The meat packing industry and changes in America's eating needs are combining to alter the complexion of the Midwest heartland from white to brown.
Older whites in Nebraska and Iowa, two classic breadbasket states, may be staying put, but their children and grandchildren are fleeing the states for better jobs. Meanwhile, the meat packing industry in the past 20 to 30 years has transplanted itself from big cities to small towns, and has brought with it an increasingly Latino workforce.
The twin phenomena of a shrinking white population and the emergence of Iowa and Nebraska as the Ellis Islands of the Midwest are spawning a dramatic transformation of small towns, schools and churches, as well as products on grocery shelves.
If you think Iowa and Nebraska are still largely homogeneous small towns and rural communities populated by the progeny of Scandinavian immigrants, it's time to wake up and smell the salsa.
Latinos, who are overwhelmingly Mexican and American, are now the largest minority group in both Nebraska and Iowa. This is primarily because between 1980 and 2000, the Hispanic share of meat-processing workers increased from less than one tenth to nearly one third, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
At the same time, the percentage of non-Hispanic whites working at meat processing plants dropped from three fourths to barely one half, according to USDA.
Nebraska illustrates the velocity of the change. The minority population was only six percent in 1980, but rose to 15 percent by 2005. It's not likely to stop there, because 25 percent of the children already in the state are minorities - and some believe that figure itself is an undercount.
"In many Iowa communities the influx of nonwhite immigrant newcomers is making up for the rapid loss of the state's working-age Anglo population " due to declining birthrates and the exodus of the young for jobs in the South and West, according to a 2006 study by Mark Greg, a professor at the University of North Iowa and director of the Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration.
Jerry Perkins, farm editor for the Des Moines Register, who covers this historic story, says the new immigrants are re-populating small towns, starting new businesses and generating more money for local school systems.
Mexican immigrants and their children are now key to the economic future of both Iowa and Nebraska because they are the growing part of the workforce - in the same way that German, Norwegian and Swedish immigrants and their children found themselves in a position to mold the future of these states at the turn of the 20th century.
To understand the changing demographics you need to understand another revolution that's occurred in the past four decades.
"The meat packing industry has a long history of employing immigrants especially Irish and Polish immigrants during the first half of the 20th Century," wrote Wallace Huffman and John Miranowski, two economics professors at Iowa State University in a 1996 report, "Immigration, Meat Packing, and Trade: Implications for Iowa."
Indeed, the central characters in "The Jungle," muckraker Upton Sinclair's pioneering book about the industry, were Lithuanian immigrants. The book, published in 1906, chronicled how the meat packing industry abused workers and produced unsafe and unsanitary food.
In the late 1960's, Americans began changing their diets from all that beef and pork to more chicken and fish. Between 1970 and 2000 the per capita annual consumption of beef declined from 80 pounds to 65 pounds, while chicken consumption alone nearly doubled to 53 pounds, according to the USDA.
And more and more women went to work.
The meat industry convulsed, and in the years since has in many ways transformed itself-developing refrigerated trucks, busting unions to lower wages and recruiting a largely Mexican workforce-some directly from south of the border and second-stoppers from California and Texas.
The consequences of those changes are now clearly visible in small towns from eastern Iowa to western Nebraska and Kansas.
As more women went to work outside the home, working mothers and working wives wanted meat they could take out of the package and cook. That translated into fewer sides of beef and slabs sent to butcher shops and grocery stores, and more packaged and processed products.
The industry also automated, lowering the demand for skilled meat cutters and packers and opening the door for a larger labor force of relatively unskilled workers.
In the old days, live pigs and cows were brought to feed lots outside big cities, slaughtered there and quickly rushed to butcher shops. With great advances in refrigerated trucks, the processing plants moved to rural areas of Kansas and Nebraska to be closer to the livestock. Then the prepared meat was trucked back to cities.
Relocating to the countryside in Iowa and Nebraska meant moving to right-to-work states and importing a new work force. Rural counties in Iowa and Nebraska have been losing their white populations for years.
The industry also consolidated. By the late 1990's four firms accounted for roughly half of all U.S. poultry and pork production and 80 percent of all beef production.
All of these changes combined to lower the salaries of meat workers and that contributed to the change in the color of the workers.
"Stable or declining real wages from meat-processing employment made it relatively less appealing than alternative occupations and careers for an increasingly well-educated native-born workforce," the USDA reported.
The economic professors reported that salaries peaked in 1980 at about $19 an hour and were down to $12 an hour by 1995.
In today's infant years of the 21st Century, as meat packing plants have moved to rural areas, Mexican immigrants are literally changing rural population trends on the Great Plains. Hispanic population growth actually stemmed overall population decline in more than 100 nonmetro counties, according to the USDA.
How do you cover this truly historic story? Jerry Perkins, who speaks Spanish fluently, recommends a few areas to look at:
---The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represents many meatpacking workers in Iowa.
---Many churches and social action groups have outreach programs for immigrant workers in meatpacking towns with large Hispanic populations.
--- Local businesses that cater to Hispanic workers are often owned by members of the community and I've found those business owners often make excellent sources within the community
--- Also, look for local real estate companies that cater to Hispanic homeowners. They know who's coming and going.
"It can be difficult to peel the layers of the onion of the immigration story and it takes a lot of old fashioned "shoe leather" reporting and source developing to crack the facade of the story," Perkins said, "but it can be very rewarding once you do."
Meanwhile the theme of the future is emerging in the elementary schools in the meatpacking towns. The names on school rosters are 40 percent to 50 percent Mexican. And growing.
