‘This Is How People Find Their Voice’

If we can disappear our history, disappearing our people isn’t far behind. We’ve now had the first West Liberty [Iowa] resident arrested at his yearly ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] check-in. … We must speak up, even when our voices are hoarse and our bones tired, our kids demand time or the harvest awaits. It is our duty as rural Americans to make sure they don’t rewrite what they’re doing to us. We cannot let them disappear the truth.

Her story, “Iowa Republicans Are Erasing the State’s History,” exposed the state’s plan, spearheaded by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, to cancel the Iowa Historical Society’s 163-year-old journal Annals of Iowa as well as her plan to get rid of 60% of the historical society’s archives by closing the Centennial Building in Iowa City. In 1960, when the building was dedicated, Erem wrote “the head of the Historical Society called it the ‘most significant event in the society’s 103-year history.’ Now it’s a nail in the society’s coffin.”

Having grown up in upstate New York, Erem still sees herself as a transplant in Iowa, but her roots have grown deep. She got her first start in community organizing in Iowa, during the 1980s Farm Crisis. After sojourns elsewhere, in 2010, Erem came back with her second husband to build a house and put in a prairie and trees on 75 acres. In 2015, she became the co-founder and executive director of the Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, a nonprofit organization founded to protect and steward threatened farmland in Iowa to secure a healthier food system and environment for all.

Throughout those years, like the 1980s, Erem noticed significant social, political and environmental changes affecting Iowans. Politics had shifted rightward. Young, diligent and hardworking farmers could simply not afford land anymore. Meanwhile, industrial farms were taking over the state. Erem found what she had learned as an organizer and activist during the farm crisis had stayed with her. “Is there a way to organize out of this mess?” she wondered.

Erem currently serves as the board secretary of the Iowa Farmers Union. She writes the Substack Postcards from The Heartland and has written several books and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. With her second husband, Erem co-owns and manages Draco Hill Nature Farm, a diversified farming operation that include Asian pears, chestnuts, prairie seeds, eggs and outdoor education in Cedar County, Iowa.

This interview is the first in a series of “Meet the Barn Raiser” interviews, where Barn Raiser explores the lives and stories of the rural writers, organizers and civic leaders who are carrying forward the spirit of barn raising in rural America today. The interviews are available on video and in print.

What made you first get into community organizing?

I had just graduated from the University of Iowa in 1985 when I was exposed to the farm crisis. I was from upstate New York. I didn’t know anything about farmers or the Iowa farm crisis except what I’d read in the newspapers, which we still had back then.

And, I got involved with Iowa CCI, when it was still called Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, and ended up at a meeting with about 200 farmers with representatives from Sen. Tom Harkin’s office (D) and from Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office (R). And these farmers were going to town on these guys, and as far as I could tell they were blowing smoke back at them. People were frustrated.

There were stories about beehives getting put in people’s mailboxes and their kids finding them when they went to get the mail. And dung getting thrown up on their porches and people getting chased off their land. Somebody who could pay for the 40 acres around their house, but the bank wouldn’t take the money because they wanted the whole farm. And this really changed my life.

I stood up and asked a question about how Harkin had taken his name off of the Save the Family Farm Act, which was the hope for all of us at that time. And I’d heard about it on the radio on the way there, and there was a gasp in the audience when I said it. All these guys, two feet taller than me, surrounding me, and I’m in the back of the room, and the Harkin guy wouldn’t answer it.

The crowd started yelling to him, “Answer her question! Answer that girl’s question!” He had moved on to somebody else. And he said one of those, you know, “I’ll have to get back to you on that” kind of things.

All of that just changed my whole life. That one experience was, “Okay, this is how people find their voice. This is how they make change. This is how they hold people accountable.” And I was hooked. Between that and the divestiture demonstrations at the campus against apartheid in South Africa, I was totally hooked on the notion of collective action changing the world.

How did you find the path you wanted to take?

I went to a graduate student from Africa, his name was Ebo, when I was a senior and said, “I want to be a worker,” and “I want to be a farmer.” He said to me, “You can’t be.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “Because you get to choose. And workers and farmers, they don’t get to choose. But you have a college education now, and your job, if you want it to be, is to aid them in their work.”

And so I realized that what we now call privilege was just, to me, being a white, college-educated person with a writing degree. I could tell their stories. I could, as best I could, honor their struggles.

What was it like trying to balance writing with social justice advocacy and organizing?

I couldn’t get a job as a journalist in 1985 where I was living, which was Waterloo, Iowa. But I simply lived the experience.

We were living on the east side, and we were the only white people for 20 blocks. But that’s what the economics of our situation were. I got to know my neighbors and I got to know what was going on.

Some January days the only way to stay warm was to get into a hot tub of water. We didn’t have much money, so I’d walk the grocery aisles, sometimes almost in tears because all I could afford was macaroni and cheese and a bag of frozen veggies. It gave me a taste, just a taste, of what people go through in this country every day.

So all of that, in my 20s, formed me into someone who realized I could dedicate my life to using my skill set to aid—to aid and abet—the efforts of people who may not know how to come together and organize, or may not know how to tell their story, or simply don’t have access to a system that allows them to tell their stories.

I could be that bridge. I could be of service. I could be of use. And, I’ve enjoyed it ever since. I’ve alternated between organizing and writing my whole life, for unions, for nonprofits, struggling with the challenges of coalition work and cross-racial work and cross-class work. It’s not easy peasy, it’s not something that can get funded by a federal grant and be done from 8 to 5. It’s something that you do in your spare time because you have to.

To me, the difference between being a radical and liberal is that liberals can walk away at any time and just feel good about what they did. But radicals know that they’re tied—their futures and their livelihoods—are tied inextricably to the people being treated the worst among us.

What are the challenges facing rural organizers today?

In 1993, I got a union gig as a communications director for SEIU in Chicago (Local 73). There’s seldom a happy end to the story in union organizing, especially black workers in Chicago, because service workers are so easily replaced. Until you can sustain collective action, you can’t even dream of a victory.

Now, out here in rural Iowa, it’s a whole different ballgame, right? We’re separated by many acres, miles sometimes. We’re separated by town versus farm, city versus rural. You know, we’re literally separated by distance. So we might all be white, for example, but there’s a vast difference in experience. There are people who have many generations here, compared to the newbies like me who will never, ever have the kind of credentials that they have.

And yet, in February we took 35 people to Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks’s (R-01), Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R) and Sen. Grassley’s (R) office. They’re all in the same building in the Quad Cities, rather conveniently.

I can’t tell you the number of people who stood up in the midst of a polite conversation with the staff. We had our signs and all that, but we were being polite. Our people stood up there with shaking voices, saying, “I don’t know how to speak publicly, but … ” or “I’ve never done this before, but … ” and were literally using their voices before their representatives. You can tell that it changed them. There’s no going back from that.

How can we bring rural and urban people closer together?

There is a vested interest in people separating rural from urban. For example, nobody ever talks about the rural poor, you know? There’s all kinds of poor people out here but they’re white and they’re hiding. They’re living on couches or in the trailer in the back, behind the house or something and so they’re much harder to see. And that makes, that makes us be able to pretend that they don’t exist.

When urban people can see the truth about what’s going on in rural America, I think we start bridging that gap. We start saying, “Wait a minute. We have more in common than we thought.” And we’re not, by the way, just a bunch of hicks out here.

I remember working for the Press-Citizen in Iowa City. I was running the opinion page, and in 2001 workers went on strike at Maytag in Newton, Iowa. It was a rough economy. And the news newsroom was like, “Why are these idiots going out on strike?” I would respond, as I often do, “People make choices from the choices they have.” The strikers were full grown adults with children or mortgages or car payments. They know exactly what they’re doing. So why not just respect that and go out and find out why they went out on strike? What drove them to do that?

Well, the same thing applies in our politics. What drove people to vote for Trump? What drove them to do that? Don’t just assume that they’re stupid or backwards or idiots or uneducated. Assume that they had a vested interest in voting for a man who made the promises he made and not for Kamala Harris, a woman they barely knew, who was a different race and was from California. Of course, add to that whatever they’re seeing on Fox News, and we have a perfect storm of this kind of situation.

What we don’t need is city people just writing us off, you know. We don’t need that.

How can the media do a better job of covering rural and small town issues?

Iowa used to be the first in the nation Democratic caucus, right? We’re familiar with journalists, you know, flying in, telling the story of the restaurateur who hosted that presidential candidate that day, and, you know, standing by the hay bale and doing their thing and then leaving. And, of course that’s the nature of that beast. But there’s no way that they could capture what’s going on out here. We even struggle here, in Iowa, with that, right?

I was just on the phone with a campaign manager from a major campaign here in Iowa. He said, “Oh, my candidate cares so much about rural Iowa. We want to get to your rural revival that you’re organizing here in eastern Iowa.” In the fall, we hosted some 200 people for the first-ever Eastern Iowa Rural Revival, where our subtitle was, “We’re not just the space between the cities.” Eastern Iowa is the more populated part of the state and western Iowa is not. So every candidate thinks that if they do an event in western Iowa and they talk to corn and bean farmers, that they’ve covered the rural angle. In eastern Iowa, it’s a lot more local food farmers—people like me.

Because we have more people here, we can sell direct to consumer. But most candidates act like rural and farming is all just corn, soybeans, and hogs and chickens, and that they’ve covered that base. But we have to teach them that’s not the case.

Well, only journalists that are living in that community, only the people who are from here, can separate out those things. Just like with union people. When I was a union organizer, not all unions are building trades, you know? There were Service Workers and there were Teamsters and there were United Auto Workers, but it’s like the media treated unions as a monolith. And they treat rural Iowa, rural America, as a monolith.

Having journalists in those communities is so important, having them living this work: Getting our own hands dirty and seeing our people at church or at the baseball game or in the grocery store—or what’s left of it, knowing that our grocery store is about to go under because SNAP benefits [formerly food stamps] just got cut and the local grocery store lost their 10% that they needed from SNAP to stay alive. We’re the ones that know those stories better than anyone. I count on my editors to make it relevant to a much bigger audience, but we bring that local voice to it, that local perspective.

How do you balance collective action with individual action?

The struggle itself matters. We know this from Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. We know that we have to do this because it’s what the future builds itself on. And we have to set this example that there’s no one hero coming to save us. We have to do the work ourselves.

Are you hopeful about the future of rural and small town America?

Sometimes all you have is hope. That’s the one thing I think we have to hang on to. But some days it’s harder to find than others.

Barn Raiser gives us that hope, to me. Also, Indivisible gives me that hope. The Iowa Farmers Union gives me that hope. I cling to these things, and I participate in them actively because I have the time that most people don’t have, being semi-retired.

Growing perennial crops gives me more time than most farmers. I have some skills and experience, and I’m still young enough to be able to employ those skills and experience. So, and I have the privilege of being able to live off of lifetime savings and Social Security. So why wouldn’t I?

I’m one of the few people, really, on this earth, that has the luxury of getting out there and fighting this fight. A lot of other people, especially older liberals who are pretty well off, have been crying the poverty game for so long that they forget they actually have a hell of a lot more than most people do.

It’s not about being poor or frugal. It’s about being afraid of for the future. It’s about not knowing if you’re going to have enough money for the nursing home, or long term care, that makes them feel poor. Not the fact that they’re actually poor, because they’re not. In Iowa City, a lot of them are retired professors, or retired health care workers, from the University of Iowa. And, yet they feel this stress and poverty because they don’t know if they have a secure future. I tell them:

You’re guaranteeing that you won’t have a secure future if you don’t put your resources into the fight now. So let’s just cough it up now. I don’t want to see a $25 donation. I want to see $100, $200, $300. I want to see stretch donations if that’s what you can do.

And I want to see your ass on the line. So you better get out to the rally, and you better get out to the Congresswoman’s office so that her staff can sneer at us. And you better start knocking doors, texting your friends and doing whatever the hell you can do because this is the fight now.

This is not about where you’re going to be living 20 years from now. Because we can pretty much guarantee where that’s going to be if we don’t stop this crazy [tide of authoritarian politics and loss of civic rights] right now in its tracks.

My hope is to inspire people in any way I can, whether it’s the kick in the butt or it’s the cajoling or it’s the comforting or it’s the collective action. We have to find a way to get people off of these screens and out in the streets, one way or the other.

That is what I love about Indivisible, that is what I love about the Farmers Union, and that is what I love about Barn Raiser is that we’re telling the stories of people who are getting up and moving physically to make something happen, and I think that’s a key part—not the only thing, but a key part to whether we’re going to stop this march of fascism across our country.

Joel BleifussMore by this author →

Joel Bleifuss is Barn Raiser Editor & Publisher and Board President of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is a descendent of German and Scottish farmers who immigrated to Wisconsin and South Dakota in the 19th Century. Bleifuss was born and raised in Fulton, Mo., a town on the edge of the Ozarks. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1978 and got his start in journalism in 1983 at his hometown daily, the Fulton Sun. Bleifuss joined the staff of In These Times magazine in October 1986, stepping down as Editor & Publisher in April 2022, to join his fellow barn raisers in getting Barn Raiser off the ground.

Justin PerkinsMore by this author →

Justin Perkins is Barn Raiser Deputy Editor & Publisher and Board Clerk of Barn Raising Media Inc. He received his Master of Divinity degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School. The son of a hog farmer, he grew up in Papillion, Neb., and got his start as a writer with his hometown newspaper the Papillion Times, The Daily Nebraskan, Rural America In These Times and In These Times. He has previous editorial experience at Prairie Schooner and Image.