Laura Kraus

A lot of your neighbors are growing from horizon to horizon corn and soybeans in this state. Why aren’t you doing the same?

All my neighbors grow corn and soybeans from horizon to horizon. That’s what we grow in Iowa. When I bought this farm, I had the opportunity to try something different, and I knew I had to because I’m not a good enough farmer to make enough money to live growing corn and soybeans the way everybody else does. So, I needed to try something different, and I had some ideas about some things that I might do, but probably about fifteen years ago, I learned about the idea of community-supported agriculture and it seemed like a pretty good way to make a living off the farm.

So, I’ve always been interested in fruits and vegetables, and I always had a big garden and always planned to grow food for people, but kind of figured out this marketing model that made it possible to do it in a way that could support me, or nearly support me.

I know that this is highly appreciated by my community. I’m stunned constantly at how much people appreciate this and how much they enjoy it, and it gives me a real lot of pleasure to give people something they can actually eat. So, the corn and soybeans that I grow on the rest of the farm aren’t actually edible in the form that they’re in. A whole lot of stuff has to be done to them. So, for me, it’s a lot of fun to give people peas and broccoli and radishes and things that they eat in the car before they even get home. It’s way more rewarding than corn and soybeans.

Is this an easy way to make a living?

Growing fruits and vegetables is not an easy way to make a living. It’s a lot of hard work. It takes a lot of hours. It takes real high-level management skills and it’s management skills that we might have lost a little bit, but management skills certainly that we could relearn. Farmers are creative and talented and they know how to get stuff done.

You can get in a rut but you can get out of it too, and so, I feel even though it’s real hard work and even though it’s every day of the week, it’s a way to make some money, it pays much better than corn and soybeans do. It paid for this farm — in a short amount of time. And, even though its’ a ton of work, I believe the potential is out here in the country, for not people who have small farms like this, but rather mid-sized farmers who might be struggling in a market that pays very low prices for our commodity crops and depends on a program in order to support your family, plus two or three people in the family working in town.

I really think the possibility of growing fruits and vegetables for local consumption is a huge one and we have the ability to do it.  We just have to practice a little bit, get the equipment and learn how to use it, and I think it’ll work fantastically for people. And, I think it would be a huge opportunity to get more money into the countryside and to support our communities better and to get healthier food and more healthy food to the people in our towns and community.

Why do you think people buy your produce?

The food is good. They don’t seem to have a political agenda, although I know there are CSA’s in Iowa where the political agenda is huge and wide. But, my people don’t seem to have it. My people just like the food, they like to come out to the farm, and the kids like to hold the cats. And it’s just pretty fun.

How come your neighbors aren’t doing the same thing as you?

There are probably a number of reasons why other farmers don’t do this. This farm is very small. It’s a very unconventional farm in Iowa. It’s only 72 acres. Your average farm in Iowa is about 700 acres, so its’ very small. What I do is manageable on a small scale, but I also think it is manageable on a larger scale. We know that the mid-sized family farmers are the group that is shrinking the quickest.

So, small farms are becoming more common, large farms are becoming more common, mid-sized farms are going away and that’s a huge problem because that’s where our communities are based. They’re the backbone and several reasons why people might resist into fruit and vegetable production. And I guess I think of fruit and vegetables for local consumption, too.

I’m not thinking about going into any kind of a global or much beyond the Midwest market. One reason is that your average farmer in Iowa is at least 55 years old and when you’re 55 years old, it’s not that easy to start a whole new thing, and I don’t blame them because I’m almost 50 and I don’t really want to start a whole new thing either — so, that’s kind of hard. We don’t really have the access to the equipment.

The equipment that would’ve been here maybe 50 years ago, when we had more diverse farming operations in Iowa, is almost all gone. So, in order to get the equipment, you have to build it or go out of state to find it or you have to do quite a lot of research to figure out what the equipment is and how to use it. And, most of all, what we don’t have is any sort of a market distribution network. So, I can grow a zucchini on my farm — a perfectly wonderful zucchini, but it’s way easier for the grocery store in Marion or Cedar Rapids to get that zucchini from Chile than it is to get it from me, because we just don’t have the distribution and marketing network.

And the distribution and marketing networks to get the zucchini from Chile to Marion, Iowa, are established, they run like well-oiled machines, everybody knows exactly where they fit, they can guarantee that that zucchini is going to come in a certain condition on a certain day at a certain time to a certain dock and a certain price and we don’t have any of that in Iowa. Our distribution network is virtually non-existent and so, most of our sales have to be done direct from the farmer to the ultimate user, maybe a restaurant or a hospital or a store, or direct to consumers.

And, that’s a lot of work and farmers don’t particularly care to spend that much time with the public. It’s a personal thing and everybody doesn’t know how to do it. And so, figuring out how to sell the product, I believe, is the big roadblock. I think we’ve got a lot of evidence that growing more fruits and vegetables for local consumption has all kind of economic and health and social and community benefits for the State of Iowa and for the people who would be involved in it, including the producers and consumers.

But, it’s a big jump to make it happen because we lack this distribution network.

And, one more thing that’s a problem is the Federal Farm Program pays a subsidy for commodity crops like corn and soybeans, not for vegetables and our payment is based on a historical value that’s related to the acres — number of acres of corn and soybeans that have grown on this farm in the past and it’s a permanent feature that goes along with the land, so it adds value to the land to have a large number because that makes it possible to get a larger subsidy payment.

So, people are reluctant to grow fruits and vegetables any way that might diminish the value of that number because that would be a permanent devaluation of the land. The value of the land is based on its capacity to produce corn, so it’s native capacity and also on its historical corn production records.

Do you think that kind of land valuation, or the subsidy system, is good for Iowa?

Well, the subsidy program from the federal government is a very mixed blessing and we get a lot of benefit from a lot of the different components. But, the subsidies themselves allow us to stay on the land. That’s how families live. The cost of production is greater than the value of the crop, for both corn and soybeans. So, the market never pays us back fully for the cost of production. I shouldn’t say never, but rarely does the market pay us back fully to cover the cost of production.

So, we depend on the various programs and various subsidies to cover the cost of production and also provide income for the family to live on.

So, it’s very critical, but is it a problem? Yes. Everybody knows it’s a problem, because it causes us to make production decisions that aren’t necessarily environmentally the best. They aren’t maybe the best for our family. They aren’t maybe the best for our community. So, we make decisions based on the program rather than on other criteria that we might value more.

It’s crazy. But, we’re married to it now. We’ve been doing it since Earl Butts — the late 70’s. We’ve been operating under this kind of a program so a whole generation of farmers now has only grown up with this program and sure, it’s crazy, but it’s very difficult to imagine not having it because it’s hard to imagine that the market could ever pay us to cover the cost of production of the crop.

If everyone started growing local vegetables, then you’d go out of business, right? So, it’s kind of a niche market?

If everyone started growing local vegetables, no, I wouldn’t go out of business because the potential demand is huge so, there’s plenty of opportunity. But first of all, everyone’s not going to do it. That’s a false argument — never does everyone do it. So, everyone’s not going to do it and the demand for fruits and vegetables in Iowa, if we all ate five a day like we’re supposed to, or seven a day in a better world, the demand is huge.

It would take thousands and thousands of acres away from commodity production.

Your neighbors grow corn in the distance. Has herbicide overspray affected your crop?

There is some hazard with growing fruits and vegetables in the country in Iowa because there is so much weed killer and insecticide use — not insecticides as much, but everybody uses two or three doses of some pretty serious weed killers. And, the technology is good to keep the weed killer on the field where you put it but things happen, and so, if the wind is blowing or if something gets messed up, you can quite easily get damage from a weed killer on a place where it’s not supposed to be.

And, a lot of fruit and vegetable crops tend to get damaged more quickly than other things do. So, if there is drift from a neighbor or if the product volatilizes, comes out of the field, goes back into the air and then starts moving around in the wind, we can have quite a lot of serious damage. And, there’s really no way to protect yourself from it.

One day, the neighbors had to spray the weeds in the cornfield and it was time. So they started when the winds were calm enough, but during the process of spraying, the winds picked up and some of the spray drifted across the road and hit several of my tomato plants.

Does farm policy need to change in order to produce more farms like this?

Well, there’s a lot of risk and a lot of things you have to learn in order to transition to organic or to transition to fruits and vegetables for local production. So, you need to have some sort of a plan in place to help you make the jump and certainly, the farm program could support those kinds of transitions, absolutely. So, helping people learn to farm organically by making some sort of a support payment available for a couple of years while the learning happens.

It would be great if they could help to provide some sort of cost share or some program that would make it possible to support the building of infrastructure for a marketing and distribution network for example.

That would make it more possible in your view for more farmers to kind of escape the commodity treadmill?

Well, since I believe that the distribution problem is the primary problem that keeps people from entering into fruit and vegetable production, I think that might help to solve the problem. It certainly won’t make it easy for people to grow fruits and vegetables, but it will reduce one of the barriers a little bit.

If there were more government support for this transition, do you think that would bring the cost down and ultimately be an expenditure that would be of benefit to we the people?

Well, frequently, organic food costs more than conventional food. Not always, but many times it does. It’s pay me now or pay me later. We pay for the food one way or the other. So, we either pay for the good organic food or we pay for water pollution or farm worker diseases and all the problems associated with pesticide use.

Can you imagine a bill that would support the transition to organic that would help bring down the higher cost of organic produce?

I’m not sure that the cost of organic produce would come down, but I think the cost of conventional food would go up because the true cost of the food would show if that wasn’t there to provide the subsidies to hide all the true costs. So, the true cost of production would be paid for by the market, which would raise the price of the product, which would ultimately raise the price of processed foods because that’s where most of the commodity crops go, into processed food. So, I’m not sure that organic food would become cheaper, but I think conventional food would more truly reflect some of the costs associated with it.

U.S. taxpayers are paying for all this cheap corn and soybeans?

U.S. taxpayers certainly pay to support all this cheap, poor quality processed food. Absolutely. We pay in water pollution. We pay in sediment. We pay in sickness. We pay in highway construction. We pay in irrigation, we pay, we pay, we pay, we pay, and it’s not reflected in the costs of the food at all.

What do you think of the notion, especially now with ethanol, that the overproduction of corn and soybeans, incentivized by the subsidy system, creates a low price?

We’re paying taxes to support a production system that encourages overproduction of crops that can only be consumed when processed. So, we grow too much corn. We grow too much soybeans. The price stays low. It makes the exporters, the food processors, the huge confinement livestock feeders, and the ethanol producers happy. But, it doesn’t do anything for the rest of us. We pay through our taxes and we get poor quality food.

Is there something that I haven’t asked you?

Well, we’re really in trouble out here in the country and as much as every farmer in Iowa of any type would agree with you that the farm program is a mess and the subsidies are a disaster. I can’t imagine how we would get along when and if they go away. We barely make a living now. I can imagine a bloodbath in the countryside, particularly in the middle of the country and in the south where we are so dependent on the programs. Our gross sales of our commodity crops are less than what we spend on inputs and over and over the data shows this.

We would earn negative income, plus we buy food. We spend millions of dollars to buy food from all parts of the world and the country when we could grow our own. As much as people say the subsidy program has to go, it is such a crutch for us, that if it goes quickly, we will die. I mean, it’s just that simple. It will be an absolute bloodbath in the country at all levels.

So, when the subsidy program is redone, it needs to be done very carefully and very slowly and very gently because we need to have farmers and we need to have tons of them in the rural areas. If we’re not here, it’ll get worse. It’s not like we’re going to run out of food.

The President at one time he said he wanted to cut it 5%. You think about a 5% cut in your income at the same time that most of your major costs are going up, like fuel and fertilizer and all that stuff, chemicals and rent, because of the ethanol thing.

So, your grocery bill and your light bill and everything else is going up, and you just took a 5% cut in your income. Well, that means that you have to rent a cheaper house, so rents go down. The retired ladies in town, who own 70% of the land in Iowa, now have 5% less income. The bank is going to give you 5% less loan on your production loan, 5% less money. You’re going to buy 5% less equipment and 5% money and your time. It’s just like this rollercoaster that just gains speed and gets worse and worse as it goes.

Rearranging [the dollars], but using them for rural development, using them for conservation, using them to support farmers who are doing things that are good for the environment and good for rural areas.

Is there enough support for conservation and for transition to different types of agriculture?

There’s never enough support for conservation and transition to agriculture, no. There needs to be support for research, and there needs to be support for actually doing the thing, there needs to be support for infrastructure. No. There’s nowhere near enough. The farm bill is $60 billion in all. No, it’s more than that. 30 to 40 is food stamps, $0 billion on the subsidies, $4 billion on conservation and disasters each. So that’s $8 billion on conservation and disasters and we didn’t even get to transition to organic or any of those. And, the conservation money is getting cut. We just saw a program yesterday where conservation is down to about 9% of the total value of the coming into Iowa. Only 9% of that value is for conservation. The rest is mostly almost all subsidies.

The program encourages overproduction and overproduction often happens when poor environmental decisions are made. So, unsuitable ground, for example, is planted to corn and soybeans when it should be in permanent cover. So, we encourage overproduction which causes bad environmental decisions at the same time that we pay less and less to do environmentally positive things that would make the land overall less productive but environmentally much more sound.

What about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico? How are we going to stop nitrates from going down the Mississippi River?

The dead zone is a monster problem. I believe it’s mostly coming off of agricultural ground. The number one pollutant is sediment. Sediment carries phosphorous, nitrates dissolve easily in water, and so easy for that stuff. Ninety percent of the surface of my State is covered with corn and soybeans. It’s pretty hard to imagine that they’re not the major contributor to this issue, although many people don’t think that. But I think it’s probably true and certainly nitrates and soil runoff from urban areas is critical too.

It’s absolutely important. It’s not like it’s nothing. It’s hugely important. How to stop it? Plant prairie.

Do you have a well? Do you ever worry about atrazine?

I do have a well. It’s only 140 feet deep, and I control the upper part of the ground so I don’t worry too much about it, although I’ve never had it tested because I don’t really want to know. I wouldn’t worry about atrazine because I know that there’s not very much atrazine being used around here, but there certainly could be nitrates. And I don’t think there’s any bacteria either because I’m on the top of the hill and there’s no livestock left where I live, so we don’t have to worry about E Coli.

How about your neighbors in town?

Well, I know that people in the country can get their water tested and I hear off and on of people who get their well improved. I think it’s almost always nitrates or chloroform bacteria around here. Atrazine is used in such low quantities anymore, that I guess that I don’t suspect that it’s one of the biggies. It’s not one I hear about. The City of Cedar Rapids gets their water from the Cedar River and they can’t have any more than 10 parts per million nitrates in the drinking water, and the river is quite frequently in the spring well over that, up into the 20’s and sometimes into the 30’s.

So, they worry a lot about nitrates in the water because they don’t have any way to remove them, so they’re very concerned about what’s going on upstream on the Cedar. Now, certainly, the people downstream of me probably have similar concerns and are worried about what I’m doing too.

Do you receive subsidies for your corn and soybeans?

Yes, I get everything there is to get on the corn and beans, oats, wheat, all commodity crops, depending on what I grow. Each year I get a different one.

Without that check, I’m fine, because I have an operation here in the vegetable garden that pays for the farm. I don’t plan on having the commodity crops pay or make many farm payments. Mostly, I have too much land to plant fruits and vegetables. I have to plant something, so I plant corn and soybeans, and oats and hay and in an organic rotation, you don’t produce that much corn and soybean.

So, my check would be larger if I was a better farmer who was more determined to grow commodity crops to get the payment, but I think probably there are many times that I do not cover the cost of production of my crop and the payment would definitely help me get over the hump. But, I don’t calculate it, because once again, I don’t want to know. Welcome to Iowa.

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