Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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BUCKEYE, Iowa - "Come on! Come on! Go girls!" Annette Sweeney was on horseback, hollering at her chocolate-colored cows on a perfect Iowa morning, happy that her life is better since Donald Trump became president.
Sweeney, 60, raises Angus cows and corn on the flat, green farmland of central Iowa. Just 1 in 7 Americans live in places like this: Rural counties have 72 percent of the nation's land but a shrinking population as urban areas have ballooned in size and wealth.
In recent years, Sweeney has felt a growing "disconnect" between how people think in cities and in places like Buckeye, a town of 108. In her view, farmers were too often "shoved aside" during the presidency of Barack Obama, while environmentalists and conservationists, many of whom live nowhere near a farm, took over the national conversation.
Obama set aside millions of acres of undeveloped land as national monuments - more than any other president - preventing huge areas from being mined, logged or farmed. Obama also implemented more regulations with a significant economic impact than any president in three decades, according to the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center. Those actions were cheered by many Americans but widely viewed in rural areas as killing jobs.
Incredibly, Sweeney said, Obama's Agriculture Department even started pushing "Meatless Mondays," an insult to Iowa's pork, beef and chicken producers. "I will eat more meat on Monday to compensate for stupid USDA recommendation abt a meatless Monday," Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R, tweeted in response. Meatless Mondays felt like a "slap in the face" to Sweeney, who has this bumper sticker on her Buick: "EAT BEEF: The West Wasn't Won on Salad."
But nothing galled Sweeney more than a regulation Obama issued in 2015 called "Waters of the United States" or WOTUS. The Environmental Protection Agency said it was aimed at keeping pollutants - including fertilizer, manure and other farm runoff - out of streams and creeks that feed the nation's waterways. Farm runoff is a leading cause of water pollution, contaminating drinking water, spawning toxic algal blooms and killing fish.
To Sweeney, WOTUS felt like the government's hands on her throat.
Was some bureaucrat now going to show up and police her puddles and tiniest ditches of water? She said that is what happened several years ago: A federal conservation official told Sweeney she had a half-acre of wetland in the middle of a 160-acre field. Wetlands are protected habitats for migrating birds and other wildlife and are important for healthy soil and water.
"Suddenly, this piece of land that we had been farming for 70 years was federally protected, and we had to stop everything," said Sweeney, who was born on the farm and raised two boys there.
In the end, Sweeney had to pay $5,000 to preserve a small parcel of wetland elsewhere so she could continue farming her own property. The experience contributed to a feeling that "we were smothered" by the federal government, Sweeney said.
'Smothered' and 'shoved aside' in rural America
This is a lengthy article and there is a Democrat farmer's views in there as well.
Sweeney, 60, raises Angus cows and corn on the flat, green farmland of central Iowa. Just 1 in 7 Americans live in places like this: Rural counties have 72 percent of the nation's land but a shrinking population as urban areas have ballooned in size and wealth.
In recent years, Sweeney has felt a growing "disconnect" between how people think in cities and in places like Buckeye, a town of 108. In her view, farmers were too often "shoved aside" during the presidency of Barack Obama, while environmentalists and conservationists, many of whom live nowhere near a farm, took over the national conversation.
Obama set aside millions of acres of undeveloped land as national monuments - more than any other president - preventing huge areas from being mined, logged or farmed. Obama also implemented more regulations with a significant economic impact than any president in three decades, according to the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center. Those actions were cheered by many Americans but widely viewed in rural areas as killing jobs.
Incredibly, Sweeney said, Obama's Agriculture Department even started pushing "Meatless Mondays," an insult to Iowa's pork, beef and chicken producers. "I will eat more meat on Monday to compensate for stupid USDA recommendation abt a meatless Monday," Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R, tweeted in response. Meatless Mondays felt like a "slap in the face" to Sweeney, who has this bumper sticker on her Buick: "EAT BEEF: The West Wasn't Won on Salad."
But nothing galled Sweeney more than a regulation Obama issued in 2015 called "Waters of the United States" or WOTUS. The Environmental Protection Agency said it was aimed at keeping pollutants - including fertilizer, manure and other farm runoff - out of streams and creeks that feed the nation's waterways. Farm runoff is a leading cause of water pollution, contaminating drinking water, spawning toxic algal blooms and killing fish.
To Sweeney, WOTUS felt like the government's hands on her throat.
Was some bureaucrat now going to show up and police her puddles and tiniest ditches of water? She said that is what happened several years ago: A federal conservation official told Sweeney she had a half-acre of wetland in the middle of a 160-acre field. Wetlands are protected habitats for migrating birds and other wildlife and are important for healthy soil and water.
"Suddenly, this piece of land that we had been farming for 70 years was federally protected, and we had to stop everything," said Sweeney, who was born on the farm and raised two boys there.
In the end, Sweeney had to pay $5,000 to preserve a small parcel of wetland elsewhere so she could continue farming her own property. The experience contributed to a feeling that "we were smothered" by the federal government, Sweeney said.
'Smothered' and 'shoved aside' in rural America
This is a lengthy article and there is a Democrat farmer's views in there as well.