Letters to the Editor: Not unnoticed

Hats off to the city crews who have cleared the lakeshore of brush, weeds and volunteer trees along Lakeshore Drive between Chautauqua and Sunset parks.  It is beautiful and so wonderful to have an open, clear view of the lake we love so much!  Your hard work has not gone unnoticed.

Candy Clough

Storm Lake

Grassley’s real constituents

Is Senator Charles Grassley a farmer? A recent letter thanks God that “we have a real family farmer at the policymaking table in Washington.” We could argue about this until the cows come home (although in parts of our industrialized dairy systems they never leave the barn or see the light of day). I'll just say that any real farmer wouldn’t be able to spend most of his time in Washington — or boastfully touring every county in the state — and still get in the crops or take care of a sick calf.

But the best measure of Grassley’s devotion to Iowa farmers is in their declining numbers. When Grassley was first elected to the Iowa Legislature in 1958, there were over 180,000 farms in the state. Today, as he enters his 64th straight year as a professional politician, there remain about 84,900 farms. Well over half of Iowa’s farms and farmers have disappeared, were wiped out or were bought out during his tenure. This loss is everywhere apparent as you drive through our rural areas and declining small towns.

If Charles Grassley was busy defending Iowa's family farms, he wasn't doing a very good job of it. But that letter-writer did have part of it right. Grassley “is one of our strongest advocates for production agriculture.” Think Cargill, John Deere, Bayer, Tyson, BASF, Smithfield, ADM, Corteva, Syngenta, Poet, et al. These are Grassley's real agricultural constituents.

Jim Walters

Iowa City