To the editor:

After reading the very revealing letter “Gov. Reynolds must take control of IUB hearing” by Bonnie Ewoldt from Milford, I am curious why she would think the governor would intervene and provide constitutional justice to those landowners who are battling agri-business corporations?

(Gov. Kim) Reynolds is nothing short of a puppeteer for giant agribusiness corporate power, including ethanol producers. According to the Iowa Ethics Campaign Disclosure Board, Gov. Reynolds received $160,000 campaign donation from Bruce Rastetter.

The injustice Ewoldt experienced at the IUB hearing is nothing new. It’s called economic colonialism. It happens all over the world where big American corporations search for cheap raw materials with the help of the U.S. military and corrupt foreign leaders who run roughshod over their workers and farmers.

Actually, it has been said American farmers are the new Indian without having to face genocidal violence, just decades of mental anguish selling underpriced grain and livestock to giant agribusiness interests.

We farm activists have been screaming our heads off that we needed a price floor that matched true costs of production plus family living expenses ever since Roosevelt’s farm policy was gutted, and it was cheap grains that led to the destruction of family farm livestock production and the rise of agribusiness livestock factory farming and ethanol production.

I grew up on our farm in the ’40’s. It was fully diversified with good crop rotations with long-term alfalfa and clover plus permanent pastures that are true blue carbon sequestering. Diversified family farm systems are circular economic systems where you take from the land, but restore and rebuild the soil through crop rotations and animal production. Agribusiness CAFO production and ethanol production are not circular economic systems, meaning they are not sustainable.

Nature is reacting to the abuses from an agriculture system that is not circular that should be plain to see, and yet agribusiness and ethanol producers have the ears of Congress and state regulatory agencies. The IUB is under pressure from wealthy capitalists who only care about the bottom line and be damned democracy and the environment.

We need land reform by investigating the vast fraud at the Pentagon, and use the recovered monies to establish a special land bank to rebuild family farm livestock production back on the land — plus parity pricing supply management tools for grains.

Larry Ginter

Rhodes