"Monona County officials and residents fear a repeat of the communication gaps and loopholes that left them caught off guard by a plan to import treated slaughterhouse manure."
"In a matter of days, a dirt pit the size of five football fields appeared next to the weathered headstones of Center Cemetery in Castana, Iowa.
The excavation site sits on the edge of the Loess Hills, a 200-mile corridor of craggy bluffs and ridges bordering the Missouri River valley in western Iowa. The hills, formed from erodible silt deposited by melting glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age, are among the most distinctive landscapes of the American heartland.
In this treasured landscape, residents whispered that a private developer was building a lagoon to store animal-waste byproducts trucked in from a meat-processing plant in neighboring Woodbury County.
“It was just sort of a rumor,” said Scott Koepsell, whose family owns farmland less than a mile from the site. “But we didn’t know for sure … and we had no good answers.”"
Anika Jane Beamer reports for Inside Climate News August 22, 2026.
