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I was lucky enough to sit down with Cornelia Mutel yesterday. Her descriptions of her life’s literary work and understanding of ecosystems was humbling.

I was also gifted a copy of “Tending Iowa’s Land” and can’t wait to dive into it.

I was on my way home last night from touring CAFOs all day. It was about 9 PM and somewhere on the road between Ames and Cedar Rapids on Hwy 30. I saw this huge red glow to the north. I jumped off the highway and chased the red dragon on dirt roads hoping I could find my way.

I managed to follow the glow to the exact field. Felt incredibly lucky. It was an amazing sight. The fire was on both sides of the gravel road but mostly burned out on the left side already…but that view to the right was WOW.

I grabbed my telephoto lens + tripod + Nikon and crossed my fingers for good luck. Then I lost my glasses. Have you ever tried to use your Nikon in the dark…and without your glasses? Good luck lol. Not a chance. Thank God another person pulled up next to me.

She had followed the glow all the way from Clutier. (So…maybe I was near Vining? I honestly have no idea. I wasn’t using a GPS or my phone) She got out her flashlight and helped me find my glasses. Totally saved the day.

A farmer in a side by side rolled up once the fire calmed and we chatted. He was burning some of his CRP land with a prescribed burn. It was a glorious sight and a memorable night to cap a very informative day for the Iowa Prairie Documentary Project.

I create documentary projects for one simple reason: it’s my way to make sense out of a very confusing world. Well, that and I want to make the world a better place for my kids and for everyone. Even if it’s only something I can do in small ways, it always feels worth the effort.

After doing this conservation doc work for the last 10 years I have learned a lot. Sometimes I have to write for one simple reason: it’s my way to make sense out of how complex the narrative is. That allows me to narrow things down, to figure out what the narrative arc for the movie should be.

Today I am writing because of money. I normally make my projects for free. It’s very rare that I have any other funds to work with besides my own paltry sums. Which is absurd.

Scenario: zero budget filmmaker tries to make an impactful movie for free about a polluting industry that has tens of millions of dollars in their greenwashing budgets. And I do this while working for a living.

There are reasons for working for “free”

-it means no donated funds with creative strings attached
-total creative freedom
-I don’t waste my time begging for $$ to make the movie when I should or could be creating the movie

The number of excellent movies that are not made because they don’t get fully funded would really surprise people. But there is also a supposition in the filmmaker world that if you don’t have a budget and don’t have the fancy mics, crew, expensive cameras, and can’t pay top dollar for sound and color grading…then you have no business making a movie. I saw this trend early on, in 2015 and I steered away from it. I have proven that you can make an impactful movie as an all volunteer effort.

So I began this movie with that same intention. About two months ago, a crazy thing happened. Someone representing a Foundation offered me a fairly large sum of money to help me make this movie. It was a game changer. I needed a fiscal sponsor though. I found one. Soon, the check was on the way. Suddenly I could schedule interviews without worrying about gas money or grocery money. I could rest easy knowing I could pay my rent and afford to work on the movie nearly full time. It was, in a word “everything”. Knowing the money was coming allowed me to relax and focus entirely on the creative without worrying about going broke.

A few days ago, through no fault of their own, the fiscal sponsor had to pull out of the agreement. It was totally understandable. Even though I cannot go into the details, I can say that we are all still on the best of terms. It was just one of those situations that can happen now and then. What it meant for me though is that I had retooled my entire approach to the film. I had let those helping me for free know that I was going to be able to pay them. I had lined up a lot of interviews and was making travel plans further afield that would help me tell a bigger story, that I never would have considered before without this financial offer.

Anyway…I am just sitting here realizing how it all hit me today. Feeling pretty stuck. Worried about how I will now afford the travel I have booked. And wondering how to pivot and scale back on everything.

Now I have these competing realities.

• The Foundation’s offer is still on the table but it means taking the time try to find a new fiscal sponsor so that the check can be accepted and put to good use.

• Spending time to find that fiscal sponsor could net zero results…and then I would have blown precious time that I need to spend on research, interviews, creative output.

Now that the weather is turning and now that the movie needs to be done by September 1st…it’s 100% GO time. I don’t have the time to spend on a possible lost cause.

I guess what I am realizing is that I have my answer. It’s really the process of elimination. I can’t do everything. I can’t do the full time job of chasing funds and the full time job of creating a video series + podcast series + making a feature length movie by September 1.

I just have to go through the difficult process of retooling what I can and cannot do, now that I am back to an all volunteer effort.

Everything will still happen. It will just happen differently. These things happen.

I will say though, that if anyone reading this knows of a non profit that might want to be a fiscal sponsor for this Iowa centric project, then let them know about my project.

I don’t have the time or go go juice to follow leads sent to me at this point. But if a non profit takes notice and wants to help then I’d love to hear from some…or just one right one!

Onwards and upwards, for the prairie. Time to get back to work. I have an interview with someone I have been trying to get into the same room with since August of 2025 that I need to jet off to…and in the next 1. 5 weeks I have 8 more interviews lined up. And I have my day job lol.

I am so damn busy lol.

I am in that phase of a project where everything IS the project. Here is a brief stream of consciousness writing about what it’s like to work on the Iowa Prairie Documentary Project…for about 10 minutes. 

I keep seeing the yellow summer airplane and a wet cloud of fungicide soaking a woman and her son. The pilot hit the button before he was over the correct corn field. No apologies. But someone did say “that stuff is harmless”. Then come the 18 wheelers later on in the season. The work crew is there. Before it can be believed by old timers they load the corn that’s planted corner to corner and off they go. The “farmer” hires everyone while he enjoys life in California. He doesn’t even know the slope of his land in Iowa. He hasn’t walked it in years or maybe ever. He’s a clean shoed landlord with renters. He doesn’t know a “side by side” from a golf cart. He doesn’t care that the valley creek got straight as a shotgun in 1880. He doesn’t care that it’s loaded with his paid for carcinogenic nitrates and tons of other chemicals and that it’s pointed downstream. 

He doesn’t think about the water that runs through drainage tiles like it’s in a hurry to push the cancer rates even higher. He just wants tall corn. 

After a windy day in Iowa City, a scientist tested dust off of a leaf and found signs of Atrazine. Look it up. It’s in the air you are breathing, miles and miles away from the nearest field. 

The corn and soybean seeds that go into the Iowa soil are not so much seeds as they are an amalgamation. Multiple layers, one after the other, manmade chemicals douse and soak every single seed. These chemicals, individually are known to be harmful to life. Who has done the testing for what happens when they are all combined and ingested? Nobody. 

The guy that wants to put CO2 pipelines all over the state, is already producing the same product in another country. It would mean that he is trying to convince everyone in Iowa that there is really hot market for what he is peddling…while he is creating the competition for the same market. It’s like an arms race and he can sell to both sides. He wins either way. Iowans will lose either way. 

Soon, I am going to interview someone in Iowa who has over 15 members of his family with cancer. If I read another report that claims our high cancer rates are due to eating bacon or drinking beer or “lifestyle choices”….instead of what humans are clearly doing to the air and water – I am going to lose my damn mind. 

I think about Oak trees all day long. About their branches and what the droop means. About the placement and the soil they grown in. On my daily walks I now have Oak trees that I say hello to. 

I think about land and ownership and indigenous people and journal entries from 1835 drift in and out like sun behind clouds. I think about starting the movie with the very first fur traders to come here and how that’s when it all started to change, that’s the point of origin for water we can’t trust and cancer and an entire state with wilderness areas small enough to walk through in less than an hour. 

I am reading journal entries that predate the Beaver Wars. Jesuits were a special kind of stupid. Let me show you a Bible while I am plotting your destruction?

I think about people who are trying to do the right thing by the land and I think you can recognize that it is the right thing, when they ask for no reward in return for its doing. That’s the rarest thing of all. And the opposite of that, is how we got into this whole damn mess to begin with.

Human beings taking and wanting more than they need, quite simply, is the reason Iowa is the USA’s most environmentally degraded state. How do I say all this in a ninety minute movie?

Data Centers. That has to be talked about.
The poisoned Plum Creek watershed, just southwest of the Cedar Rapids airport…Biosolids mixed with arsenic and mercury have been applied to the land repeatedly, who is stopping them? Beef from that land is raised and sold to Hyvee. I doubt anyone is doing testing on that meat. 

Every time I work on a project I run into an absolute truth: I realize I can’t tell the full truth. There are things that can’t be mentioned. There are people that know some pretty serious things and they tell them to me but they won’t on the record. Because if they do, they will lose their access to knowing what is really going on, which is worse than not knowing. 

I think about the way Big Ag companies support research related to prairie restoration, to prairie plants research. They funnel greenwashing PR money at big nonprofits that you would recognize the names of. If you ever wonder why these conservation orgs don’t come out with hard hitting pieces about what’s going on behind the curtains of Bayer Crop Science and other large companies—well there’s no need to wonder. But I think this green muzzle is worth knowing about. 

I think about sitting in a car parked outside of a pig CAFO last week and even with the engine running and wind blowing, I could hear what could only be described as screaming. There’s a difference between a pig oinking or squealing…and a half insane creature screaming from a life of drugged misery. And now I have heard that difference.

The company that is guilty of the largest chemical spill in Iowa’s history now has a lawsuit being levied against them. This is a good thing. How can I center this effort in the film?

Every thing happening with prairie restoration, restorative agriculture, the reversal (however small and mighty it may yet be) of the corn and soybean industry has been based on long learned efforts of so many Iowans that started this work decades ago. I have been so fortunate to have spent time with many of them already.

Wisdom, only seems to show up in well aged packages. Time makes a difference

I have been wrestling with how to explain how different my approach is with this movie. This early AM at 1:20 AM I finally jotted down how I see it. I just added the following to my About page on this site.

“Feature Length Documentary
The movie will premiere in Iowa in October of 2026. Run time will be around 90 minutes. I’ll be infusing all the things I have learned from the interviews over the course of an entire year into this movie. My approach to making the movie will differ a lot from my previous movies. In the past I have followed the classic conservation messaging formula:

• insightful interview with a subject matter expert
• evocative b-roll footage
• informative infographics
• repeat and close with a strong “call to action”

I have used that formula and it’s worked quite well. For this movie however, I am shaking things up. I am diving into this work with a more immersive and vulnerable storytelling approach. I feel that with how high the stakes are here in Iowa that a more creative and experimental methods are needed to help an audience really connect on a deeper level. For me it’s about crafting a story that helps people reconnect with what they’ve lost and to help them want it back. The movie is not yet titled.”

Saturday November 22, 2025…first post!!! Today this site was created…humble beginnings!

Main Trailer:

BTS Recording Sesh with the sound master mix dropped in: