‘We don’t ride bicycles in Iowa’

It’s November, and I’m still riding my bicycle to work. Iowa Congressional hopeful Joe Mitchell boasted to the president recently that Iowans don’t ride bicycles. Huh. I guess that makes me a non-Iowan.

According to Joe, I should have been firing up my car every morning burning fossil fuel to drive seven blocks to my workplace.

If Joe and I ever met, I’m sure he’d look right through me, which is OK by me. I’m an oddity, to be sure, using my bike for transportation more than recreation. But he couldn’t look through the other 900,000 Iowans who enjoy our 2,000 miles of bike trails.

Besides that, Joe must have been living under a rock all his life. Has he never heard of RAGBRAI? This year the Register’s Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa hosted 20,000 people from every U.S. state and 20 countries.

Mitchell crowed that real Iowans ride Harley-Davidsons. I’m glad Pete Hegseth didn’t weigh in because he would have said something like, “Step aside, Pipsqueak, and let a real man talk. A Harley is a fine thing, but for maximum lethality on the highway, only a Triumph Rocket 3 will do. And notice, that the word Triumph is almost the same as Trump.  And the word ‘rocket’ well, I ordered rockets to bomb Iran. Therefore, it’s ordained by God that I ride a Triumph Rocket 3.”

Harleys and Triumphs aside, I really shouldn’t be riding my bike this late in the year. Forty years ago, riding a bike in November would have been a fool’s errand.

In many a past year, we would have had snow by now or if the snow had temporarily come and gone, there would be ice. Or it would be too frickin’ cold.

Forty years ago, there were no fat tire bikes to make people invincible in the winter elements. We parked our bikes until at least March.

The fact that I rode my bike every month in 2025 and I may be able to do so again this year is nice for me, but it is not nice for the ecosystem.

Climate deniers snort that things are different but anyone who pays attention to growing zones knows that the warmth is creeping northward. Iowa’s northern tier counties used to be Growing Zone 4 with average winter lows ranging from -30 to -20. The rest of the state was solidly Zone 5 (-20 to -10).

Based on data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), those northern tiers have now joined Zone 5, while the southern tiers of Iowa have warmed to Zone 6, with average winter lows ranging from -10 to 0.

We’re warming up, and while I welcome fewer snot-freezing days that make me hate living in Iowa, our agriculture, corn yields in particular, will suffer.

In 2022, the Environmental Defense Fund reported that warmer temperatures enhance an earlier and longer growing season, which sounds great, right? But more days of extremely high temperatures would threaten yields. And we’re seeing more days of extremely high temps. The report expects that by “2030, corn yields in Iowa will be 5 to 25 percent lower than where they would be without climate change.”

Armen Kemanian, associate professor of production systems and modeling in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State said, “It doesn’t mean that Iowa will stop producing crops, but it might mean that Iowa farmers adapt to a warmer climate producing two crops in a year or a different mix of crops instead of the dominant corn-soybean rotation. The changes are likely to be gradual, and farmers and the supply chain should be able to adapt. But things will change.”

Journalist Barry Piatt regularly reminds readers on his Substack column that it’s been three years and counting since a Farm Bill has passed. Piatt regularly calls out Iowa’s congresspeople Grassley, Ernst, Nunn and Feenstra as the “Can’t Do Caucus.”

He’s not wrong. If agriculture must adapt to changing conditions, farmers will need government support to find the best solutions. A good government that cares about its people by responding to climate change.

You may ask what this has to do with bicycles and Harley-Davidsons and Joe Mitchell. Some might say, “Not much,” but if you believe that everything is connected, Joe Mitchell’s toss-off line isn’t just a toady revealing his thirst for power.

That thirst for power is what signs deals for AI data centers before the public can weigh in. That thirst for power is what chants “drill, baby, drill.” That thirst for power is what seeks to mine “clean coal” and to denigrate wind and solar power and electric cars.

If you don’t believe that riding a bike to work in the winter isn’t a harbinger of climate change, then you might want to pay closer attention. That woman might not know beans about growing corn, but she knows something is not right.

Joan Zwagerman does not own a Harley or a fat tire bike.