There’s a joke you’ll hear while driving through Iowa in the late spring. When someone sniffs something pungent wafting up from the fields, they’ll turn to you with a grin on their face. Then comes the joke: Smells like money!

Heh, I used to say in response, but no more than that, for it’s not a very good joke. It’s just one of those things some Midwestern folks say out of habit, like aw damn it or just gonna sneak on by ya. But more and more, I’ve become uncomfortable entertaining the premise of the joke — that is, the tacit equation of hog manure with profit. So now: Smells like money! someone’ll say. Nah, I’ll respond, that’s just hog shit.

I’m not opposed to the smell of hog manure per se. After all, I grew up with that smell. When I was born, my family had been raising hogs in Washington County, Iowa for generations. They’d been farming corn for even longer, right on back to when the state government first decreed, illegally, that parcel of Meskwaki land open for white folks to claim as their own.

Generation after generation, right on down to me, came the wisdom derived from living intimately with animals.

From a very young age, I could sense where to stand among hogs to stay in their line of sight. I knew rudimentary veterinary medicine. I understood how to herd hogs back into the pen from the corn fields into which they would occasionally romp. I also learned — through ample practice — how to scoop hog shit from one spot to another. All of this taught me that although some folks think manure smells like money from afar, when it’s on your hands, it just smells like shit. 

And so it went, until 2007, when the herd was sold off. At the time, my family explained to me that this was a good thing — one less responsibility, one less concern. But as I would later learn, the real reason was corn. The ethanol boom drove the price of corn skyward, raising all other costs except for the price of pork. It was no longer financially viable for a farm of my family’s size to use corn for hog feed. We did not have the herd size of other farmers, whose magnitude granted them a certain degree of protection.

My family was not the only ones to sell their hogs, though. Between 1992 and 2017, the number of farms raising pigs dwindled from 561 to 167. But this didn’t mean that there were fewer pigs in Washington County. Rather, during that same time, the pig population ballooned from 344,170 to 1,332,048 — 60 pigs for every human being in the county. Taken on average, that’s 8,000 pigs per farm, granting Washington County the third largest pig population of any county in the nation. The demographics of farm workers has also changed in the past three decades. Though actual statistics are difficult to gather, migrants, immigrants, and BIPOC workers make up an increasing share — if not majority — of actual Iowa farm labor.  

There are other facts, too — ones that the state Pork Board isn’t as proud of. Iowans now experience the second highest rates of cancer in the nation, largely due to nitrates from manure runoff. 

In 2018, 700 Iowa waterways were found to be polluted, largely owing to nitrates from manure runoff. Research has also directly linked the intensification of the livestock industry to increased reports of cyanobacteria content in drinking water near livestock operations. Humans and non-humans who live near CAFOs are more likely to experience a range of adverse health effects, too, including respiratory disease, hypertension, bacterial infection, and cognitive impairments — and in Iowa, these folks tend to be already marginalized. And what of all the money assumed in the hog shit smell? Into the hands of just a few individuals. 

Rob Nixon calls this “slow violence” — the gradual accretion of ecological harm over time, which disproportionately impacts BIPOC, poor, and other historically marginalized communities. I’d also call it a quiet or hidden violence. Tucked back away from cities and interstates, the damage is hard to identify for those not actively living in it. 

And this, now, includes me. I have been off the farm for more than ten years. That time has granted me a generative distance from the daily minutiae of living among the pigs. In that space between now and then, between me and the pigs, I have had time to reflect. I see that the systems and attitudes that drive the monstrous growth of the pork industry are those that drive the climate crisis: maximization, extraction, acceleration, consolidation, inequality, producerism, neoliberalism, capitalism, objectification of our nonhuman kin (and, for that matter, our human kin), and the pursuit of profit.

What to do? What to do in the face of pork propaganda? In the face of the state government’s blatant disregard for the living world? When Governor Kim Reynolds actively stymies local requests for already allocated federal funds to support greater environmental protections? When environmental scientists are gagged by politicians? When the MAGA movement has made meat a political issue — a key component of their concept of masculinity? Can we imagine, in the face of so much resistance, an Iowa without pigs? 

I am still trying to find ways to respond to these questions. As an educator, I’ve been working to help students build their capacity to read critically, to learn to see what’s not immediately visible on the page, to look for the unpalatable ecological harm that writers cannot or will not depict. But identifying the harm is only one step in what I now know as a much larger endeavor: to empathize with those nonhumans and humans whom we’ve never met, to actively care for those whom we’ll never see, hear, or touch. The trick, as I see it, is to be able to imagine the smell of hog manure in the air but reject the compulsion to say it smells like money.

In my decade as an educator, I have been fortunate to work with young people who understand the precariousness of the moment we are in. Even the most privileged among them know that the climate crisis is not an abstraction. They know their futures hinge on our collective willingness to care — to dream beyond convention. These young people — their energy, their anger, their diligence, their concern, their care for one another — give me hope. Across generations and geographies, there are communities working together to reverse the slow violence status quo. How fortunate I am to have found myself among them.

Nick is a Climate Generation Window Into COP delegate for COP29. To learn more, we encourage you to meet the full delegation, support our delegates, and subscribe to the Window Into COP digest.

Nick Kleese is an Iowa farm kid turned literacy educator. Nick serves as the Associate Director of Community Engagement at the Center for Climate Literacy at the University of Minnesota, Managing Editor for Climate Literacy in Education, and Editor at Climate Lit. He is also Co-Founder of KidLitLab! He has taught middle school and high school English, undergraduate children’s literature courses, and outdoor immersion experiences for kindergarteners. His current research explores the role young people’s literature and media could play in advancing an interspecies democracy.

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Out of Iowa