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Solar panels create 31 times the energy from an acre of land that corn does in the form of ethanol, according to research coordinated at Cornell University in New York. Put another way: If solar panels were installed on just 3.2% of the land currently devoted to corn, they would produce as much energy as the entire ethanol complex.
To stop pollution of surface water with farm chemicals we should set aside a considerable part of our acreage to some other use than row crops. We are growing about a third too much corn for the world’s consumption. We will be trying to figure out how to get rid of excess soybeans when China won’t take them. Setting aside acres from row crop production can free up marginal land for energy production.
Turfgrass groups funded by fossil fuel interests (the same chemical interests that encourage us to farm up to the river and into the ditch) will have us believe that windmills could kill you and solar panels get in the way of feeding starving children. The world has plenty of corn and beans. Hogs, too. Starving children lack cash and suffer the bombs we drop on them. We are not serious about feeding them as the Good Lord tells us to. We can make more money with wind and solar than corn and beans per acre and feed starving children — if we decide to, first by not dropping bombs on them.
Grazing animals are not deterred by solar panels. Property tax revenue from renewable energy infrastructure can offset the entire transportation budget of a rural school district. It would reduce fertilizer and herbicide application, which is the real rub. People are led to believe by Gov. Reynolds that we should renew nuclear power when we do not know how to deal with the waste, and when we have not even begun to exploit solar. If half our corn ground were planted in solar panels, the US could reach its carbon reduction goals. We are trying to grow corn in the parched Great Plains with irrigators and can barely get the job done. Iowa can put up a far better crop while we still have soil. Arrays can be laid to maximize soil retention and to minimize nutrient loss.
The study suggests that farmland owners could generate four times as much revenue from solar than they can from row crops. That will become evident as demand for electricity grows with artificial intelligence and data centers. Wind energy has been good for Northwest Iowa despite all the propaganda against it. Solar energy will be. Markets ultimately will demand that marginal land shift to its highest use, which is not necessarily growing No. 2 yellow corn to ship to an ethanol plant that might not make it into the future.
The Trump Administration deported at least two children to Honduras last Friday who are citizens of the United States, according to their family lawyer and a federal district court judge. A two-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy with cancer were deported with their mother, even though their father wants the children with him in the United States.
The mother was detained in Louisiana when she showed up at a required immigration appointment as a legal US resident. The next day she was on her way to Honduras with her two children. The family attorney said the woman was not afforded the presence of counsel. All of this caused federal Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, to say that he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process.”
Border czar Thomas Homan asserted that coming to the US and having a baby is “not a get out of jail free card.”
This is denial of birthright citizenship in the flesh. It also refutes due process — you cannot just send people to a prison in Louisiana and ship them off to El Salvador or Honduras without a hearing.
If they can do this to a four-year-old with cancer without caring if he can get his medicine, they surely can do it to you.
This boy is a citizen. We are not aware that his mother committed any crime other than being here.
Homan flatly denies the right to birthright citizenship. This could be the case that is heard by the Supreme Court. President Trump has said that a legal resident sent to a prison in El Salvador without a hearing will not be returned, despite a demand by the high court that his retrieval should be “facilitated.” Trump further denies that district court judges can tell him what to do.
We are not approaching a constitutional crisis, we are in the throes of such a crisis. The president ignores the courts. The administration is denying Americans their basic rights under the law. None of it is normal or defensible. We must reclaim law and order. That should start with Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and the Senate Judiciary Committee. They do nothing. Hence the crisis. Nobody is safe from detention and deportation.
A consultant told the Storm Lake City Council, rinse and repeat, that we lack affordable housing. This has been true for a long time. We recall former City Councilman Dave Patton, who was a landlord, saying that we did not have a housing crisis so much as an income problem. Patton’s theme rings true today, decades later. Housing remains a problem.
The nubbin of it is cost: $400,000 to build a single-family home or $150,000 for multi-residential. Who has that sort of jam? Not enough heavy paychecks here. We need to at least double our senior housing spaces. Gramps spent all his money on health care and prays Congress doesn’t cut a hole in his safety net.
We have champagne tastes on a cheap-beer budget.
The entire nation has a housing affordability crisis because people have a hard time making a living, much less throwing a downstroke of $100,000 on a 30-year mortgage. The study confirms what we have known for some time: We need housing. To swing a loan you must have sufficient income. That is the problem at the nubbin. Storm Lake on average pays less than Iowa as a whole, and pays half as much as Minnesota. More income, more housing. That is the simple arithmetic. The city can put in curb and gutter or give a property tax break, but a $400,000 nut is awful rich on a Busch Light budget. We used to expect something more than a mobile-home economy. Perhaps that is why people are not satisfied with the situation at hand.
Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig said last weekend that he is thinking about running for the Republican nomination for governor, now that Gov. Kim Reynolds is not seeking re-election. Naig could be the strongest 2026 Republican candidate for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that he is a decent person who is not on some sort of crusade.
Naig told the Iowa Press program on public television that he will mull it over in the next couple weeks as he returns to the farm near Cylinder for planting. First point: Naig is from a Northwest Iowa farm. Second point: Naig is a graduate of Buena Vista University in Storm Lake. Third point: He is amiable and not a zealot.
Naig is in the hay with the chemical agriculture establishment, which is well within the mainstream of Midwestern Republican politics and the Farm Bureau. He ran for secretary against our old friend Tim Gannon as a free trader who shuns a burdensome regulatory framework. Safe territory in Iowa. He has given a nod to conservation within the framework of the agribusiness gospel. At least he wants to batch and build bioreactors in Sac County. We doubt that Attorney General Brenna Bird or Sen. Michael Bousselot, among the Republicans in the field, have given a whole lot of thought of managing nitrogen loads in the Corn Belt.
Our neighborly inclination is to speak well of Naig. Republicans would do well to give him a friendly hearing. They could surmise that State Auditor Rob Sand is likely to be the Democratic nominee, who will try to smother the electorate in moderation. Iowans have been a moderate lot and have grown tired of Reynolds and her divisive politics. Naig is moderate as an Iowa Republican can be these days. We hope he doesn’t have to turn nasty to participate in the primary.
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