“Again, just like people who move next to an airport and then complain about the noise: Didn’t you KNOW that hog farms smell really bad when you purchased a house there?”
When there were family farms it was tolerable. With the corporate farms that make up most of this the hog farms are huge. Picture lakes of pig feces sitting there waiting for a breeze to pick it up.
Iowa was very tolerable back then... it may have been a source of humor for coastal elites, but it was one damn fine place to call home. Small towns were more than bedroom communities, school board members were generally conservatives with a sense of propriety (and not made up of the NEA's personal picks), railroad branch lines were reasonably viable, the suits in Des Moines did not control the rest of the state, etc. etc.
Now that we have fewer (but larger) nominally "family" corporate agribusinesses who increasingly resemble pre-WWI Silesian junkers, the stenches emanating from the state are not just literal.
Mr. niteowl77