The shift took place nearly three years ago as Smith—who was working off the farm for a fertilizer company at the time—was talking with the Minnesota-based farmer Sheldon Stevermer. “Corn was $2.75, beans were $7.25. We’re small farmers who don’t have a lot of acres. [We were asking ourselves,] ‘Is it worth staying in business?’” Smith recalls. The two were exchanging ideas and Stevermer asked a third farmer, Lance Petersen, what he thought. “He bounced it off Lance and he said, ‘What about putting a pen of sheep in between the rows?’”

Stevermer has an engineering background and he and Smith decided to run with Peterson’s idea. They got to work designing a farming system that involved growing alternating rows of corn and strips of pasture that were wide enough to move a mobile barn through. The plants in those rows also get exposed to more sunlight than a standard canopy of corn or soy, resulting in higher yields per plant. They called the result—a solar-powered barn that separately housed eight sheep in the front, 10 hogs in the middle, and a 125 chickens in a trailing chicken tractor—the ClusterCluck 5,000. They coined the term “stock cropping” for the larger idea to have, as Smith puts it, “plants feeding animals, and animals feeding plants.”

Since then, Smith has dedicated 5 acres on a plot of land Smith rents to trialing the stock-cropper system. And he has worked with Illinois-based Dawn Equipment to design a second, much lighter and more nimble iteration of the barn: The ClusterCluck Nano runs on solar energy and can be moved with a phone app. Now, Smith and Dawn Equipment CEO Joe Bassett are working on a third iteration and actively pursuing outside investment.

The hope, says Smith, isn’t just to build a new type of farm equipment—it’s to help farmers build soil health, cut down on water pollution, and usher in a new approach to farming in the Corn Belt.

Iowa is famously home to more hogs—25 million—than people, and a sizable number of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. As a result, massive quantities of manure get spread on the same farmland repeatedly, typically during the cold months when there are no roots in the soil to absorb it. That often leads to nutrient pollution in the waterways (and dead zones in places like the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico).

Stock cropping, on the other hand, involves rotating crops with pasture strips so that a smaller numbers of animals leave behind just enough nutrients on the land to help corn grow there the following season—replacing the expensive, leaky fertilizer systems used by most commodity farmers. Meanwhile, the animals themselves live in less confined spaces, eating the plants and insects in the pasture strips. Smith has calculated that if there were 1.4 million ClusterCluck Nanos operating on about 1.9 million acres of forage strips within 15 of Iowa’s 99 counties full time, they could theoretically replace that state’s CAFOs.

“What is progress in ag?” Smith asked the crowd at the field day last August. “If you go down to the Farm Progress show in Boone, [Iowa,] you’re going to see one version of progress, and that’s big, wide, fast farm equipment that’s designed to do more with less people involved,” he said. But Smith, whose somewhat flat speaking affect belies his deep knowledge of agronomy and a stubborn dedication to farming, has other ideas. He points to the fact that even though corn and soy prices have gone back up over the last year, so have the prices of the inputs most commodity farmers rely on, such as synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides.

“It’s the same thing that’s happened three other times in my career. We get a pop and the machine responds, and the pop becomes not very fun anymore. But the concepts we have out here could be very useful as we move ahead into whatever is going to be next. [It’s] not going to be next year or the year after that, but the pattern always comes where [farmers] drain the tank and come back to a break-even proposition.”

Instead of this familiar boom-bust cycle, Smith hopes to see a network of farmers across Iowa, Minnesota, and beyond that can afford to stay on the land while farming at a smaller scale by cutting their input costs radically and selling higher welfare, grass-fed meat into local markets and directly to consumers. And while doing so will require more than just a grassroots effort, these farmers are hoping that their out-of-the-box ideas gain traction with investors who can help them scale up.

‘Escaping the Dead-end, No-win Ag Treadmill’

Even with an automated barn, he says, the stock-cropper system still requires farmers who are more hands-on than most other modern commodity farming, a fact that, if it were widely adopted, would result in a reversal of the population loss so many rural counties have seen.

“The whole idea of this system is that it will require a lot more farmers,” said Smith during a phone call last fall. “Because even though the barns are going to move themselves, somebody still needs to chore them, somebody still needs to do the daily husbandry. And you don’t have to try to farm half the state of Iowa to make a reasonable living.”

Ricardo Salvador, the senior scientist and director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (and a Civil Eats advisory board member), had Smith as a student when he taught at Iowa State University in the ‘90s. He has attended two of Smith’s field days and sees the work as potentially transformative.

“He wants to escape the dead-end, no-win treadmill [agricultural] situation where all that you can do is choose from a very narrow range of options, which always make the farmer the person who takes the ultimate risk, earns the least, and is dependent on government [subsidies] in order to make ends meet,” says Salvador. By selling the highest-value final product—the meat itself rather than just the grain to feed the animals—Salvador adds, he’s found a way to do something that has “become out of reach for farmers that decades ago bought into the idea of specialization.”

The hope, says Smith, is to create a system that’s more resilient in the face of climate change because it relies on fewer inputs.

Eventually, he says, “we could probably cut nitrogen use by 75 percent compared to a conventional corn acre. And I think we could completely eliminate the [added] phosphorus and potassium and use the animals to cycle it back into the soil.”

He is also looking at other crops that might make good animal feed, like barley and field peas, which would diversify the operation further.  “The whole idea is that we want to increase the amount of biodiversity in the field within this system and build resiliency that way.”

Dawn Equipment’s Bassett got on board with stock cropping and started collaborating with Smith several years ago. Bassett had been making small-scale farm equipment targeted specifically at those cutting down on tillage and planting cover crops after he took stock of the nitrogen problems—and resulting regulations—in the Chesapeake Bay and the Des Moines Waterworks lawsuit.

“At that time, [it looked like] the government was going make farmers start doing something to preserve water quality and topsoil, “ he said. “I thought, ‘Surely, there’s going to be a groundswell of momentum that sort of gets farmers to change their practices.’” And while didn’t happen right away, he says that part of the business has grown in recent years.

Bassett sees much of the recent wave of ag technology as furthering, rather than solving, the most pressing problems with commodity agriculture—and he wants to do something different, even if it can mean a slower ramp-up to profitability.

“Agriculture is very high-tech now, but it’s not actually any different,” he says. “We have high-tech tractors and combines, but what they’re doing is exactly the same. Now [farmers are getting] robot tractors to plow the fields, so they’ll just plow even more.”

Bassett is personally motivated by the climate crisis and believes having animals on the landscape are key to sequestering carbon in the soil. “A stock-cropper system of intercropping, where you are rotationally grazing in between rows of cash crops, will probably be the most regenerative farming system possible. And it will produce the highest yield per unit of fertilizer of any system.”

Dawn Equipment is working on more prototypes, and the company’s ability to manufacture its first round of commercially available ClusterCluck barns will depend on the level of investment Bassett and Smith are able to attract. Together they have bootstrapped the project so far, and they are hoping to attract venture capital to keep scaling up the project. But Smith isn’t interested in the typical model.

“A lot of people just want you to come in and do this and then flip it in three years and sell it to Cargill. I’m not interested in that. We need to find the right investor that is bought into the merits of what we’re trying to build and is going to give us the rope and the leeway to get there,” he says.

And while the barns were developed for corn and soy operations, Bassett hopes to see them reach orchardists and vineyard owners interested in grazing animals as a way to build the soil between their rows in other parts of the country.

A Processing Bottleneck

Keaton Krueger, another Iowan who is farming with his wife on 80 acres purchased from her family, while working full time in the field of precision agriculture (most recently for WinField United), has been following Zack’s progress and says he’s very impressed with what he and Bassett have done in the last three years. The focus on soil health aligns with his approach and, on paper, the system promises the kind of steady income that would allow him to gradually transition to full-time farming.

“Right now, farming is like a second job, but it would be great someday if a system like the stock cropper could allow us to make a living farming without having to become a giant consolidated grain-farming entity. I think there are a lot of people like he and I, who are still in agriculture professionally, that probably could access a few hundred acres of land and would be happy to go home and work hard on that land to make a living.” But working at that scale isn’t possible within the current system, he adds.

And yet Krueger hasn’t committed to buying a barn because he says the meat processing infrastructure isn’t there yet. The Kruegers raise hogs for themselves and their family members, and he says, “We have to schedule a year in advance for just a few hogs a year.”

But he’s optimistic that more demand could help pave the way for more processing. “I think that will probably be an area that gets solved either through the stock-cropper vision or through somebody that’s supporting the vision,” says Krueger.

Krueger, Smith, and Salvador all point to Jason Mauck’s work as an inspiring example. The Muncie, Indiana-based, self-described “maverick grower” farms row crops in strips to collect optimum sunlight like Smith and raises hogs that he sells himself through Munsee Meats, the meat processing plant that has been in his family since the 1950s—with the recent addition of automated self-serve meat lockers.

“[Mauck] is trying to retain as much of the food dollar as possible, which means that he’s in charge of production, processing, and distribution,” says Salvador. “He’s got this small USDA-certified meatpacking plant. But then his sales are through what are essentially these high-tech vending machines. And he controls the whole thing.”

At the field day in September, Mauck bought a ClusterCluck Nano and brought it home to Indiana, where he has been sharing photos of it in action.

And when Smith envisions networks of producers working together to build a supply chain using stock cropping, he thinks the region around Mauck’s processing business is probably the most logical place to start.

“It’s going to take regional hubs outside urban areas, and then farms positioned around those hubs rather than, for instance, growing pork here in Winnebago County, Iowa, and shipping it to Sioux Falls to be killed, and then shipping it to Washington, D.C., after that. We’ve got to do a better job of nesting the production around where the people are.” He also sees pasture-based systems as inherently easier to locate next to cities—because, unlike CAFOs, urban dwellers “can actually come out and see and participate in it, and it’s 100 percent transparent; the farmer has nothing to hide.”

The USDA is also in the middle of rolling out a sizable grant program that is intended to support small-scale meat processing infrastructure—as part of the Biden administration’s response to consolidation in the meat industry—but it’s not clear whether those grants will work in tandem with efforts like Smith’s.

Swimming Against the Tide

The depopulation of rural areas—and the sheer number of miles it has put between people—hasn’t helped. But social media has done a lot to help outliers like Smith and Mauck build networks that have bolstered them in the face of the status quo. “Maybe 10 percent of farmers are open to these ideas,” says Smith “That’s the community space that we’re aiming for and trying to build a coalition around right now.”

At the end of the day, Smith is clear-eyed about the fact that what he’s doing may struggle to gain traction because it threatens the powers that be in the commodity agriculture industry.

“You’re not going to see John Deere, Corteva, or Bayer supporting something like this. I come from that world,” he told his field day audience. “I was a Pioneer seed rep and chemical dealer.” Enabling farmers to work in a closed-loop way that harnesses the power of nature isn’t good for those companies’ bottom lines, he added.

“Changing the arrangement of the use of plants and animals in this way, it is a significant threat [to the existing industry],” he added later on the phone. Not only does the stock-cropper system require much less synthetic fertilizers, but “it’s going to take us less seed. We’re getting more yield per seed, and that flies in the face of everything I’ve done up to this point. . . . It’s a potential threat to significantly reduce the things that we’re told we have to farm with in order to survive.”

“A lot of farmers just wouldn’t dare try this, because the fear of looking strange,” says Salvador, who adds, “the people who will pooh-pooh it or make it sound like it’s strange are the industry and the folks who want to be comfortable just farming corn and soybeans, and getting checks from the government when they can’t make ends meet.”

“But,” he adds, “I see a slow-brewing, quiet revolution out there.”

The post Could This Mobile, Solar-Powered Livestock Barn Reshape the Corn Belt? appeared first on Civil Eats.

The Flenaughs’ property, nearby Holly Grove, and the former all-Black towns and communities date back more than two centuries. Flenaugh and every Black farmer, former sharecropper, and landowner across the Delta whisper about the missing, lost, or sham property deeds at the Phillips County Courthouse at the county seat in Helena. According to state officials, the county is one of just three in the state that don’t have public online access to court and property records.

All those deeds link to the ghosts of the Elaine Massacre of 1919, which is by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in U.S. history.

The events in Elaine, almost 103 years ago, stemmed from the state’s deepest roots of white supremacy, tense race relations, and growing concerns about labor unions. In September 1919, a shooting incident that occurred at a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union—a Black-led organization that sought to improve life for Black farmers and communities in the state—escalated into mob violence by white people in Elaine and the surrounding area.

Although the exact number is unknown, estimates of the number of African Americans killed range in the hundreds. Only five white people lost their lives, according to records from the time. Even so, 12 Black men were arrested in the wake of the white-led massacre and sentenced to death for murder charges. The Elaine 12, as they came to be known, became part of a precedent-setting legal case with nearly as long an impact as the massacre itself.

Flenaugh says his family’s land goes back to his great-grandfather, Cebron Johnson (Hall), who in the 1880s left more than 30,000 acres in Monroe and Philips counties to descendants and their families just east of the former all-Black town of Holly Grove. That land, according to Butch’s father, Eugene, Sr., was owned by the family prior to the massacre as Black farmers emerged from slavery in the late 19th century.

“This is part of that 30,000 [acres],” says the younger Flenaugh, a well-built, 50-year-old farmer, as he looks out over property that is part forest thicket, part nature preserve, and part family graveyard.

What happened to the Johnson land is a fate that befell countless Black farms during the early 20th century: Land was taken through outright theft, intimidation, violence, and fraudulent property records, with the end result of robbing generations of Black families from the inherited wealth that comes from land ownership. And at a time when the current administration has committed to advancing racial equity, and efforts to provide debt relief to Black farmers have been stymied by racist lawsuits, the scale of violent land theft is coming to light in a powerful, galvanizing way.

A Century of Land Theft in Arkansas

According to a recent real estate listing, the 1,650-acre preserve is up for sale for $11.1 million; that price tag includes diverse waterfowl habitats such as flooded green timber, tupelo and cypress brakes, wetland slashes, and more than 600 acres of agricultural fields.

Meanwhile, most Black farmers’ experience in the region is similar to the Flenaughs’. When he first got to his family’s place, Flenaugh says there was no wildlife in the area because the rice farmers adjacent to the family’s property had killed off everything with pesticides. Once he stopped the white farmers from spraying the chemicals on his family’s property, Flenaugh’s land recovered. Today, it is brimming with life; a wide variety of waterfowl make the region part of the “Duck-Hunting Capital of the World.”

“I can now walk out on my stand and see the same duck and waterfowls, big game deer, wild pigs, snakes, catfish, and other wildlife that can be found over there at Big Slash,” says Flenaugh.

The novice farmer told Civil Eats that the legacy of the Elaine Massacre is still “thick in the air,” because everyone knows that thousands of acres of land that are now in the hands of white and corporate landowners once belonged to Black farmers.

“It doesn’t make any sense, because if you go look at the records over the years, they kept changing the [property] books,” he says, adding that most Black families were driven off their land or “scattered” during the Red Summer of 1919.

“If you look at those records, those whose [names] were penciled out just disappeared; those that had red marks were burned on their land or in their houses. The ones that had blue check marks on them are the ones that they were after, or they just left and never came back,” he says.

According to a 2019 report by the Equal Justice Initiative, the racist attacks in 1919 were widespread and targeted the 380,000 Black veterans who had just returned from the war. “Military service sparked dreams of racial equality for generations of African Americans,” the report notes. However, “during the lynching era, many Black veterans were targeted for mistreatment, violence, and murder because of their race and status as veterans” and the perceived threat they posed to Jim Crow and racial subordination. The report goes on to note that “racial violence . . . reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed and continues to be evident in the injustice and unfairness of the administration of criminal justice in America.”

Flenaugh says the Elaine Massacre sent a message of intimidation that still affects the region today. And there are still some Black and white people who say the incident should not be talked about, even after a local committee dedicated a memorial to those slain during the 100-year commemoration two years ago.

“The sad part about it is that every last bit of property around here is ‘heir property.’ If more people understood that, they could come back and get [their] land,” he says.

Yet Flenaugh’s own family is still in a fight to keep all their land. Flenaugh and his father, Eugene Flenaugh, Sr., and two brothers, Johnathan and Eric, had a court date this summer at the Phillip County Circuit Court in Helena-West Helena concerning property line dispute with a white farmer seeking to plant rice on their plot.

The tense struggle has led to confrontations with the Phillips County Sheriff’s Department and bad blood with the white farmer. In June, the court allowed the white farmer to plant on the disputed land, but the complaint still has not been fully settled. Larry Hicks, a Little Rock-based NAACP attorney who has taken an interest in the Flenaugh’s case and the plight of Black farmers in Arkansas, said the family recently sent a letter to the court terminating the legal services of their attorney following the court hearing in late June.

For the Flenaughs, the dispute bring up memories of Elaine and the repeating patterns of stolen Black wealth. “We just want them to leave us alone,” the elder Flenaugh told Civil Eats.

Working to Return Lands to Black Families

In hushed conversations with her grandmother, she learned that she had a personal connection to the massacre: She was related to three of the Elaine 12, including Frank and Ed Hicks. The story goes that Frank had two families—one with his first wife, who died at an early age, and another after he remarried. Hicks-Gilbert says she is a granddaughter of one of the first sons but she has been trying to track down more information about that side of the family since her grandmother passed away in 2019, on the 100th anniversary of the massacre.

Hicks-Gilbert says she promised not to speak publicly about the massacre while her grandmother was alive. Now the caretaker of the Descendants of the Elaine Massacre Facebook group, Gilbert is on a mission to make sure that the heirs’ property belonging to Black descendants of the Elaine genocide is restored to its rightful owners.

“The biggest endeavor we are working on is creating a database of all those killed and the survivors. We’re going to open it up [to the public] because we know that in finding records and talking to families, a lot of them [left town] during the massacre. They were scared,” says Hicks-Gilbert.

She adds that many Black families and single men who didn’t migrate to the Midwest or East stayed on as sharecroppers in Arkansas or left for states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Once there, they often sought out anonymity.

“I found one family that changed their last name after their grandfather escaped,” says Hicks-Gilbert.

On that day at the courthouse, she learned that her great-grandfather’s brother, Ed or Edd Hicks, one of the Elaine 12, lost his land to a white landowner just two months after he and the 11 other Black men were jailed and charged with murder and condemned to death by all-white juries.

Hicks-Gilbert says that seeing the deed itself helped her understand the “transgenerational trauma” she had seen in her grandmother’s face every day while she was alive. “She was friends with survivors who were in the choir with her, who went to church with her, and they all shared in this tragedy,” says Hicks-Gilbert, wiping tears from her eyes. “And I look at it now; it was all about surviving.”

Like Flenaugh, Hicks-Gilbert says the massacre was meant to put fear in the hearts of Black farmers across the Arkansas Delta.

Hicks-Gilbert’s main goal is to get an accurate count all the Black people killed during the massacre. In tracking coverage and mentions of the incident over time, she has noticed that white newspapers have often minimized the Black death toll. At first, local law enforcement set the official number at 26. In the years afterward, however, some estimates have swelled to well over 800.

“When I get with other descendants, we’re talking, and everybody’s stories are syncing up, we know there were upwards of a thousand [deaths],” says Hicks-Gilbert.

She also believes the ghosts of the Elaine Massacre are responsible for the feeling that time has been standing still in Philips County for the last 100 years. She points to the fact that it still has the state’s largest Black population, but the median household income of $33,724 is 50 percent lower than the national average $67,521, and 32 percent lower than the Arkansas median. It is not only the poorest county in Arkansas but also among the poorest counties in the U.S. by household income.

Hicks-Gilbert said the Black sharecroppers that were a part of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union at Hoop Spur were not just fighting for better pay for their crops at the time. They were also banding together to buy land independently, as a path toward community and generational wealth that would have enriched the lives of many Black families in Phillips County and Arkansas.

“At least three generations of Hicks worked on the land that was stolen from my grandfather and my uncle. My brother currently lives and works near Hoop Spur, yet we have never owned any part of it,” she added. “Instead, Black families throughout Phillips County were left with generations of poverty, oppression, suppression, and depression akin to slavery.”

Reconnecting to Farming—and to Racial Justice

Adams-Shango is a budding urban farmer who began studying hydroponics at the beginning of the pandemic, after she became concerned about food security. Her interest in farming turned serious when she took a class on vertical farming at Farm.One, the crowdfunded, antiracist, and antidiscrimination urban farm in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood that supplies hydroponic greens and edible flowers to many of the city’s top restaurants.

“It has been calling us all this time; we just had to listen,” says Adams-Shango of her farming roots. She added that her journey into urban and vertical farming brings back memories of her childhood visits to the South with her great aunt, who ran a homestead farm in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

“I would spend summers down there . . . but I had forgotten all about that,” Adams-Shango recalls.

While she was learning to farm, her mother and 103-year-old aunt attended the unveiling of a life-size portrait of her famous great-grandfather. In 1923, Jones filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the Elaine 12 were denied due process of law. After reviewing the case, the Supreme Court agreed and overturned the convictions. The precedent-setting Moore v. Dempsey changed the nature of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, allowing federal courts to hear and examine evidence in state criminal cases to protect defendants’ constitutional rights.

Scipio Africanus Jones. (Photo courtesy of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System.)

For years, Adams-Shango says her mother used to share stories about the famous lawyer, but she only now understands the strong connection to farming. She is also excited about the renewed interest in his life. That interest also led Hollywood’s Searchlight Pictures last year to purchase the rights for The Defender, a biopic about Scipio Jones.

Meanwhile, Adams-Shango is taking a leap and starting a farm with her three adult children, Kofi, Johnathan, and Hazel. After an immersion program at Hartsfield Organic Farm in Vermont, her family found a farm mentor, ordered non-GMO heirloom seeds, and made plans to pay a financial backer $1,200 a year to bootstrap a 17.5-acre plot called The Flying Buffalo.

“I think this can work, and can even do this as a family,” the former Chicago Mercantile Exchange broker explains.

Advancing Racial Equity Nationwide

Dania Francis, the lead author of the study, told Civil Eats that Black agricultural land ownership peaked right after the turn of the 20th century, just ahead of the Elaine Massacre and the wave of others like it. W.E.B DuBois in 1907 estimated that Black families owned 3 million acres in 1875, 8 million in 1890, and 12 million in 1900. By 1910, African Americans had acquired more than 16 million acres. “This was the most land they would ever own in the United States; however, there was a nearly 90 percent decline in ownership from 1910 to 1997,” the report states.

Francis said that total represents the most conservative estimate possible. “We don’t include all the additional life-reinforcing value that having that land would create,” she told Civil Eats. “If you are a landowner, you are more able to send your kids to college; you are more able to invest in other businesses. So, we didn’t even model that in this estimate.”

Francis and her team have already started the second phase of the study, which will include research on the potential wealth lost by Black farmers and their families. “We wanted to get this estimate out there first, and now there is this ability to use this land [as the baseline for calculating] capital and grow the [estimate] even bigger.”

The final piece of the study, Francis acknowledged, is moving the national conversation on reparations that was reignited following George Floyd’s murder forward. Francis, who co-authored an influential 2003 paper on “The Economics of Reparations,” said the key takeaway from the 2022 study is that the legacy of slavery and post-Civil War state-sanctioned discrimination and ongoing institutional inequities prevented the enslaved and their descendants from benefiting from the growth of the U.S. economy.

“The work that we are doing has to be done directly in conversation with the work on reparations,” Francis said. “A reparations program should be targeted to the current Black-white wealth gap as a representation of all that harm.”

Francis added that it is important to have an estimate for not just Black agricultural losses but for “all the individual harms” that have impacted African Americans, including slavery, lynching, housing discrimination, and racism in the criminal justice system.

“Not that we are going to add up all those harms, but it helps provide more evidence to say, ‘Look, this has dollar value,’” said Francis.

For descendants like Flenaugh, Adams-Shango, and Hicks-Gilbert—and their families and communities—that’s an important step forward.

The post Black Farmers in Arkansas Still Seek Justice a Century After the Elaine Massacre appeared first on Civil Eats.

Fracking, a process used to extract natural gas and petroleum, depends on silica sand, or “frac sand” to produce the fossil fuels. A single fracking site can use millions of pounds of sand. The sand is blasted into wells to keep fissures in the rock open so that oil and gas can be released.

In the Midwest, farmland is being irreversibly lost in pursuit of silica sand.

Wedron Silica, which is now owned by Ohio-based Covia, has been expanding this particular mine for years and now owns at least 2,500 acres in and around the tiny village. It’s just one of several that Covia owns across LaSalle County, Illinois, 90 miles southwest of Chicago. Here, U.S. Silica, Smart Sand, and other companies are also actively mining.

Together, the companies have purchased hundreds of parcels of land and now own more than 9,000 acres in LaSalle, a Civil Eats investigation has found. The majority of those acres are former or current farmland. Silica mining is also prevalent in other parts of Illinois and regions of Wisconsin and Missouri.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), LaSalle County’s farmland acreage dropped 5 percent from 2012 to 2017, to 573,000 acres. But many of the acres still identified as farmland are owned by mining companies and leased to farmers. Across the street from the mining activity in Wedron, for example, Covia owns 600 acres, where tiny corn plants were just starting to green up in neat rows. In 2018, the county approved the company’s application to expand into those farm fields, despite the fact that LaSalle County Soil and Water Conservation District discouraged the decision based on a site assessment score that identified the land as “highly productive.” Digging could start at any time.

Early in the pandemic, declines in fossil fuel prices led to a big drop in demand for frac sand. Now, with oil and gas prices at historic highs with no relief in sight, demand is soaring. In February, one energy consultant told Reuters that current prices for frac sand were “unheard of in the industry’s modern history” and that he expected them to go higher.

“You’re taking this short-term demand for sand, and you’re totally sacrificing the long-term agricultural potential,” says Ted Auch, the Great Lakes program coordinator for the FracTracker Alliance, who has been following the issue for years.

While the more immediate impacts of fracking on communities where the drilling itself takes place have been widely covered, silica sand mining has mostly remained in the shadows. Even on the ground, most residents and tourists visiting LaSalle County’s state parks cannot see the gaping, miles-long craters that extend across the landscape, hidden as they are behind man-made hills called berms, most planted with thick vegetation.

Yet some local residents are watching the mines spring to life with new intensity. “They really are accelerating,” said Joy Konczak, who lives across from a Smart Sand mine in North Utica, where she said that blasting regularly shakes her home. “I was out of town the other day and the neighbor called me and said, ‘Oh my god! My curio cabinet just walked across the floor.”

As the mining picks up, its impacts intersect with other pressing issues. According to American Farmland Trust, farmland is being lost to development at a rate of about 2,000 acres per day, even as the federal government, private industry, and many advocacy groups are betting on that land as a vehicle for carbon sequestration. Meanwhile, young, beginning, and low-income farmers—some of whom are working to farm in ways that require fewer fossil fuels to begin with—are being priced out of land ownership due to development and a growing interest in farmland investment.

County officials have supported the expansion of mines primarily based on the industry’s promises of jobs and economic growth, but in Wedron, for example, there is little left of the village that isn’t mine offices or infrastructure. In the town center, frac sand is loaded directly onto rail cars on the banks of the Fox River. Drivers have to navigate over the sandy tracks to cross the water. At the entrance to the processing plant, the local post office, which the company bought in 2019, sits shuttered, in disrepair.

Civil Eats sent detailed questions to company representatives at Covia, U.S. Silica, and Smart Sand about their expansion and other issues raised in this story. Representatives at Covia and U.S. Silica did not respond. At Smart Sand, finance manager Josh Jayne said, “Thanks for reaching out. We have no comment at this time.”

Shaped by Sand

A strip of green represents a group of about 20 homes, including theirs. The vast sea of red surrounding it represents land that was annexed by the village in 2013 to enable mining. Every parcel is marked “A-1” for agriculture; Covia and Smart Sand own them all.

When they moved to the town in the early ‘90s, the group explains, there was a single sand mining company in the center, but it didn’t seem to disrupt the surrounding landscape or their lives. Many of their neighbors were farmers. Looking out the glass door into the Gassmans’ backyard, flowers are blooming near a beehive, and trees block what would be a view of the plant—pictured at the top of this article—which is now owned by Covia.

But over time, the companies snapped up the surrounding farms one by one, often paying as much as $20,000 per acre. “We expected them to expand at some point, but we did not feel it would be in our lifetime, and we certainly didn’t expect to be encircled like this,” Konczak says, gesturing in the other direction, toward the front door, which now looks out onto one of Smart Sand’s berms. “I assumed that would be farmland forever.”

Most of LaSalle County is endlessly flat. What was once prairie is now covered as far as the eye can see with corn and soy fields. But the landscape also has other unique geological features that have long drawn visitors interested in its natural beauty.

St. Louis Canyon in Starved Rock State Park. (Photo by Lisa Held)

At the bottom of the famous St. Louis Canyon in Starved Rock State Park, just across the Illinois River from North Utica, hikers stand on a sandy beach to snap photos of a waterfall framed by walls of St. Peter sandstone. It’s one of 18 canyons in the park formed by a powerful flood from a melting glacier, which carved up the earth and deposited sand along the way. Also key is a geologic fold, called an anticline, that pushed the sandstone up closer to the earth’s surface.

It’s perhaps fitting that at a lookout point at the park’s lodge, visitors can see Covia’s North Utica mining infrastructure just beyond the dense foliage spread out in front of them. After all, the same stone they come to marvel at fueled the frac sand rush.

LaSalle County, with seven frac sand mines, is the country’s unofficial frac sand capital. While Texas is home to the most sand and gravel mining by volume in the nation, Wisconsin and Illinois are close behind, and the sand from this region is considered higher quality for fracking, because of its uniform size and shape. Since the sandstone is close to the surface, mining it is also easier than in other places. Given nearly 80 percent of Illinois’ total land is in farms, the majority of the stone is sitting under cropland.

While the USDA directs some resources toward farmland preservation programs like conservation easements, the federal government does not regulate private land use, farmland or otherwise. LaSalle County and village governments control land use through zoning laws. When a company wants to mine land zoned for agriculture, it must apply for “special use” permits that trigger public hearings. In most cases, officials approve the special use, even when the land and site evaluation shows the land is valuable for farming. (They often add conditions the companies must agree to, addressing issues like blasting frequency, light and noise pollution, and impacts on neighbors’ wells.)

“[The mines] can keep expanding out and down,” said Robert Goodin, a mineral commodity specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), citing the vast amount of silica in the region that has yet to be extracted. Smart Sand tells shareholders that based on its current volume, the company could mine the land it owns there for another 161 years.

U.S. Silica runs its operations from a 900-acre pit in the center of Ottawa, a town that sits between North Utica and Wedron and feels like a big city by comparison. The company still operates a processing plant there but its blasting and digging has moved across the Illinois River and is gradually moving west, closer and closer to Starved Rock, where drivers pass the excavation of farm fields minutes before the park entrance sign appears. U.S. Silica secured that continued expansion in 2017 when it bought Mississippi Sand, another frac sand mining company. Years earlier, Mississippi Sand’s application to mine these 300 acres of farmland—which the Conservation District also determined to be “highly productive”—led to significant controversy.

More than 1,000 people signed petitions opposing the mine. During a public hearing that stretched to midnight and had to be extended to a second day, some locals and union representatives voiced support for the project based on the jobs it would provide. Many residents and environmentalists objected, however, based on its proximity to Starved Rock, the health and quality-of-life effects of the mines already in operation, and the loss of farmland. “As the saying goes, they’re not making farmland. It is only to be saved,” Sierra Club volunteer Joyce Blumenshine testified. “Because you can’t eat what is left in that great big pit in the ground when the silica sand is gone.”

The county board approved the permit. U.S. Silica now claims it has just under 100 million tons of “proven and probable” silica reserves in Ottawa, according to a 2022 report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and its annual production capacity there is 4 million tons, meaning it could operate for another 25 years.

The current high oil and gas prices don’t just increase overall demand for frac sand, they can also drive companies away from cheaper sources toward La Salle’s premium products. “Companies might say it’s worth it to spend more money on those sands, because they will have better flow rates and produce more [fuel],” said Goodin.

While farmland is being destroyed, many land-owning farmers have cashed out by selling their land to the mining companies. Ray Aubry and Bill Stack, founders of a group called Conserve Our Rural Ecosystem (CORE), don’t really blame them. Aubry is a retired educator with 18 grandchildren. His house, just north of Smart Sand’s mine, is surrounded by cropland. On a clear day, if you look west over the alfalfa field outside the front door, you can see the outline of Wedron’s mountain of mined earth on the horizon.

Stack, who lives just to the west, was long what he called a “plain corn-and-bean farmer” while also working an off-farm job. Now, he leases his land to another farmer and raises some cattle.

Together, the pair has tried to raise community awareness of what they see as threats to farmland, food production, and their homeland’s ecosystems. Still, they can rattle off the names of farmers who have sold their acreage for top dollar and bought double or triple the number of acres elsewhere. Those high land prices then shut out farmers with fewer resources, they say. As many of the younger farmers in the region lease land from the mining companies, it makes it harder for Aubry and Stack to organize locals around the impacts the companies are having. “They control the farmer. If the farmer squawks too much, then they take the ground away from him. So, they really have suppressed [dissent] by buying all of this ground,” Aubry said.

In 2016, CORE fought the opening of a new mine in the county with the help of pro bono lawyers from Northwestern University. They succeeded in that one instance, but silica mining continues to expand.

“Farm Land not Frac Sand”—their sign—still stands in a field on the way to Troy Grove, another small village northwest of North Utica. There, another mine stores hulking piles of silica sand right beside a residential neighborhood, and sand lines the street approaching the entrance. On an 85-degree Sunday in June, residents were outside tending their gardens and washing cars. A little boy and girl stood at the top of a ladder on a plastic swimming pool, contemplating the jump into the water below. The mining plant’s rusted infrastructure towered above them, and white particles could be seen blowing through the air, like soft snow.

Up in the Air

While the frac sand itself is not dangerous, mining, processing, and moving it releases fine particulate matter that can include crystalline silica particles. Exposure to particulate matter is linked to respiratory problems such as asthma and decreased lung function, as well as premature death in people with lung or heart conditions. Crystalline silica, specifically, is a known carcinogen, and exposure is associated with increased risk of lung cancer, an irreversible condition called silicosis, and COPD. Because the particles are small enough to travel in the bloodstream to the liver and kidneys, exposure is also linked to kidney and autoimmune diseases. These effects have primarily been observed in workers who are exposed to the dust in mines and at construction sites, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has specific regulations in place to protect workers.

“They go to work and wear protective equipment,” Phil Gassman said. “We live in it.”

Of course, the exact degree of daily exposure for the residents of this area is unclear. At the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, researcher Crispin Pierce led a team of student researchers that measured levels of particulate matter at sites near frac sand mines. His team found consistently elevated levels, which included crystalline silica, at those sites. Based on the risks associated with the levels they measured, he calculated the associated long-term effects and determined people living near the two facilities lose between 41 and 249 days of life expectancy due to breathing in the polluted air over time.

Dwight Swenson, who lives in Jackson County, Wisconsin, another hotspot for frac sand, said a mine moved in a little over half a mile from his home in 2015. Since then, his previously healthy wife developed lung granulomas, a respiratory condition that can be a precursor to silicosis. Swenson monitors particulate matter on his own, and he said that while the companies fall back on the fact that overall average levels don’t exceed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s standard for exposure, levels do go well above what is considered safe on many individual days.

According to an EPA spokesperson, “Sand mining facilities are regulated under the Clean Air Act as sources of particulate matter. For this reason, a variety of state and federal regulations and permitting requirements may apply depending on the size of the source, the location of the source, and the nature of the operation.” The spokesperson said the state agency would be in the best position to identify specific requirements for silica mines. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR)’s Office of Mines and Minerals did not respond to a specific question regarding whether the agency regulates emissions from sand mines by press time. But a spokesperson said that the agency’s authority was limited to overburden removal, reclamation, and blasting activities. Copies of IDNR silica mine permits obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request do not include provisions related to particulate matter emissions.

At his home in Wisconsin, “They’re out of compliance almost 30 percent of the time,” Swenson said, “and we have to breathe all of the time.” He and his wife check the levels before deciding whether or not to spend time outside. They also deal with frequent blasting. Usually the windows rattle; once, blasting broke a window.

Frac Sand, Farmland, and the Future

At the state level, IDNR’s Office of Mines and Minerals has regulatory authority over silica sand mine blasting, overburden removal, and the process called “reclamation.” IDNR defines reclamation as “the reasonable rehabilitation of the affected land to useful purposes, while keeping to a minimum the impact on the surrounding areas” and it requires companies to obtain reclamation permits before they begin mining. IDNR says mining sites could be converted to pastures, forests, wildlife areas, and other uses, and in some places, farmland restoration has been attempted, but it’s difficult to find examples of success.

Wedron Silica has said that farmland restoration is among its aims. In its 2018 expansion plan, the company stated that after reclamation, it would restore the land to “production agriculture, pasture, and gentle slopes to lakes.” But residents wonder whether the companies can and will deliver on their promises. Soil must be replaced, and even when the overburden is put back into the landscape, experts say one thing is clear: the flat, expansive farmland made up of fertile soil formed over thousands of years is not coming back.

“You can imagine it as trying to start a farm on top of a parking lot,” Goodin, at USGS, said. “There are no natural resources left there. It’s just hard rock for miles around. They might have to break up the ground, import soil and organic matter, and bring in plants that can live in the tortured environment.” Flooding the pits with water to create recreational “lakes” is the most popular promise of reclamation, but local residents say to date, the bodies of water left behind have been fenced off and stagnant.

Residents and Ted Auch at FracTracker Alliance said that state and local government officials could do a lot more to regulate the mining companies. They could assess risks more seriously, require more stringent permits around waste and water use and air pollution, and demand companies do serious reclamation on each parcel of land as they go. “The speed at which they mine with no long-term thought about what they’re going to do with these parcels—that’s the thing that needs to be slowed so far down,” Auch said.

The irony, he pointed out, is that while farmland is being lost in pursuit of silica, the corn and soy farming happening on the same fields is also driving the demand for fossil fuels, and therefore frac sand. Nitrogen fertilizers are made from natural gas. The insecticides that coat nearly every corn seed and the herbicide sprayed to keep the weeds down are also made from oil and gas, while the tractors and trucks used to farm these crops also run on fossil fuels.

“My hope is that fossil fuels will go away, and when that happens, all of this will go away, too. But I’m not sure it’s going to happen in my lifetime,” Konczak says, her neighbors in North Utica nodding along. “I think it’s going to happen, but how long is that going to take? How bad do things have to get?”

This story is part of an ongoing Civil Eats investigation. Contact senior staff reporter Lisa Held at lisa-at-CivilEats.com or securely at lisaelaineh-at-protonmail.com. Ask her for her Signal info.

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