By Kelly Page, IowaWatch.org
Broadcast version by Roz Brown, Public News Service
DES MOINES, Iowa – Iowa does not have enough psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists or other mental health care providers to handle an increasing need to care for farmers dealing with relentless flooding this year, several mental health experts IowaWatch interviewed warned.
Many health care specialists don’t want to work in small, rural areas for reasons ranging from a lack of local resources to seeing few options for personal growth that comes from cultural events or entertainment, the interviews revealed.
The result is that people who need mental health care immediately have a difficult time getting it, a problem in the parts of rural Iowa hit this year by devastating flooding.
“We turn people away every day because we don’t have available appointment slots. We do a lot of referring to other agencies,” said Susan Ecker, director of Waubonsie Mental Health Center, which has locations in Fremont, Page and Montgomery counties in southwestern Iowa, all hit hard by the flooding.
“There is no competition between service agencies in our community because all of us combined cannot handle the volume of people that are seeking service. ”Fifty of the 59 Iowa counties designated as disaster areas because of flooding this year also have been designated by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration as having inadequate mental health care. In all, 86 of Iowa’s 99 counties are designated mental health professional shortage areas because they do not have an adequate number of providers for the number of people living in those counties.
Some of the counties hit hardest by flooding are not targeted by national programs that encourage young healthcare professionals to work in the rural U.S. with incentives like student loan forgiveness, scholarships and grants. Many mental health professionals still feel a strain on mental healthcare resources in heavily-flooded counties even when provided these incentives, interviews revealed.
For many, their caseloads become too large to handle adequately, leaving them with an ethical dilemma of taking on more clients at the expense of others they already are seeing. Meanwhile, patients in these underserved areas rely on therapists who get shuffled to multiple locations during the week. Patients have to wait five to six weeks to be seen if not needing urgent care — one to two weeks if they do, health care professionals said in interviews.
Alecia Dougherty, clinical supervisor at Plains Area Mental Health Center, which covers a wide patch of northwest Iowa, said some patients are on their second or third therapist in one to two years. She said switching therapists, especially after building a therapist-client relationship over the course of years, can be traumatizing.
“Turnover is probably the biggest barrier to getting good services to people in this area,” Dougherty said. “It affects community coalitions, it affects clients.”
Clinicians at Plains Area Mental Health Center move to places like Sioux City or Des Moines after starting in the smaller, rural areas Plains Area serves, Dougherty said. “I have actually two clients on my caseload right now who saw their previous therapist — one of them saw her for nine years, the other one saw her for 13 years — who were honestly traumatized by having to start seeing me. So it was a major setback for their treatment.”
Ecker works in Clarinda but lives on a farm near Elmo, in northwest Missouri just south of the Iowa-Missouri border near where she grew up on a rural Big Lake, Missouri, farm. Both areas sustained serious flooding this year. She said she feels connected to her community. Her husband, Terry Ecker, is a farmer.
“I’ve lived here all my life. This is home to me. It makes me really sad that there’s this disaster in the community, and there’s such a great need, and I don’t know how to employ therapists to meet those needs,” Ecker said.
Unmet demand for mental health care services in disaster-ridden, rural regions in the state are part of a larger problem in Iowa, mental health care advocates said. “We don’t have psychiatrists, psychologists, nurse practitioners, therapists, clinical social workers,” Peggy Huppert, executive director of the Iowa chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said. “It goes all the way down the line. We just don’t have enough.”
Even if enough care providers were available, barriers exist in linking farmers, whether they are in flood zones or not, to mental health care services, the IowaWatch interviews revealed. Financial difficulties, transportation issues, time constraints and limited internet access, but also many therapists’ lack of understanding of agriculture and a stigma attached to mental healthcare in farm communities also make it difficult for farmers to get the help they need when confronting stress and behavioral health issues.
“I guess that agriculture’s a tough job anyways, but this year is probably a hundred times more stressful than a typical year,” said Corey McIntosh, a fifth-generation farmer near Missouri Valley, Iowa, on the western side of the state, which has had some of the worst flooding from the Missouri River. “I’d say a lot of the people around here are probably experiencing, you know, certain levels of depression.”
McIntosh’s farm has flooded twice this year. Although he is not seeking counseling, he said it would be difficult if he were because he would not have time to do it.
He sees more flooding in the future. “It can’t be denied that we’re experiencing more extreme weather events,” he said. “The Corps of Engineers recognizes that climate change is happening but they have yet to start planning for it.”
MENTAL HEALTHCARE DILEMMAS IN SHORTAGE AREAS
Eight of the counties hit by flooding have not received designation by the national Health and Resources Service Administration as mental healthcare provider shortage areas (Cass, Dallas, Fremont, Mills, Montgomery, Page, Polk and Pottawattamie). This designation can have importance for healthcare providers in rural areas because the National Health Service Corps uses the administration’s designations to decide where to help clinics provide financial recruiting incentives to bolster rural healthcare systems.
Though a recruiter at one clinic IowaWatch spoke with said the clinic used the National Health Service Corps program as part of a more robust recruiting strategy that produced helpful results, many others said the program is not the complete answer when attracting mental healthcare providers to rural areas.
Ecker, from the heavily-flooded southwest of the state, practices in counties that previously had been declared a shortage area but lost their designation for reasons she said she does not fully understand. She said National Health Services Corps helped Waubonsie Mental Health Clinic for many years but that has changed. “Every few years, they rewrite the different areas. And our rating scale changed somewhat by a point or two,” she said.
Dougherty said Plains Area Mental Health Center employees continually feel understaffed and are fighting high turnover rates, even with Service Corps funding and employment benefits such as numerous health insurance policy options and pay that is 7% higher than the state average.
Dougherty blames high turnover and a perceived unattractiveness of rural communities, in part, on colleges failing to prepare students for the specific needs in rural areas. She said she has seen employees straight out of school quit the profession within their first few weeks because the work was too challenging.
“A lot of treatment models are set up for urban areas — I would say most of them, to be honest — and then we try to implement them in rural Iowa, because they have such good outcomes,” Dougherty said.
Despite widespread challenges with recruiting mental healthcare professionals to rural America, employees at one clinic IowaWatch spoke to said they have doubled their staff in the past year and are expanding services. The clinic is Crossroads Behavioral Health Center in Creston, Iowa, in a region that also has experienced heavy flooding. Last November, it hired human resources and marketing director Macie Blazek, who has a recruiting background.
Crossroads provides employees some of the same financial incentives as other clinics: service corps backing and what Blazek called a good retirement program. The clinic additionally pays for an independently-licensed therapist to supervise a clinic therapist’s first two years in practice. This process can be a financial drain on therapists if they have to pay it.
Many mental healthcare clinics do not have full-time recruiters. “We’re still hiring several positions, currently,” Blazek said. “And so even though we feel like we’re in a good place right now, it’s something we still kind of have to keep working at.”
READ ALSO: ETHICAL DILEMMA FOR RURAL PSYCHOLOGISTS
POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS
Telehealth or telepsychiatry, with appointments conducted online, is a potential solution to delivering mental health care to farmers in underserved rural regions but many of those regions lack adequate high-speed internet connection.
Beau Pinkham, director of crisis services at CommUnity, an Iowa City-based organization that provides crisis management to Iowa residents, including farmers, said delivering such care is impossible if someone does not have adequate internet connection. Research undertaken by Connected Nation Iowa, a broadband access advocacy group, shows many parts of Iowa have few or no broadband internet providers.
Pinkham said CommUnity’s hotline has received more texts and messages through its online messenger option than phone calls in recent years. People are more comfortable being emotionally vulnerable when a conversation is not face-to-face or voice-to-voice, but mediated through text on the internet, a psychological phenomenon known as the “online disinhibition effect,” Pinkham said.
Mental health concerns associated with the flooding are still developing. More than a dozen mental health experts IowaWatch spoke with said the full demand from farmers who need mental health resources in the flooding’s aftermath has yet to emerge.
Statewide hotlines like one at CommUnity and the Iowa Concern Hotline, which Iowa State University Extension Services began as a response to the 1980s farm crisis but which now serves all Iowans, did not see a major uptick in calls immediately following the beginning of the floods, representatives of each said in interviews.
Drawing on experience from aiding Hurricane Katrina survivors who relocated to Iowa, Tammy Jacobs, who helps coordinate the Iowa Concern Hotline, said it usually takes some time after a disaster – 60 to 90 days, for example – for people to start reaching out for mental health assistance. Things slow down and people have time to think, she said. “And that’s usually when we start getting more of an increase in the calls,” she said.
Pat Sheldon, whose family has been farming near the small town of Percival in the southwestern corner of Iowa for four generations, has been working continuously to maintain the 2,500 acres of farmland owned by him, his father, his brothers and his son. Sheldon also is the president of the Benton/Washington levee district, which has become a demanding position after multiple levees breached in the flood.
“I’ve been really busy. So you just keep going. Adrenaline kicks in and away you go,” he said.
Sheldon said he has not needed to seek mental healthcare, and has dealt with the emotional impact of the floods by spending time with friends and focusing on moving forward. But he said he thinks many farmers having difficulty dealing with flooding probably need professional help.
HEFTY WORKLOAD
Farmers impacted by the floods are dealing with a hefty workload to make their land functional again while also worrying about the financial realities of bringing in little to no income from a crop this year. Many stored grain from 2018 in bins over the winter in hopes of better economic conditions in the future but lost it when floodwater busted open the bins. McIntosh, the farmer from near Missouri Valley, said some of his neighbors had livestock die from stress-induced strokes while being evacuated.
McIntosh said the Missouri River has flooded his farm several times in the past decade. He described the flood of 2019 as especially devastating, even though flooding in 2011 was larger in magnitude, because farmers had less time to prepare for it. He and his neighbors were forced to evacuate livestock and equipment in just three days this year, whereas they had three weeks in 2011.
McIntosh said dealing with the flood and the personal stress it is putting on farmers is like “trying to put out fires, one after another.” Farmers have no time to think about how the pressure to cope with the flood affects them mentally, he said. “And every day it’s another challenge, you know, an unexpected challenge.”
Paul Daniel, a psychotherapist in Marshalltown, Iowa, in 2019 flood-disaster zone Marshall County, recalled the July 2018 tornado in his town and how it still affects residents’ mental health needs. He said trauma from natural disasters can affect people out over the course of years, not just weeks or even months.
He also said just knowing you live in a region prone to flooding can trigger anxiety and depression. “I’m sure it just kind of brings back a lot of memories, and triggers, and especially when it’s raining, often here, three, four days in a row,” Daniel said. “They’re like, ‘is my house gonna flood?’ I mean, you live with that fear all the time.”
Mike Rosmann, a farmer, therapist, and something of a spokesperson for farmer behavioral healthcare, from Harlan, Iowa, said that, even without flood conditions, behavioral healthcare often is financially inaccessible for farmers who are tentative about their insurance fees being impacted by an official diagnosis of mental illness.
“Farmers will sometimes pay out of their pocket, or maybe they even have high deductibles,” he said. “But they don’t want an official claim form to become processed.”
READ ALSO: DEALING WITH THE STIGMA OF MENTAL HEALTH CARE
This is part of why Rosmann, along with many other mental healthcare providers IowaWatch spoke with, is a strong advocate for the full funding of the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network, which was established through the 2018 Farm Bill. It called for “farm telephone helplines and websites, community education, support groups, outreach services and activities, and home delivery of assistance, in a case in which a farm resident is homebound.”
The Farm Bill authorized $10 million annually to fully fund this Assistance Network, but Congress only allocated $2 million to it for federal fiscal 2019. This prompted several farm advocacy groups to send a letter asking the House and Senate Subcommittees on Agriculture to fully fund the Assistance Network.
Also impacting farmers’ access to care is that many mental health care providers, even in rural areas, do not have a strong enough understanding of agriculture to make farmers feel that they are being listened to and understood during appointments. Even if a farmer is able to make an appointment, Rosmann said farmers’ relationships with therapists often fall apart due to this cultural disconnect.
Rosmann said he often hears from farmers that, even though a counselor is caring and tries to understand, “she just doesn’t or he just doesn’t understand what I’m going through emotionally, and I can’t make him or her understand how distressed I am.”
Rosmann said that lack of knowledge about agriculture can cause a massive disconnect in how therapists talk to farmers. “The counselor says, ‘You know, I can show you how to manage your anxiety, but you have to apply it.’ And the farmer says, ‘I don’t know how to apply it, I have to feed my cattle every day, I have to I live where the source of my anxiety emerges. It’s harder and harder for me to get up and go out in the morning when all I see is it’s cloudy and rainy again.’”
“We need many, many counselors in Iowa who have a grasp of agriculture,” Rosmann said.
Brandi Janssen, director of Iowa’s Center for Agricultural Safety and Health, said she has encountered therapists in the state who had fundamental questions about how agriculture works. She met with a group of mental health providers that serve Grinnell and Newton, Iowa, who wanted more information about important factors in farmers’ lives, like tariffs and how crop insurance works.
RELATED: SW IOWA FLOOD ADDS TO SAFE DRINKING WATER CHALLENGES
Karen Hyatt, of the Iowa Department of Human Services oversees Project Recovery Iowa, an effort funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has met with people affected by floods, often in parking lots and campgrounds. She has referred them to professional counseling if necessary.
Hyatt said she saw many people displaced by flooding this year who had to pay housing expenses like mortgages and utilities for property they were evacuated from but also for places to which they resettled. Some found themselves unable to pay even for the gas to drive to an appointment, she said. Hyatt said one of the community mental health providers she has worked with obtained a foundation grant to cover the copays for people that are coming into the agency.
Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig described the wellbeing of farmers who have been impacted by flooding as “very much a top of mind issue for us.” He said the National Institute for Food and Agriculture recently made available funds for organizations that provide mental health support to farmers.
Naig said he is working with Iowa State Extension Services to “see if we can collaborate on a grant there to get some additional dollars and some additional capacity there.” He said bolstering extension services is his primary means of supporting farmer mental healthcare in the state but he wants to know more about what resources the state lacks.
“I’m always wanting to understand more about those things. And then we’ll help in any way that we can,” he said.
This story was produced by the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism-IowaWatch, a non-profit, online news website that collaborates with news organizations to produce explanatory and investigative reporting. Read more at IowaWatch.org.
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By Jennifer Bamberg for Investigate Midwest.
Broadcast version by Terri Dee for Illinois News Connection reporting for the Investigate Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration
During the 2023 harvest season, one of Jake Lieb’s tractors quit working. A week later, his combine stopped working, too. Both were new — and he was locked out from making any repairs himself because of software restrictions embedded in the machines.
Instead, a technician from John Deere was dispatched to diagnose and repair the problems. While waiting for the technician to come out, Lieb fired up a 20-year-old tractor he hadn’t used for harvesting in years. Crops are vulnerable to the weather, and had he not, Lieb could have lost at least a day of harvest. Some of the crop might have dropped to the ground, rendering it unsalvageable, potentially costing him thousands of dollars.
“Meanwhile,” Lieb said, “we’ve got over a million dollars of equipment in the field, inoperable.”
When the technician from John Deere arrived at his farm in central Illinois, it took about 30 minutes total to plug in a diagnostic tool, see which sensor was bad, unscrew it, replace it and close everything up in the combine.
“If I knew what sensor was bad in that combine, I could have had it fixed in five minutes,” Lieb said. “But if you don’t have the software, it’s impossible to know what’s wrong.”
For more than a decade, farmers like Lieb haven’t been able to fix their high-tech equipment. Until recently, manufacturer restrictions meant only company-authorized representatives could own and use diagnostic tools, and make fixes when needed.
In March 2023, in an attempt to address farmers’ frustrations, the American Farm Bureau Federation signed a memorandum of understanding with John Deere and four other farm equipment manufacturers. The farm bureau called it a “private-sector solution to the right to repair issue.”
In the agreement, Deere, Kubota, Case New Holland, AGCO, and CLAAS of America promised to give farmers and independent repair shops access to customer diagnostic tools. In exchange, the Farm Bureau agreed not to support any federal or state repair legislation.
However, advocates for repair legislation say that the nonbinding agreement and the customer versions of tools provided by the companies fall short of needed protections that legislation would ensure. These same advocates are supporting bills across the country, including one introduced this year in the Illinois Senate.
The Illinois bill (SB2669) proposes to establish an agricultural equipment bill of rights. It would require manufacturers to make software, firmware and all other tools needed to repair machines accessible to independent repair shops and owners throughout the state at a reasonable cost.
The bill directly addresses the MOU, and says that agricultural equipment owners are entitled to any tools or software not covered by the MOU. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jil Tracy (R-Quincy), declined to comment after multiple attempts by email and in person to reach her. Deere and the other farm equipment manufacturers also did not return multiple requests for comment.
The bill is languishing at the statehouse. According to a spokesperson from the Illinois Corn Growers Association in an email to Investigate Midwest, there’s no chance the bill will pass this year.
The cost of repair
The demand for new tractors and combines ebbs and flows, but a consistent source of profit growth for John Deere is the sale of parts and services. Despite a 19% drop in sales of new ag equipment sales from between 2013 and 2019, supply chain disruptions and food system upheaval in 2020, and a month long labor strike of 10,000 workers across five states in 2021, Deere’s profits swelled the past three years, totaling a nearly 270% increase from 2020, according to the company’s SEC filings.
According to Bloomberg, the sale of parts helped buoy the company’s portfolio — parts sales grew by 22% between 2013 to 2019.
While Lieb’s fifth-generation family farm operates on annual tractor trade-ins so his machines stay on a warranty, which includes free parts and services, he’s in the minority. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 20% of farmers in the U.S. regularly buy new machines.
The rest hold on to their equipment for longer periods of time or buy second-hand machines, which come with limited warranties or none at all, making repair restrictions more consequential.
Equipment made before 2014 doesn’t have as much complicated software, and there are more repair workarounds. Still, the costs of repairing older machines add up.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of parts and labor, for ag equipment of all ages, has nearly doubled in the past two decades and spiked 41% since 2020. (Farm machinery is grouped together with construction and mining equipment by the bureau.)
In 2023, Kevin O’Reilly, then with the Public Interest Research Group, conducted a study of the cost of repairs directly tied to downtime and repair restrictions imposed by equipment manufacturers. He found that farmers lost an average of $3,348 per year to repair downtime.
The study of 53 farmers in 14 states estimated that if every farmer in the country faced similar losses, repair restrictions placed on them would cost U.S. farmers more than $3 billion a year.
“Even with our older machines — the stuff without software,” said one farmer in the study, “we were paying more because we were running up the hour counts. When stuff gets old, it breaks down more often.”
Curbing pollution leads to digital transformation
In the mid-1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency introduced emissions standards for agriculture diesel equipment as part of a growing effort to curb air pollution. The agency gave manufacturers nearly two decades to meet certain benchmarks in a set of four tiers, each with increasingly stringent regulations. The final set of standards rolled out in 2014.
To meet those emissions standards, complex computers were installed in agricultural machinery, which manage a wide range of functions and systems in the machines. This, in part, led to a technological revolution in farm equipment manufacturing, and drove the shift from mechanical operations to electronic controls.
In addition to monitoring emissions output, combines and tractors are now loaded with digital sensors that measure everything from humidity in the air to the density of the soil on a centimeter-accurate grid, instantaneously sharing those metrics with the cloud via satellite and GPS imaging. Deere’s quest to create optimum efficiency is driving the company to develop a fully autonomous fleet by 2030.
In reality, a faulty sensor in Lieb’s case caused his combine to shut down. And up until the MOU last year, farmers like him and independent repair technicians couldn’t access the necessary software tools to make their own repairs or clear a code once the repair was completed.
But why was the MOU even necessary? Over the years, Deere has argued in court that a farmer may own a tractor, but they don’t own the software that makes it run.
In a seeming win for farmers seeking the right to repair, the Library of Congress ruled in 2015 that repairing agricultural equipment is not an infringement on copyright. However, the ruling fell short of requiring equipment manufacturers to make their diagnostic tools publicly available.
Customer tools leave much to be desired
With nearly 6 million members nationally and 400,000 in Illinois, the American Farm Bureau Federation is the largest organization of farm and ranch families in the country and a powerful agriculture industry lobbying group. (The Census of Agriculture counts about 3 million farmers total in the U.S.; the farm bureau invites non-farmers to apply to be members.) The organization has drawn the ire of repair advocates over the memorandum of understanding.
The 2023 MOU was brokered between the farm bureau, John Deere, CNH Industrial, CLAAS, AGCO, and Kubota. The companies agreed to release customer diagnostic tools, which range in annual subscriptions, for example, between $1,500 from CNH to $3,100 from John Deere.
Repair advocates with the Public Interest Research Group, a federation of nonprofits focused on consumer protection issues, compared the John Deere customer tool to the authorized company tool, and said the customer version leaves much to be desired. That is why state or federal regulation is required, advocates argue.
PIRG Director Nathan Proctor said he took it personally when he saw the differences. “It was almost like (the customer’s tool) is redacted or obfuscated,” he said.
The tool provides a lot of information, Proctor said, but it’s inferior compared to what dealers have, and requires customers to go through extra steps in order to accurately diagnose issues and clear codes once the repair is complete. This leaves independent technicians and farmers at an unfair advantage in the market of equipment repair, he said.
“Essentially, the dealers have a privileged level of access,” said O’Reilly, former right-to-repair campaign director for PIRG. “They can get through a digital door to press a button that you need to press in order to fix the thing, and farmers either don’t have access to that door, the door was locked, or they had to go through three, six, nine different doors just to get to the same place that the dealer was able to get to, right away.”
PIRG focused their study solely on Deere tools because of the company’s dominance in the market. “When people think of agriculture or farming, John Deere is one of the first brands that comes to mind,” O’Reilly said. “They definitely have a level of dominance both as far as in the market but culturally as well.”
Only three companies control the highly concentrated U.S. market for agricultural equipment — CNH, AGCO and Deere — and Deere commands nearly half of that. Globally, Deere controls a quarter of the market share of all ag equipment sales worldwide.
An influential giant in agricultural equipment
The first right-to-repair bill was introduced in Illinois in 2018. It would have applied to a broad category of electronic equipment, including electric wheelchairs, laptops, smart phones, and medical equipment, had it passed. After lining up nine bipartisan co-sponsors and hearing debate, it died on the House floor. It was opposed by numerous associations and large agribusinesses, including John Deere and CNH.
Deere & Company has been headquartered in Moline, Illinois, for the last 176 years, growing into the agricultural giant it is today with more than 80,000 employees worldwide and profits topping $10 billion in 2023.
As the nation’s leader in soybean crops and second in the nation for corn production, Illinois exports millions of bushels around the globe, generating billions of dollars of revenue. And when farmers profit, John Deere profits.
Some of that money flows into the state capital. The John Deere Political Action Committee donated more money to Illinois politicians since 2017 than politicians in any other state by tens of thousands of dollars each year. In 2022, the most recent year of the most available comprehensive data, the John Deere PAC gave $183,500 total to 47 Illinois politicians, while the median donation for all other politicians in the country was only $15,000.
The company’s rapid technological innovations over the past decade coincided with an aggressive merger and acquisition strategy, which the federal government has said erodes competition. Deere has acquired multiple machine learning and artificial intelligence companies over the last decade and recently announced a partnership with SpaceX, all but dissolving the categorical differences between Big Tech and Big Ag.
As for its competitors, Deere’s net income surpasses its competition by the billions. The company made more in the first quarter of 2024, which ended Jan. 28, than AGCO and CLAAS combined for all of 2023.
These trends worry elected officials in the White House and around the country. In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order promoting competition and targeting repair restrictions that violate anti-trust laws. The order was supported by the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces federal consumer protection laws. In 2023, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul led a coalition of attorney generals around the country urging Congress to pass right-to-repair legislation, specifically for farm equipment. And 15 states are currently considering right-to-repair bills that cover agriculture equipment, after Colorado passed the first in the country in 2023.
In the meantime, the Illinois farm bureau said it will work with the MOU.
“The MOU led by AFBF a year ago was a solid step in the right direction for an individual to perform maintenance on their own equipment,” wrote DeAnne Bloomberg, Illinois Farm Bureau’s director of issue management, in a written statement to Investigate Midwest. “In the meantime, the Illinois Farm Bureau will honor the Memorandum of Understanding signed by AFBF.”
Why groups oppose legislation
Equipment manufacturers and private business interest groups such as the Illinois Chamber of Commerce have spent the past seven years lobbying against proposed right-to-repair legislation in Illinois, according to witness slip records on the state’s General Assembly website.
They’re concerned about safety and emissions tampering, whether intentional or accidental, according to those records.
A spokesperson for the Association of Equipment Manufacturers said in a written statement to Investigate Midwest that current legislative proposals go further than what is safe and could “increase the likelihood of cybersecurity attacks on equipment…and leave equipment vulnerable to untrained or unauthorized parties looking to steal or use it for an unintended purpose.”
Mark Denzler, president of the Illinois Manufacturers Association, said that he’s not opposed to farmers repairing their equipment, he’s opposed to modifications. “You can get in and either accidentally or intentionally, for example, change coding, and suddenly you're emitting past what you're supposed to.”
Farmers, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates emissions standards, say this isn’t the point of repair advocacy.
The EPA sent a letter to the National Farmers Union in August 2023 stating that the Clean Air Act and the EPA’s policies of implementing regulations are “aligned in preventing tampering, not by limiting access to independent repair, but rather by enforcing the prohibition against tampering against any party that does so.”
“We're not looking to turn our tractors into hot rods and soup them up,” said Lieb, the central Illinois corn and soybean farmer. “We need them for longevity, and when you start turning up horsepower and messing with things that they're not designed to do, inevitably, you're going to shorten the lifespan.”
‘The people calling for change are farmers’
Last October, members of the National Farmers Union, an organization representing 200,000 farmers and ranchers across the U.S., went to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers about the impact of what they say are monopolies in the ag sector.
Mike Stranz, vice president of advocacy at National Farmers Union, said that passing right-to-repair legislation will bring more competition, openness and transparency to the market for farm equipment repair.
“Having more choices in the marketplace and a more open repair market that drives competition makes things work better for farmers,” he said. “What big companies are pushing against is more competition — they want less.”
Farmers aren’t the only ones who depend on John Deere. The state of Illinois has paid the company $42.8 million in contracts since 2005, according to state comptroller records. The state mostly depends on John Deere machines for lawn service, trail maintenance, highway and roadside mowing.
All off-road diesel engine machines, such as construction equipment and forestry machines, have internal computers and repair restrictions similar to tractors and combines. However, the difference between a $500,000 John Deere combine and a $40,000 utility tractor for landscaping is that the software isn’t as integrated into the utility tractor and most repairs are still analog.
Farmers are concerned with repair restrictions because of the differences in the distribution models. Farmers typically own their equipment, while construction companies generally rent equipment for the duration of a project. The overhead, the budget and the time scale of farming and construction also is different, said O’Reilly, formerly with the Public Interest Research Group.
Ultimately, O’Reilly hopes that right-to-repair laws will pass across industries, including construction and forestry.
“But right now,” he said, “the people calling for change are the farmers.”
Jennifer Bamberg wrote this article for Investigate Midwest.
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By Naoki Nitta for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
It's no wonder that hospital food gets a bad rap, says Santana Diaz, executive chef at the University of California Davis Medical Center, a sprawling, 142-acre campus located in Sacramento, California. As a seeming compromise between nutrition and institutional efficiency, food has long been dished up as an afterthought to patient care. “That was never the focus of hospitals,” he adds.
But for Diaz, good food is key to good health. Since taking the helm of the facility’s nutrition and dining services in 2018, he has worked to revamp the cuisine, including sourcing almost half of ingredients from farms and ranches within a 250-mile radius of the Sacramento Valley. Food grown in local fields, orchards, and pastures with healthy soil management practices simply make for healthier, more nutritious, and more flavorful meals, he says—the perfect ingredients for changing the “stigma” associated with hospital fare.
Diaz is not alone in making this shift, but he may be ahead of the game. In 2022, the University of California (U.C.) system—a network of 10 campuses and five medical centers—committed to supporting regenerative farming as part of U.C. President Michael Drake’s vision to mitigate the effects of climate change and drive a more equitable food system. And as an advisor to an initiative lead by the nonprofit organization Roots of Change, Diaz is helping to steer the larger institution toward local agriculture—through the system-wide procurement of regeneratively ranched beef.
The term, a general reference to pasture management that prioritizes soil health and perennial plants by grazing livestock through rotated paddocks, encompasses a set of practices that advocates say results in healthier animals and pastures. Research also shows that beef from cattle raised strictly on grass is more nutritious than conventional beef, although it’s not yet clear how regenerative practices may impact those findings.
Cumulatively, the U.C. dining system serves more than 600,000 meals a day during the academic year. By ensuring reliable demand for regeneratively raised meat, proponents of the system’s new procurement pledge see the sizable volume giving the state’s independent ranchers and rural economy a huge boost, and bolstering the local and regional meat supply chain.
It’s a tall order, but Diaz knows the sway that comes with institutional demand. The former executive chef at the Sacramento Kings’ Golden 1 Center and the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium is also a founding member of Beef2Institution, a non-profit program helping K-12 schools, hospitals, and sports venues in California source beef from local, family-owned ranches.
Institutions are the perfect outlet, says Diaz, for ground, braising, and stewing meat and the other lower-value, secondary cuts that make up nearly two-thirds of every beef carcass. So featuring hamburgers, boneless short ribs, and carne asada as part of a local farm-to-fork menu offers nearby ranchers a prime bread-and-butter opportunity, he says—all the while exposing a captive audience to the value of beef raised on regenerative pasture.
“Obviously, we’re not going to change patient behavior . . . in [one] hospital stay,” Diaz notes. But because diet plays a major role in raising the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions, there’s huge merit, he adds, in educating them about preventative and nutritional approaches to health management.
And with his kitchen alone churning out 6,500 meals a day—along with patients, the medical center feeds an army of clinicians, staff, and medical and nursing students—the appetite of the entire U.C. system will likely have a resounding impact on the larger beef market in the state. “That’s how institutions can flex their buying power,” Diaz says.
A Premium Product
Despite research showing that eating less beef has significant health and environmental benefits, including shrinking an individual’s carbon footprint by as much as 75 percent, America’s steak and burger consumption is on the rise.
Currently, the vast majority of U.S. beef comes from cows raised on pasture for about the first year of their lives, then moved to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—large-scale industrial facilities that grain-finish cattle in confinement for six to eight months before slaughter. Along with concentrated levels of environmental pollution, critics deride beef feedlots as places where hundreds if not thousands of cattle are crowded together. These conditions typically require antibiotics to prevent herds from getting sick; subsequently, this “subtherapeutic” use has also been linked to antibiotic resistance.
Nevertheless, CAFOs are also the basis of a “hyper-efficient” commodity system, says Renee Cheung, managing partner at Bonterra Partners, an impact investment advisory firm for regenerative agriculture and co-author of a market analysis of grass-fed beef. These operations pump out a consistent, year-round supply of beef for the meatpacking industry, a sector dominated by a handful of multinational giants that control more than 80 percent of the country’s beef market.
Grazing cattle on pasture for the entirety of their lives, on the other hand, is far less productive. As such, strictly grass-fed or grass-finished operations tend to be modest in scale, says Cheung, with the majority of ranches in the U.S. herding around 50 heads. The smaller volumes and seasonality of pastures create more variability in slaughter weight and harvest windows, running counter to the conventional year-round commodity model.
As a result, non-CAFO operations don’t benefit from the economy of scale built into the heavily consolidated processing and marketing infrastructure, Cheung says. With limited access to centralized meatpacking facilities, these producers are often saddled with high overhead for transport, cold storage, and market delivery—all of which add to premium prices at the meat counter.
The cost, however, also reflects a more superior product. Compared to conventionally raised beef, studies show that strictly pasture-fed beef contain higher nutrients with less fat, often with lower levels of antibiotics, hormones, and risk of food contamination. And grass-fed cuts simply taste better, according to Chef Dan Barber, sustainable and ethical farming advocate and author of The Third Plate, who extols its rich, complex, and “undeniably beefy” flavor.
Not all pasture-based ranchers have adopted paddock-based regenerative practices, but the number appears to be growing. That’s in part because the holistic principles of regenerative ranching go hand in hand with land stewardship and animal welfare, says Michael Dimock, executive director of Roots of Change. By “mimicking nature,” the grazing patterns of ruminants benefit from natural forage and room to roam, all the while “maximizing soil health and biodiversity” of plants, insects, and other animals.
Regardless, recent research shows that 100 percent grass-fed cattle have a larger carbon footprint than those finished on grain because they fatten at a slower rate, yet also weigh as much as 20 percent less at maturity. And while regeneratively managed pastures have been shown to sequester carbon, the science behind the potential for “carbon-neutral beef” has been overblown. Still, Dimock adds that well-managed, rotational grazing enhances pasture productivity, helps restore spent cropland, and prevents wildfires by keeping invasive grasses and dry brush in check.
It’s also a highly efficient use of marginal land, notes Dimock—a classification of the 70 percent of the world’s arable regions unsuited for crop production due to poor soil, aridity, or steepness. As he sees it, regenerative ranching is also accessible and practical for smaller operations because it’s scalable, and lowers the financial risks associated with compliance-centered practices like organic farming.
The Power of Procurement
Making regenerative beef a more attainable business model requires developing a resilient supply chain, says Dimock, one that caters primarily to smaller producers. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of a heavily consolidated industry, including bottlenecks in meat processing due to labor shortages and transportation breakdowns. Along with the USDA’s recent $1 billion investment in expanding the nation’s meat and poultry processing capacity, he sees California’s $600 million Community Economic Resilience Fund (CERF) giving a major boost to the state’s meat supply infrastructure.
The targeted funding includes shoring up the network of smaller, regional harvest, processing, and storage facilities, he adds, and will help rural communities develop stronger economic hubs that decentralize the current top-heavy model. But those new and expanded facilities won’t succeed if there isn’t a consistent market for the kind of meat they process.
“If we want to give small-scale ranchers a fair shot,” Dimock says, “we have to break up [the current corporate stronghold].”
Going up against the commodity system, however, comes with additional challenges. While grass-fed beef accounts for roughly $4 billion, or 4 percent of the overall U.S. market, an estimated 80 percent of the supply consists of imports, largely from Australia, Uruguay and Brazil—countries where raising livestock on pasture is far more economical. Passed through a USDA-inspected plant, these products can be labeled “domestic,” leaving true domestic producers at an economic disadvantage.
In fact, the general lack of standards and regulations for the grass-fed sector has created a Wild West landscape of labels, says Bonterra’s Cheung. For its part, the USDA has recently announced stepping up its labeling guidelines, which distinguish true grass-fed beef from confusing claims such as “pasture-raised,” “50 percent grass-fed,” and “grass-fed and grain-finished.” These are highly misleading terms, she notes, given that most cattle are pastured for the first year of their lives. And “there has been a lot of outright cheating in the industry,” she adds—for instance, grass-fed labels can still apply to confined cattle raised on grass pellets.
The fundamental practices of regenerative ranching align with California’s efforts to promote farming “in a manner that restores and maintains natural systems,” says California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) Secretary Karen Ross. The approach also complements the state’s climate smart initiatives and efforts to advance social equity through the support of small-scale farms and ranches.
Still, Ross acknowledges that the term’s inherent flexibility can make it a fuzzy concept. That’s especially true in California, where regional variations in microclimates, precipitation levels, and soil structure reflect a wide practice spectrum—some ranches in the state’s mountainous reaches, for example, may winter their herds on dried silage when fields are bare, while others may have the means to transport them to greener pastures.
“If you talk to 12 people about regenerative [practices], you’ll get 12 different definitions,” Ross says.
Currently, several certifications such as the American Grassfed Association (AGA), Regenerative Organic Certified, and Land to Market provide a range of overlapping criteria that ensure the regenerative provenance of meat. By outlining transparent measures, these voluntary labels are intended to legitimize and safeguard the premium nature of regeneratively produced beef.
Last month, the CDFA began work on officially defining regenerative ranching and agriculture. Rather than developing standards for state certification, and the goal is “to make sure that when we use the term, we have a shared understanding of what the practices are,” says Ross. The “inclusive” set of parameters will help inform state policy around regenerative food production, she adds—including public procurement initiatives.
Public institutions are “a ready-made way” to spur and ensure market demand for healthy food from sustainable sources, adds Ross, who has been involved in discussions about the UC initiative. “We’re investing in better outcomes for farmers, the community, and the environment,” she says. “That’s the power of procurement.”
Building the Supply Pipeline
Balancing supply and demand is nonetheless a delicate endeavor, says Tom Richards, co-owner of Richards Grassfed Beef in Yuba County, California. The fifth-generation rancher has been a key voice in both the UC initiative and Beef2Institution.
Most of California’s pasture-grazing operations focus on a premium, direct-to-consumer market. Between online sales, farmers markets, restaurants, and specialty retailers, year-to-year demand tends to be stable—and manageable.
The supply of better beef “isn’t something you can just dial up,” says Richards. Increasing herds is a risky investment—“it takes three years to raise one of these animals,” he notes—so clear market forecasts are imperative. “The biggest thing that we need from the industry is for somebody like a Santana [Diaz] or UC to say, ‘we’re committed to [helping you] map out a three- to five-year plan to grow your supply,’” he says.
“Right now, the market’s operating on a push,” Richards adds. “But what the industry needs is the pull”—with heavy strings attached.
For smaller-scale operations in particular, committed relationships all along the supply chain are essential to staying afloat. Yet that business model runs counter to industry approach, says Clifford Pollard, the founder of Cream Co. Meats. The Oakland, California-based meat processor “bridges the gap” between regenerative ranches and broadline product distribution on the West Coast, and has played a central role in promoting Beef2Institution’s efforts.
Conventional meat processors “trade in commodities,” Pollard says, sourcing raw material at the lowest price possible. Cream Co., on the other hand, cultivates its supply pipeline “over many years of sustained [purchasing] commitments” to individual operations, he says.
Ultimately, with demand driving supply, the large-scale procurement will undoubtedly influence the equation. Nevertheless, even incremental steps by institutions can pave the way for meaningful change, Pollard notes. “There’s often a hesitation that it has to be all or nothing, but shifting even a small portion of your spend towards [regeneratively minded sourcing] is impactful,” he says, and U.C.’s commitment really gives regenerative producers “a seat at the table.”
“We don’t need the whole table,” Pollard adds. “Just a seat.”
Naoki Nitta wrote this article for Civil Eats.
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The chair of the Federal Trade Commission will be in rural Iowa this weekend to hear from farmers and other residents about the proposed sale of Iowa Fertilizer to Koch Industries.
The sale is pending FTC approval. Iowa spent $500 million to build an Iowa Fertilizer factory in Weverly to create competition in an already consolidated industry.
Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, said he plans to tell FTC Chair Linda Khan a sale to Koch Industries would backtrack on any competitive progress the state has made.
"Our concern is that an industry that already lacks competition and has all sorts of monopoly problems would only get worse if this sale is allowed to go through," Lehman explained.
Koch and other corporate ag conglomerates have said consolidating allows them to provide better products to farmers more efficiently. The hearing is set for Saturday on Main Street in Nevada.
In addition to reducing competition for fertilizer, Lehman argued the sale would increase prices for farmers, and ultimately mean higher food prices for Iowans. He wants Khan to hear stories firsthand, from the people on the ground in Nevada.
"We know that we might not be able to have a dialogue with the people who are investigating this situation, because they need to be impartial," Lehman acknowledged. "But our farmers need to tell their story about how the industry is already in a monopoly state."
Some 18 other ag organizations have joined the Iowa Farmers Union calling on the FTC and the Justice Department to investigate the proposed sale.
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