"Smells like money"

It's possible that I've lived the good life in Iowa only because I've been blessed with a third-rate smeller. If my nose was adept at its calling, life here may well have been more difficult. There is, after all, a certain constancy to the heavy smell created by Iowa's foremost industry. We are "number one at number two," as the Register quipped last week. While some days are definitely more sour than others, we live with and in an often verifiable stink foreigners recognize quickly. The air we breathe is heavy-laden with, well, you know.

Forty years ago, for a story about a northwest Iowa hog farm family, I wanted to know something about the industry itself, so I told the farmer to tell me about the enterprise. Before I left for the interview, my mother-in-law, a farm wife for all her married years, warned me about the stink, fearful my only coat (we were visiting) would be forever tainted if I spent any time at all in a hog confinement. I thought she was a bit alarmist.

She wasn't. I should have listened. The coat had to be washed, purged. Pungent is understatement. 

In 1966, when I emigrated to northwest Iowa from Packerland (which is not without its own excremental heft), one of the first quips I heard was a response to other aliens who had remarked about the foul odor. "Sheesh, what a smell!" someone would say. "Smells like money," some Hawkeye would quip. Case closed. 

The tally is staggering. Researchers theorize that, given the amount of fecal matter our abundant livestock produce, Iowa poop mass is equal to the output of 169 million people, of a nation the size of  Bangladesh. The numbers don't lie. 

There's more. If we divide our land mass by 169,000,000 reasonably stool-regular humanoids, our population density (number of people per square mile) would be unimaginable. For instance, in the section of land I can see right here out of our back window, we would need almost 3000 people to produce the poop our livestock does, considerably more than the couple dozen or so human beings who are actually out there.

What that means for our corner of the world is that we, all by ourselves, produce unimaginable quantities of shit, something comparable to the output of the world's major cities. In our far out corner of the state, we produce the same amount of fecal matter as New York City, London, and a goodly chunk of Bangkok. I'm not b.s.ing you.

The good news is that generally, at least, Iowa could, in fact, use more, not less poop. What the soil needs in nutrients is supplied by ordinary manure, but in lots of places the soil's--which is to say, the crop's--major needs get supplied by over-the-counter fertilizers. As much as we produce, we could actually use more, or so say the Iowa State people.

Except here. Northwest Iowa--Sioux County especially--is efficiently keeping its land fertilized by our own brood of chickens, our herds of cattle, and our whatever of hogs. From what little I know or can read, it seems the one potential horror off all this shit occurs from run-off, when loads of that manure somehow finds its way into our waterways. And that happens especially when liquid manure is incorrectly applied during winter months. 

Anyway, here's the incredible tallies. Sixty-six million chickens? Who knew? 

 Not long ago, I took some foreigners on a little tour of the region, told them that in northwest Iowa we raised millions of hogs but that we'd be lucky to see one pig all afternoon. We didn't. I did note some sheep and occasionally a crowd of cattle. But good luck on the hogs. They're all inside. 

Still, look at that tally. They're here and they're producing all right. Are they ever.