Huge organic farm in Iowa thrives without chemicals

WEST BEND, Iowa – Just shy of 800 residents, West Bend is barely a blip on a prairie landscape. But this small northern Iowa town has become a hub for the nation’s growing organic farming sector, challenging the notion that pesticides and other agricultural chemicals are required to feed the world. 

The town’s towering grain bins are surrounded by around 50,000 acres of corn, soybeans, oats and other crops grown without the use of synthetic chemicals. Farmers fertilize the land with chicken litter and hog manure. Weeds are removed by hand or with non-chemical tools, such as new laser weeders. 

In 1998, farmer Barry Fehr began experimenting with raising chemical-free soybeans on 45 acres. Today, the West Bend region is the most expansive and profitable area of organic grain production in Iowa and possibly the United States. Most of the land is farmed by multiple generations of Fehr families that live close to West Bend. One operation, Clear Creek Acres, generates nearly $40 million a year in crop sales from 25,000 acres. The Fehr family also manages about 3,000 organic acres in Colorado.

“Nobody has died of not using pesticides,” Fehr added. “I don’t think it will hurt anything not to use pesticides.”

Organic supporters hope Clear Creek Acres inspires conventional farmers to consider switching practices.

“They are unique in the way they run their operation,” said Cole Thompson, marketing director of Minnesota-based Albert Lea Seed, the nation’s largest organic seed producer. “Most people in the industry think you can’t farm at this scale organically. But you can. They’re proving it.”

Not everyone is impressed

However, not everybody in Kossuth and Palo Alto counties, close to the border with Minnesota, is impressed with the Fehr family’s achievements. 

Critics here say the Fehrs do not purchase chemicals and other supplies from local farm dealers, nor do they store and ship grain from local elevators. They do not sell their corn to the local ethanol plant. Their cultivation practices, designed to control weeds, keep the surface of thousands of acres bare, making top soil vulnerable to erosion from wind and rain. 

Also, the $500 per acre fee the Fehrs are willing to pay to rent farmland is twice the common rate, and is seen as an impediment to young people trying to start farm careers.

“They aren’t doing much for this community, I’ll tell you that,” said Joe Joyce, who farms 2,000 acres here with chemicals.

“It’s just jealousy. That’s all,” countered Linus Solberg, a farmer and Palo Alto County commissioner. “I tell people anybody can do it. Anybody here has the opportunity to raise organic crops if they want to put in the time. These guys have figured out how to do it.”

Planting and harvesting crops without the protection from insects, weeds and diseases provided by chemicals is no easy feat.

However, a growing body of scientific evidence has shown that chemicals come not just with benefits, but also with an array of risks.

Many types of common farm pesticides have been scientifically linked to cancers and other diseases, are harmful to the environment, and are known to cause extensive water pollution. Iowa, in particular, suffers from extensive farm-related water pollution, and cancer is prevalent. Indeed, Iowa has the second-highest and fastest-rising cancer incidence among all U.S. states, according to a 2024 report issued by the Iowa Cancer Registry. 

Organic generates more revenue

While harvesting soybeans in the cab of a John Deere combine, 28-year-old Jack Fehr explained how his family disregarded the typical constraints to organic agriculture promoted by conventional growers and their allies in academia and industry. They often claim that converting to organic farming takes too long, costs more, yields less, and can’t be done successfully except on small farms.

“I talk to a lot of farmers,” Fehr said. “Their big question is, well, I don’t know if I can make it work. Well, you can make it work. We do. And we get a premium for our organic crops, two to three times what conventional prices are on average.”

Fehr said Clear Creek buyers pay up to $8 a bushel for organic corn and $22 a bushel for organic soybeans, twice the conventional market price.

Farming organically is a high-wire act balancing the lower cost of supplies against the higher costs of labor.

On the savings side of the ledger are organic seeds that cost less because they are not genetically engineered and not treated with chemicals to ward off insects and diseases. There is no cost for insecticides, herbicides, fungicides and chemical fertilizers. Clear Creek applies lower-cost hog manure to its fields for nutrients and it uses chicken litter that it produces from a big, non-organic egg-laying chicken-feeding operation that it owns on the farm.

Economies of scale are the last piece of keeping production costs down for farming operations as big as Clear Creek. The farm and its neighbors have fleets of tractors, combines, trailers and other equipment that they share.

But those lower costs are offset by the expense of overcoming the primary impediment to organic grain production — controlling weeds, especially in soybean fields. Most of Clear Creek’s 30 employees spend their summers in the fields cultivating and harrowing to kill weeds. They are helped by local residents and a 70-member crew of Guatemalan field workers, hired under a special agriculture H-2A visa program – for temporary agricultural workers from other countries to help farmers fill employment gaps – who weed by hand and cost an average of $30 an hour in wages and expenses.

“We have a lot more equipment and our man hours, our labor force, are higher than with conventional farming,” Fehr said. “A big turnoff for the farmer looking to transition to organic is the amount of labor and time it takes. I’ve been in a tractor, in the field, farming since Feb. 15 this year. I haven’t had a day off.”

Enthusiasm for the enterprise

The high labor costs haven’t discouraged Fehr and his five brothers because they see the interest in organic agriculture increasing. The number of organic farms in Iowa increased from 467 to 799 from 2011 to 2021, an average of 33 annually. Iowa ranks sixth in the nation for the number of chemical-free farms, and first in organic corn and soybean production, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Organic Trade Association, the industry’s principal trade group, reported that from 2008 to 2016, the amount of U.S. farmland devoted to producing organic corn, soybeans, wheat, oats and barley grew by more than 20%, topping 765,000 acres. Iowa and four other northern Midwest and Great Plains states accounted for 40% of the organic grain trade, a portion of the $63.8 billion in organic food sales in 2023.  That amounts to 50% more sales than in 2015, according to a Federal Reserve study.

There’s a lot of market space to grow much bigger. Organic grain has also not kept pace with the increasing demand for organic meat, milk and eggs. U.S. imports of organic grain reached 1.3 million metric tons in 2023, four times more than in 2020.  

Proponents of organic farming also say it has environmental benefits, particularly for water quality. Cory Fehr, Jack’s father, said his farm’s four-crop rotation, use of manure and chicken litter, and other cultivation practices improve the condition of the soil, which keeps more nitrogen and phosphorus from draining into surface and groundwater.

“I would say we have less runoff,” Cory said. “When we apply manure and litter, we stir it into the soil right away. With it being organic, I think it attaches and doesn’t run off like the synthetic and commercial fertilizers.”

While the Fehrs don’t take water samples, which isn’t required to be certified organic, a team of researchers from the USDA and Iowa State University have studied runoff from commercial fertilizer fields compared to pastures fertilized with manure. They found that conventional crop production drained nearly twice as much nitrate into water as the organic fields. The study’s authors concluded that organic farming “can improve water quality in Midwestern landscapes.”

The interest in water sampling is keen in the two counties where the Fehrs farm. The area west of Emmetsburg, Palo Alto County’s largest town, has the highest number of waterways impaired by farm-related contaminants of any region of Iowa, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. 

Jeremy Thilges, a USDA conservation specialist, said his office in Emmetsburg is overseeing a multi-year study of water quality in Five Island Lake and other surface waters to determine the causes and the sources of contamination.

Another facet of Clear Creek Farms that doesn’t seem to attract much notice is how organic crop revenue ensures that more generations of Fehrs will still be farming around West Bend mid-century and beyond. 

As he bounded from one task to the next in his pickup, Cory Fehr explained his goals for younger Fehrs this way: “What we’re trying to do is provide opportunity for them and all the people we’re able to hire,” he said. “If we were conventional farming, we wouldn’t be able to support the families that we do.”

A version of this article was published by The New Lede on Nov. 18, 2024.