elections, just 100%, and just we need, we need to make that change on the state level.

The people need to be heard; that this is what they want, and it’s another issue that our Democratically controlled legislature chose to ignore, and we need to make reform in order for people like myself and others to run. I mean, I’ve got a thick skin and I’ve been out on the cutting edge.

I’ve been an organic farmer for 31 years. I’ve been a woman who kept her own name. And there’s all these things that I’ve done because I believe that because I believe in equity. And equity is what we need in campaigns.

To what degree does the race for money help fuel negative ads? Can publicly financed elections help?

I believe public financed elections could eliminate the sleaze at the end. People start throwing sleaze, at the end, to the wind.

They start playing, if it looks like they’re losing, then the last resort is that they’ll defame the name or the character of that person who is in the winning position. So I think campaign reform would do a lot to eliminate that at the very end because it would make it be about the issues.

I think, when people are desperate, you pull the rug out from under someone, and it’s devastating to go through, and you try to think of how you could have done things differently and that sort of thing; but it’s dirty pool, and I don’t want politicians in office who play dirty pool.

So, campaign reform could bring back respect and dignity to something people have lost respect for. It’s so important to have a political system that has ethics, that has integrity, and that has respect for the other person who’s running, and we’ve gotten so far away from that.

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