Approximately 85% of Iowa was once tallgrass prairie. Big bluestem, switchgrass, Indian grass, compass plant. Root systems that went down ten to fifteen feet and built some of the deepest, richest topsoil on the planet. Grazed by tens of millions of bison, two million elk, and uncountable smaller herbivores, all ruminants, all cycling nutrients back into the ground every time they ate, walked, slept, or died. Today, 99.9% of Iowa's original prairie is gone. Less than 0.1% remains as intact ecosystem. By landscape transformation, Iowa is the most ecologically rewritten state in the United States. Approximately 74% of its land area is now row crop. 86% of that row crop is corn or soybeans. Mile after mile of two species, planted in straight lines, harvested with combines that cost more than the farmhouse, fed synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, sprayed with glyphosate, atrazine, and dicamba, drained through buried plastic tile to remove the water the prairie used to hold for free. The Iowan does not eat the corn. 40% of US corn becomes ethanol fuel. 36% becomes livestock feed. A further chunk becomes high-fructose corn syrup, which becomes Coca-Cola and Twinkies. A small fraction reaches a human plate as actual corn. The Iowan does not eat the soybean either. The soybean is crushed for oil, which becomes the cooking fat in almost every fast-food restaurant in America. The leftover meal feeds chickens and pigs. In 1950, Iowa had 206,000 farmers. In 2026, it has 85,000. The land has consolidated into the hands of fewer, larger operations. The small towns have hollowed out. Iowa, which sits on some of the finest soil ever inventoried by humans, now imports more than 90% of the food its residents actually eat. In March 2024, a valve at NEW Cooperative in Red Oak was left open over a weekend. 265,000 gallons of liquid nitrogen fertiliser drained into the East Nishnabotna River. The spill killed approximately 750,000 fish across 50 miles of river, all the way to the Missouri border. It is the fifth-largest fish kill in Iowa's recorded history. The valve was open for 48 hours. This is the system we have been told is feeding the world. What it is feeding, primarily, is itself. The corn feeds the ethanol plant and the feedlot. The soybean feeds the chicken house and the fryer. The system grows because it needs its own outputs to keep going. The bison would have done all of this for free. The bison would not have killed 750,000 fish. The bison would not have required a single bag of synthetic nitrogen. The bison would not have hollowed out a single town. The bison did this job for ten thousand years, on the same land, with no inputs, and produced, as a byproduct, the deepest topsoil on the continent. We replaced the bison with the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet, on its own, is starting to look like a poor trade.