Strong Rural Voice Rises From Iowa Farm To Net

(Editor’s Note: Carroll Daily Times Herald staff writer Douglas Burns is a freelance contributor to Iowa Independent. This story is published simultaneously in a Daily Times Herald farm section.)

RURAL ALBIA — One of the emerging voices in Midwestern agricultural journalism is an Albia-area native with deep roots in Iowa farming and politics.

Dien Judge, 34, a staff writer and fellow with Iowa Independent.com, a fast-growing Internet-based statewide publication, writes from the Monroe County farmhouse where he was raised.

“I grew up doing everything from fixing fence to carrying buckets of grain,” Judge said.  “We used to feed steers. Nobody does that anymore except for feed lots.”

With Iowa Independent, Judge, a son of Democratic Lt. Gov. Patty Judge, focuses heavily on the intersection of agriculture and politics. He is also developing a reputation as an astute observer of rural issues and the Iowa caucuses.

“Dien brings a strong rural voice and insight and deep expertise of agriculture and its importance to Iowa,” says David Bennahum, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Independent Media under which Iowa Independent operates.

Iowa Independent is a progressive-leaning Web site funded by organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. The mission of Iowa Independent and sister publications, Minnesota Monitor.com, and ColoradoConfidential.com, is to merge blogging with investigative journalism, Bennahum says.

Judge has been with Iowa Independent, which officially launched May 1, since April.

“Dien does an excellent job of covering agricultural issues for the Iowa Independent,” said Iowa Independent editorial mentor, Bill Maurer, former managing editor for The Des Moines Register. “He was reared on an Iowa farm, still lives on an Iowa farm, and is very well connected — both agriculturally and politically — to the issues he covers. He has a very solid understanding of the issues facing rural America and how those issues relate to Iowa. His knack for finding information and then writing it in an interesting fashion has provided Iowa Independent some solid news stories way ahead of the traditional news outlets in this state.”

For Dien Judge, it all starts and ends on the ground, on the farm.

Dien Judge’s parents, John, a former state senator, cattleman, farmer and banker, and Patty, raised Dien and his two brothers on the Smoky Hollow farm, a family operation that primarily consisted of cattle but involved some grain.

Dien and his wife, Steva, an Adel native who is fluent in Japanese and works for Vermeer in Pella, have a 2-month-old son, Aidan. One of Dien’s brothers, Joe, a history teacher at Albia High School, lives with his wife in a separate farmhouse on the Smoky Hollow property. An older brother, Doug, is an environmental engineer living in West Des Moines.

An old coal mine sits within the boundaries of the Judge farm, a reminder of an industry that once flourished in southern Iowa, Judge noted.

Judge, a graduate of Albia Community High School and Indian Hills Community College, has pursued a career that blends the intimate knowledge of farm life, an up-close-and-personal view of politics with the wide-ranging curiosity of a small-town journalist.

From 1999 to 2006, Judge worked for Albia Newspaper Inc., the parent company of the Monroe County News and Albia Union-Republican.

Shortly after starting there he was promoted to news editor, and like other community journalists, covered happenings large and small in the Albia area. He also developed an interest and skill with digital photography that is part of the award-winning twin weekly Albia news company.

When his mother, a former state senator and two-term Iowa secretary of agriculture, set her sights on Terrace Hill, Dien left the newspaper and joined the campaign. Patty Judge initially sought the governor’s seat herself but quickly teamed up with then Secretary of State Chet Culver to form the ticket that eventually won the race in November 2006.

Dien served as a volunteer and paid staff person involved with policy and finance and the inauguration events.

In addition to working with Iowa Independent — where he is a paid contributor — Judge operates his own Web log that deals with agricultural issues as well: www.smokyhollow.blogspot.com.

He started it in 2005 with a “mission to do stories that didn’t really belong in the Albia paper.”

He even posts an occasional recipe on this Web site, which he jokes is the best way to drive traffic to it.

“I’ll tell you what, you put a recipe on your blog and you’re going to get hits,” Judge said.

He has a real winner of one for potato salad.

But most of what Dien posts at Iowa Independent and Smoky Hollow involves the intricacies of farm policy and politicians’ reactions to it.

Some of his recent stories have dealt with the high stakes farm subsidies debate in Washington, D.C., agribusiness mergers, ethanol and meth labs in rural areas. He’s also covered several presidential candidates and questioned them about agricultural issues.

The following is a transcript of an interview with Dien Judge conducted by Douglas Burns of the Carroll Daily Times Herald.

Carroll Daily Times Herald: You are the journalist who has done most of the rural issue and agricultural reporting for Iowa Independent. A very general question but what do you think the state of the agriculture is in Iowa? What are some of the challenges and opportunities?

Judge: I would say right now the outlook for agriculture is pretty unlimited. We have enormous potential right now with the renewable fuels industry in the state, and all of the offshoot benefits from that will directly affect agriculture and farmers all across the state.

And I know a lot of livestock producers have been worried about corn prices, and that’s something that everyone’s watching very closely. But over the last week or so it’s becoming clear there’s going to be an enormous corn crop, and that should alleviate those fears.

Right now everything is really looking good. There are challenges.

All farmers know there are challenges all the time. Right now, it’s certainly one of the good times. There are ups and downs in farming and this is one of the ups.

Carroll Daily Times Herald: With younger people in agriculture so often when we go to events, you and I, in our 30s, are so often the youngest people in the room. What is the future for young people in agriculture? What do you see as the future just for young people in general in rural Iowa?

Judge: It’s very challenging and especially when times are the way they are now. Value of land is up, and that makes it almost impossible for someone to go get financing to buy a farm, get financing to buy equipment, get financing to buy seed or livestock. It’s almost unheard of that someone gets started as a new farming operation. It almost has to be an inherited type of thing, and that’s part of the problem. Financing for young farmers is really hard to come by.

Carroll Daily Times Herald: Because of the large sum of money involved in that to have some sort of a better loan program or to have any government intervention in that may be unrealistic. To get large numbers of young people in farming that don’t inhe
rit it is one of the better angles to have young people involved under the umbrella of agriculture with the renewable energy industry? Is that where we might get the population growth in rural areas and the young people in agriculture?

Judge: Exactly. What we need in Iowa are mechanical engineers and agribusiness specialists, people who can get right in on the ground floor on these renewable fuels opportunities. That’s the opportunity for young people here. With the growth in those industries and all kinds of new developments that we don’t really know what’s going to happen with, it’s the tech side of it that’s going to bring good quality people back to rural Iowa.

Carroll Daily Times Herald: One of the things that I’ve heard mentioned by Senator (Tom) Harkin (D-Iowa) and others that I’ve interviewed recently is the potential for cellulosic ethanol. The way Harkin phrased it is that he thought cellulosic could do for your part of the state, southern Iowa, south of Interstate 80, what corn-fed ethanol has done for my part of the state. Do you have ant thoughts on that?

Judge: Switchgrass has been studied very intensively. Cellulosic ethanol is one opportunity for that. There’s also a lot of work being done on burning switchgrass to replace coal. I’m actually going to be working on a story about that this week. The Ottumwa generating station has been fitted with special equipment. Over the last six or seven years, they’ve been testing switchgrass burning in the coal-fired power plant.

Switchgrass has enormous potential. You can basically think of it as hay. People will use hay equipment to bale it and transport, and that product can be distilled into ethanol through the cellulosic process. It can also be burned. There are lots of other uses for it, too.

This is prairie grass. It’s tall stuff and produces a lot of cellulose. For marginal ground like we have here in Iowa, hills and valleys and maybe not that black dirt that you have up there, switchgrass is a huge opportunity.

Carroll Daily Times Herald: With Iowa Independent you have put the most questions to candidates about agriculture. One thing that Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey said to me when he was here in Carroll was that he was a little concerned that there weren’t more candidates discussing ag issues or making them more prominent in their campaigns. It’s not like the old “West Wing” show where they made a joke out of Iowa voting only on ethanol.  Overall what’s been your sense of the agricultural intelligence of the candidates running and have there been any candidates that have stood out to you as being particularly good or particularly uneducated on agriculture?

Judge: I would say that all of the sitting senators at least they know about the farm bill. They know about those issues that are hot right now under discussion.

They don’t tend to want to take a position yet which kind of bothers me.

I would rather see candidates out front saying what they believe on issues, especially here in Iowa. Agriculture has a lot more to it than ethanol. Everybody is pro-ethanol but what else are they going to do?

Looking at it from a non-partisan point of view Senator (Sam) Brownback (R-Kansas) certainly knows what he’s talking about. He is probably the most agriculturally trained and based candidate out there. He is a hog farmer and a farmer from Kansas. He was Kansas secretary of agriculture. Now, what his political ideology brings him to, I’m not quite sure that that’s where most people would fall in line.

I would say (former Democratic U.S. senator from North Carolina John) Edwards has said more about rural and agricultural issues than any of the other candidates. He has more positions made clear in his campaign so far than anybody else that I’ve come across and found. That might be from the fact that this is his second run and he’s spent a lot of time in Iowa.

Maybe he’s done a little bit more work in that area for this reason. Edwards seems to reach out more to rural America than most of the other Democrats, at least.

(U.S. Sen. Barack) Obama  (D-Ill.) is not saying as much, but being from Illinois he knows what he’s talking about. These Iowa issues are familiar to him.

But I am overall fairly disappointed with the candidates on agriculture.