By the time you finish Neil Hamilton’s new book, “The Land Remains,” which is written partly in the voice of 40 acres of Iowa farmland, you realize you’ve read a love story.
An unconventional one, to be sure. This love isn't romantic, it's primal: love for the earth, the soil buried below our homes, highways and food supplies, the ground beneath our feet. Literally, the foundation on which we all exist.
And in the same way that love can be fiercely protective, Hamilton pulls no punches in warning of how the land has become endangered. Overbuilt, overfertilized, subjected to greedy developers and poachers and giant commercial, often out-of-state agricultural interests, it has become an unwitting battleground. The chemicals pumped into crops to make them bigger can pollute the water and erode the topsoil. The resulting erosion and losses morph into political and economic conflicts over "eminent domain," ethanol mandates, carbon pipelines and ultimately, climate change and humans' roles in it.
This is perhaps an overly reductionist synthesis of a book that is about so much more than can be covered here. It's simple and direct, like having an honest conversation. He weaves his narrative with humor, as when he talks in the voice of the land known as the Back Forty. And he comes from a place of personal experience and historical knowledge.
Hamilton and his wife, Khanh, are longtime family friends of ours. Until his recent retirement, Hamilton was director of the Drake University Agricultural Law Center in Des Moines. But long before that, as a child, he grew up on the family's 200-acre southwest Iowa family farm, which includes the Back Forty. He walked beans, put up hay and cut thistles in pastures. He rode his bike along the route his father rode his tractor, to deliver midafternoon snacks from his mother. He belonged to the 4-H Club.
Later he attended forestry school, and then law school, and served on the boards of environmental organizations such as the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, Seed Savers Exchange and the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. As assistant Iowa attorney general, he witnessed how law and policy can affect the land. As founders of the Iowa Slow Foods movement, he and Khanh roasted pigs and hosted pie contests in the gardens of their beautiful Waukee home, where an endless and diverse bounty of vegetables grows.
Through the lens of the land, Hamilton explores facets of American history and land ownership that you may never have considered. Some of it, he prefaces, “is bloody and bitter, leaving a residue of wealth and inequality still haunting us today.” He tells of how in his earlier years he once got defensive when confronted by talk of his white privilege and pointed out he'd grown up in "an ill-heated" family farm home without running water. But he came to see where white privilege resides in the public support to white landowners and farmers.
By contrast, Hamilton tells the story of white settlers stealing the land from native Americans, and then stealing slave labor to work it. Often abandoned were the promises of 40 acres and a mule when slaves found their freedom. White society feared, Hamilton writes, that if Blacks owned land, "they could access income, self-employment and wealth to pass on, and would seek and expect political power. … Echoes of the unequal treatment of Black landowners by the legal system still reverberate today."
The book taught me surprising things, including the struggles of people of my own ethnic heritage when it came to owning land in America. In the early 1900s, land in California owned by South Asians from the Indian subcontinent was "re-appropriated" under a 1913 law prohibiting immigrants deemed ineligible for citizenship from owning or leasing land. Only free whites had that privilege. An Indian, Bhagat Singh Thind, contested that law up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1923 that South Asians were Caucasian, but not white, and thus ineligible for naturalized U.S. citizenship and land ownership. And when 120,000 Japanese-Americans were wrongfully imprisoned during World War II, many had land, which was forcibly sold out from under them.
American history, writes Hamilton, is "steeped in a broth of racism so strong, if you tried swallowing it in one gulp, you might gag on the stench.”
Today most labor on large Iowa farms comes from low-wage new immigrants.
With large-scale farming has come growing reliance on chemical fertilizers, which pollute waterways with runoff, as do manure spills from hog confinements. Hamilton depicts a current group of landowners disconnected from the land, writing, "We appear to tolerate levels of soil loss and water pollution that would have shocked our forbearers." It now takes voluntary actions and public funding "to carry out what should be private responsibilities."
Research suggests that on some 400 million acres of U.S. ground crops, an average of over five tons of soil per acre per year are lost due, Hamilton contends, to intensive “agro-chemical systems” that inhibit the rate of soil replenishment.
The concentration of the hog industry over 30 years means the number of pigs in Iowa grew by 50% to 25 million, while the number of farms raising them shrank by over 90%, from 70,000 to around 6,000 in 2020. Over 90% of swine production has shifted to contract farming in vertically integrated systems. And 20% of landowners live outside the state.
There's a rubric of players involved in this. Political leaders courting factory farms in the '90s removed local control over the siting of giant confinements, so neighbors couldn't say no to them. Other culprits are "Congress’ hollow actions on climate change" along with Iowa politicians’ “pious resistance to funding protection of water and soil," and agriculture’s "unrelenting fight against phantom regulations to avoid responsibility for stewarding the land and water.”
While the debates about crops center on reducing nutrients leaking from millions of acres of corn and soybeans, says Hamilton, "Few people dare to ask whether some land is better left in grass and habitat... In many ways we have recolonized our state without recognizing it." In the words of Back Forty, Hamilton’s favorite of his family's land: “People are more interested in how much I am worth — my price per acre — than about my health, my happiness or my real value.”
It wasn't always this way, Hamilton writes. In the 1930s, government approached soil conservation as a “vital public policy concern,” but it has been years since the U.S. Department of Agriculture raised an alarm about it. Major farm groups like the American Farm Bureau, he writes, “choose to ignore soil loss rather than risk the government asking farmers to do something.”
"The ‘all is well’ attitude came to dominate the communications from agriculture about conservation. The message is any efforts to protect nature will restrain individual rights.”
And isn’t that exactly what we hear in response to gun-safety proposals or, as Hamilton points out, to mask-wearing and other measures against COVID?
Public universities too have contributed to this mindset. Hamilton critiques the “production oriented education and mentality so common at land grant agricultural colleges like ISU,” which don't explore what he calls "the critical ethical issues embodied in being a landowner."
Even the 4-H teachings seldom addressed soil loss.
Hamilton calls the Trump administration “anti-environment and anti-public lands to an extent previously unseen.” At the other end of the spectrum was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who “saw land conservation as central to the health and future of the nation."
Still, Hamilton insists it's not too late to make changes. He heralds some champions of the environment, and holds out hope for the current administration to do more. The book includes a section on what we can do for the land.
I asked if he foresees a decline in big ag anytime soon. His answer: "There are probably natural limits that may show up, but not in the short term." He says there's a "natural inefficiency" that creeps in when farms are too big, and "We're going to recognize we have too many pigs in one place."
Hamilton’s reverence for the land and its bounty leaves you hopeful rather than helplessly resigned, as so much around us could these days. He says the land is resilient if we let it be. It's a valuable reminder not to let our own good instincts be drowned out by false arguments, and to speak up for what's appropriate and right for the foundation on which we all exist.
