Iowa
From dirt poor to common ground – Iowa Capital Dispatch
I was raised on Dust Bowl stories.
My grandmother told stories of growing up in Chandler, Oklahoma, until her family was displaced to the fruit plantations of California, where her father became a Baptist tent preacher, famous for his apocalyptic sermons that he delivered under the shade of orange trees.
In her diary, Grandma Velma describes Dust Bowl economics in personal stories of sneaking off with her brother, Oral, to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes while wearing shoes patched with cardboard.
Every Christmas, Grandma packed oranges into our stockings, one for each of her nine children, several dozen grandchildren, and at least half a dozen “took ins.”
A good orange is hard to find in North Dakota. But every winter I seek one out because oranges are heirlooms of my grandmother’s survival.
Grandma’s Dust Bowl stories have been returning to me this winter, where I work for the Walsh County Three Rivers Soil Conservation District in northeastern North Dakota.
The stories have me reconsidering the definition of “dirt poor.”
Merriam-Webster notes that “dirt-poor” came into common use in 1937. Although the term means “suffering extreme poverty,” I contend that it can better serve us as a question: what happens to a farming and ranching community when it becomes “dirt poor,” with depleted and impoverished soil?
Perhaps it is only coincidence that 1937 was also the year that the first soil conservation district was established with the Brown Creek Soil and Water Conservation District in North Carolina. The district where I work was established in 1938.
In “A Sand County Almanac” (1949), Aldo Leopold wrote that soil districts were “a beautiful piece of social machinery.” But he warned that we had only fulfilled half of our original obligation, explaining that SCDs were not merely to provide cost-share funding, education and outreach, and on-the-ground support. Crucially, SCDs were also implemented to establish local rules for land-use that would be enforceable by law.
As Leopold observed:
When one asks why no rules have been written, one is told that the community is not yet ready to support them; education must precede rules. But the education actually in progress makes no mention of obligations to land over and above those dictated by self-interest. The net result is that we have more education but less soil, fewer healthy woods, and as many floods as in 1937.
As a former professor, I believe strongly in the power of education. But as a conservationist, I believe even more strongly in the power of a community to work toward common ground solutions.
The first step is recognizing that the public has the power to change the story we are currently writing on the land. Soil health is not a private matter. Like water, soil must be protected and preserved for the common good.
Without enforceable soil health ordinances, this winter has seen yet another year where topsoil has filled up our ditches, drifted into mounds in fields, and smeared along our roadways.
In the absence of enforceable ordinances, countless fields bear the marks of freshly installed drain tile: ground pocked by the iron tracks of excavators; trenches dug for thousands of feet of perforated tubes; a pump station, much like a basement sump pump, peeking above ground at the edge of the field, its below-ground system plunged 10 to 15 feet into the earth.
Drain tile is an industrial solution to a host of filtration problems caused by the abuses of industrial agriculture. Designed to pump excess water from soggy and flooded fields that often lack cover crops or living roots, drain tile promises the industrial farmer several nifty conveniences: shortening the time it takes to drain oversaturated ground and increasing the capacity for tillable acres through the chance to drain wetlands.
The cost of this convenience is difficult to measure, and we cannot afford to measure it in economic terms alone. The prevalence of drain tile in the Red River Valley is producing much more than a trickle: millions of gallons of water have been pumped from fields sprayed with fertilizer and pesticides into ditches, which flow into tributaries, which flow into the Red River, crossing state boundaries between Minnesota and North Dakota before flowing north into Canada.
The prevalence of drain tile in the Red River Valley offers another way of understanding trickle-down economics. The origins of this trickle-down theory can be traced to the 1890s, when “horse-and-sparrow” economics took hold, with the belief that by overfeeding oats to a horse, a few lucky sparrows would benefit from the expelled excess.
Our work here in Walsh County seeks to reverse this logic, where we collaborate with farmers, ranchers, and conservation organizations to come up with comprehensive solutions to complex problems related to soil health, water quality, habitat restoration, human nutrition, and rural community development.
Charismatic species, such as the mallard duck, western meadowlark, and sharp-tailed grouse, are our ambassadors in this effort. Or, as our partner the ND Meadowlark Initiative teaches us: what is good for the meadowlark is also good for working ranchland.
Moreover, cropland can benefit from implementing full-season, multispecies cover crops that can rest highly erodible soil, sequester carbon, provide seasonal habitat for nesting birds and pollinating insects, offer grasslands for grazing in partnership with local ranchers, and begin to reverse the losses in topsoil and microbial activity crucial to soil health.
If you would like to learn more about our efforts, tune in to our podcast “Common Ground: A Prairie Podcast,” also available on Spotify. We received a generous grant from the ND Natural Resources Trust that has enabled us to travel across North Dakota to interview a range of guests, including Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, award-winning artists, folks from The Land Institute, Audubon Great Plains, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, North American Grouse Partnership, Ducks Unlimited, North Dakota Meadowlark Initiative, the United Prairie Foundation, and local farmers and ranchers.
Our podcast recognizes the prairie as a literal common ground with deep roots and an abundance of species. Although the prairie’s most enduring lesson might be patience, we also recognize this is a time of urgency: only 20% of prairies remain in the U.S., and of those, over 90% are unprotected by law.
JOHNSTON, Iowa (Gray Media Iowa State Capitol Bureau)-Three Republican candidates for Iowa governor debated education policy and abortion at Iowa PBS, their first forum of the campaign.
The debate featured former Department of Administrative Services head Adam Steen, state Rep. Eddie Andrews and former state lawmaker Brad Sherman. Two other Republican candidates, Congressman Randy Feenstra and Zach Lahn, did not attend.
The candidates are running to replace Gov. Kim Reynolds, who is retiring.
All three candidates disagreed with Feenstra’s position that private schools should stop turning away students because of limited space or special needs, though they offered different explanations.
Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs, allow state funding to follow students to private schools.
Steen said Feenstra’s position on ESAs makes him sound like Democratic candidate Rob Sand. He said private schools should receive additional funding if they choose to accept students with special needs.
“I don’t think schools should be forced to receive who they want to receive,” Steen said. “Just because we have a situation right now in our family, we are not going to force a school to accept kids that they aren’t prepared for.”
Andrews voted for the ESA program in 2023. He said private schools are already working to accept more students with disabilities.
“I think most private schools want to accept those and are now looking to expand, change their infrastructure and certainly some of the larger ones are already doing that,” Andrews said.
Sherman said the focus should be on curriculum, not enrollment policies.
“The content of the education the children are getting, that’s why so many people are looking at ESAs because they are not satisfied with the education coming out of the public schools,” Sherman said.
All three candidates backed banning abortion altogether. Sherman said some women who receive abortions may need to be prosecuted. Steen said he wants to ban chemical abortions. Andrews said he wants more support for pregnant women.
The Republican primary is June 2. Rob Sand is the only Democratic candidate for governor.
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Isabella Warren covers state government and politics for Gray Media-owned stations in Iowa. Email her at isabella.warren@kcrg.com; and follow her on Facebook at Isabella Warren TV on X/Twitter@isabellaw_gray, and on Instagram@IsabellaWarrenTV.
Copyright 2026 KCRG. All rights reserved.
DES MOINES, Iowa (IOWA CAPITAL DISPATCH) – A federal judge has cleared the way for ICE officials to deport a Bolivian asylum-seeker from Iowa to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Noting that José Yugar-Cruz is part of a class of people for whom the Supreme Court has twice issued orders lifting injunctions that prohibited such deportations, U.S. District Judge Stephen H. Locher ruled this week that he had “little choice” but to deny Yugar-Cruz’s motion to have the court block his removal from the United States.
Court records show that Yugar-Cruz, who is from Bolivia, entered the United States on July 8, 2024, at the Arizona border and immediately surrendered himself to law enforcement and was taken into custody.
In October 2024, Yugar-Cruz applied for asylum, citing a threat of torture in his home country. In December 2024, an immigration judge issued a “withholding of removal” order under the Convention Against Torture, based on the torture Yugar-Cruz had previously faced in Bolivia and likely would face again if returned to that country.
Although the federal government did not appeal the immigration judge’s ruling, it opted to keep Yugar-Cruz detained in jail while it searched for another country that would accept him if he were to be deported.
For 17 months, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept Yugar-Cruz jailed while the agency tried without success to remove him to Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Mexico and Canada.
In December 2025, Yugar-Cruz took ICE to court, seeking his release and arguing that his indefinite imprisonment was a violation of his rights given his lack of criminal history. The U.S. Department of Justice agreed Yugar-Cruz should be released from the Muscatine County Jail, subject to his continued supervision by ICE.
With his asylum case pending, Yugar-Cruz is detained again
With his asylum application still pending, Yugar-Cruz was released from jail. Days later, the Trump administration finalized a “Third-County Removal Agreement” with the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which pledged that deportees sent there from the United States would not be subject to persecution or torture.
On March 9, 2026, ICE officials learned Congo had formally agreed to accept Yugar-Cruz for third-country removal. On April 8, 2026, Yugar-Cruz was taken into custody during what he expected to be routine, address-verification visit to an ICE field office in Cedar Rapids.
On the day his deportation flight was scheduled to leave the United States, Yugar-Cruz won a temporary stay in the proceedings by arguing the federal government could not legally deport him.
As part of that case, attorneys for Yugar-Cruz argued their client was a member of a certified class in the case D.V.D. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In that case, a Massachusetts court had entered a preliminary injunction blocking the government from removing noncitizens to third countries without first providing those individuals an opportunity to be heard on the matter.
In Monday’s ruling on Yugar-Cruz’s deportation, Locher wrote that the Massachusetts decision is “unquestionably favorable to Yugar-Cruz’s position … The problem for him, however, is that shortly thereafter the United States Supreme Court took the unusual step of granting a stay of the injunction.”
So, although the Massachusetts case is still pending, ICE’s process for deporting individuals to third countries remains legally valid, Locher noted.
“This is all but fatal to Yugar-Cruz’s claim,” Locher wrote. “He is a member of a class of people for whom the Supreme Court has twice issued orders lifting injunctions that prohibited third country removals like the one (the federal government is) attempting to carry out here. In other words, when a different district court tried to do what Yugar-Cruz is asking this court to do, the Supreme Court intervened twice to stop it … The court cannot award relief on a one-off basis that the Supreme Court would not allow to be awarded en masse.”
Some human rights organizations have objected to the United States’ deportations to Congo, citing the armed conflicts, yellow fever outbreaks and widespread poverty in the area.
Two weeks ago, 15 South American migrants and asylum seekers deported from the United States to the Democratic Republic of Congo claimed to be facing pressure to return to their countries of origin where they fled persecution or torture.
Some of the 15 told the Reuters news agency that since being deported, they’d been given no viable options other than going back to their home countries, and are currently stranded in Kinshasa, a city of 15 million people, with no money and no passports.
Copyright 2026 IOWA CAPITAL DISPATCH. All rights reserved.
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) – A new state report shows more students are earning credentials tied directly to jobs as enrollment at community colleges is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels.
Students are training in-field for jobs hiring now at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids.
Shamar Benton is weeks away from graduating Kirkwood’s Construction Management program. He said community college gave him hands-on experience before entering the workforce.
“It’s a great program,” Benton said. “They put us through real life situations, and I feel like you don’t get that at other colleges.”
Statewide enrollment rebounds
The 2025 Annual Condition of Iowa’s Community Colleges report shows community college enrollment is rebounding, with Career and Technical Education programs driving more than three-quarters of degrees, and nine-in-ten graduates employed within a year.
Jennifer Bradley, vice president of academic affairs at Kirkwood, said students are interested in experiential learning.
Kirkwood said CTE programs are built around what local employers need to fill openings in areas like health care and construction.
“We are dedicated to making sure that students get those experiences in the classroom that are directly connected to what they can anticipate when they get out in industry,” Bradley said.
Benton said the smaller setting makes a difference. Fewer students per class means more one-on-one time with instructors.
“Kirkwood is together. It’s like a family,” Benton said.
Copyright 2026 KCRG. All rights reserved.
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