River Cities Reader Podcast

Rochelle Arnold is a freelance journalist whose article, Don’t Kill the Dandelion Messenger, appears in the #1040 December issue of River Cities’ Reader.

Pursuant to her article, Arnold conducted phone interviews with Ed Thomas, Vice President of Government Affairs for the Fertilizer Institute; Monte Bottens, a sixth-generation farmer who lives with his wife, Robyn, in Cambridge, Illinois, and are both advocates of regenerative crop and animal farming and soil health; and Pat Miletich, a UFC Hall of Famer in mixed-martial arts and coach to thirteen world champions, who turned his lifelong fascination with the effect of nutrients upon the human body into a literal religion, a 508c ministry, called Soil Saviors — more on that presently.

In September 2025, TFI issued a news release that reads:

TFI Statement on Release of Second MAHA Report

Thomas’s org, The Fertilizer Institute, advocates regenerative farming practices which stress the importance of The Four Rs: The Right Fertilizer, The Right Place, The Right Time, and The Right Amount. In the absence of federal regulation on fertilizer, the FI believes it all the more important to educate farmers and non-farmers alike about the harm that certain accepted farming practices pose to the environment.

In the course of these interviews, you’re going to hear quite a bit about nitrate run-off, where the chemicals used in fertilizing crops wind up bleeding into our groundwater and surface waters. If someone offered you a cup full of fertilizer to quench your thirst, you would sensibly enough smack it out of that miscreant’s hand. However, the amount of runoff that does make it into the watershed might make you paranoid about the water you’ve poured yourself, and whether it has been put through your Brita filters enough times to get the bad stuff out. (Mental Note: There will never be enough times. You’re paranoid, remember.)

Thomas would also like to see certain misconceptions about fertilizer cleared up — for one, that fertilizers are entirely man-made, synthetic substances. As a matter of fact, there are nutrient-rich substances that occur naturally in the soil; and figuring out the balances would be a worthy goal of any research outfit that professes concern for the environment. So get to it already, ag-heads.

Bottens, who has spent much of his life studying the soil, has built up a store of direct knowledge on the subject that ag-orgs would do well to hear plain. Ag Solutions Network was one that listened; and both Bottens and the ag-docs have developed a combination of commercial/commodity fertilizers and biological and nutrition products. Bottens also lays out his insights on a fairly regular basis on his AgEmerge Podcast.

Back on the farm, the Bottens abide by their own five-point system of principles: Minimize disturbance; keep the soil covered at all times; maximize diversity; maintain a living root; and integrate livestock — in short, bring it all back to the land. The point of it all is not to squeeze every last bushel from the land that you can for maximum profit; that way lies disaster. Woody Guthrie wrote whole folk songs about why it’s a bad idea.

So you know, the corn the Bottens mill is big in Japan and Italy; the meat they raise can be purchased at the QC Farmers Market in Rock Island and through their own website, GratefulGraze.com. Bottens explains how the absence of fertilizers (and antibiotics, pesticides, dewormers, and insecticides) provides the food he provides to customers a salutary result, most importantly better tasting. You know the cliché “the proof is in the pudding”? There are vegan alternatives to classic pudding you might try out. But the cliché isn’t a cliché because it’s bonkers. Try out the products of the Bottens’ labors and taste for yourself.

Miletich, for his part, survived the blows of numerous opponents to co-found the Soil Saviors. Distilled to its essence, the Saviors’ ethos holds that organic matter needs to be fed back into the soil eventually — and that includes you, too, Scooter. If you can give a little more back at the end — say, by adding ninety essential elements and minerals with a diversity of non-GMO soil borne probiotics — then you’ve done at least that much right with your life.

Miletich and his comrades are also responsible for Cell Saviors, which offers users a fulvic-humic-acid-colloid-mineral extract for detoxification and reinvigoration. In the interest of science, and her own health, Arnold is taking one of their products. So far, so good.

Miletich’s fascination with the organic began back in his childhood, when he suffered from severe respiratory illnesses that limited his participation in sports. His skepticism about doctors seems to stem from their inability to diagnose what ailed him. He did his own research, concocted a medley of organic concentrated elements, and he overcame the debilitations to get into mixed-martial arts in the UFC.

That he might have been on to something cannot be denied: The proof was in the punching. His skepticism about medicine has led him to question some of the basic assumptions about illness theory, which he documents herein. As has been mentioned, he’s made a religion out of the tenets of organic recycling. Their beliefs might not sync up with your own dogmas. But hear him out.

Arnold heard Miletich out again when she and Reader publisher Todd McGreevy arranged a phone conference, which closes out the podcast without Bottens.

— Summary and analysis by Michael Helke. See his curation of important Iowa, Illinois and Quad Cities’ local news stories at QCAToday.com.

December 28, 2025 – Reader Publisher Todd McGreevy joins Jason Bermas for the weekly Deep in the Weeds while Making Sense of the Madness on December 28. Typically Jason is live Friday mornings with Aaron Dail on WQUD 107.7FM at 9am. This holiday week McGreevy joins Bermas for a one hour video broadcast you can watch here or listen to above in the player.

Topics include Automatic License Plate Readers and a new Iowa ACLU Report as well as Election Integrity and lack of transparency in the Scott County Auditor’s office, and much more.

December 16, 2025 original broadcast on WQUD 107.7 FM – River Cities’ Reader publisher Todd McGreevy and WQUD GM Aaron Dail indulge in their monthly audio tête-à-tête, this one concerning the December edition of the Reader. Dail gets right into it about his distrust of all things AI. Those who see the artistic benefits of AI — as a relatively new platform for art, is it awaiting its Stanley Kubrick? — might want to ask, Will the political consequence of AI necessarily lead us into the plot of a Stanley Kubrick film?

Kathleen McCarthy’s Impotent civiCUKS essay in the issue #1040 gets into the propagandistic uses of AI and the importance of engaging with social media with a skeptical point of view. Given that Elon Musk, who bought Twitter four years ago, is also one of the biggest, if not the biggest, weapons contractor to the US, perhaps we need something more thorough-going than skepticism. Perhaps we should think about becoming Zététiques. Perhaps the business of examining our world is a never-ending one, and Doubt is forever a provisional skepticism. Perhaps we need to think algorithmically. Perhaps we need to be algorithms. To know the ‘bots, one must become a ‘bot. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

What isn’t up for debate, what cannot be deferred to endless examination, is the detention in isolation of Tina Peters, a Gold Star mother and a former Election Official from Mesa County, Colorado. (In Iowa, we call them Auditors.) Peters should be praised as a heroine for having secured evidence of Colorado’s 2020 election irregularities under the stewardship of Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold. Peters chose not to participate in what Griswold called a “trusted build” protocol ordered by Secretary of State Jena Griswold, which would have entailed the erasure of the 2020 election databases. No examination here necessary: These databases would be purged outright. Sec Griswold wanted to suborn Peters into an unforgivable act. The least charitable reading of Peters is that she wanted to cover her own ass, by making a duplicate of the voting rolls to check against the update. The most charitable reading of Sec Griswold is that she could not abide Peters’s lack of trust in the Trusted Build. That’s where it ends. After that point, charity is completely out of the equation, for, in all cases, Sec Griswold has dug a hole straight to Hell and has sent for the furniture. Meanwhile, Peters sits in Ad-Seg, her conscience clear but her body dying (cancer).

Read McCarthy’s article in its entirety and you’ll find that that sensation you’re feeling is anger, and that it’s a legitimate response to some illegitimate practices we’re asked to countenance on a daily basis. Remember that feeling: It may come in handy later.

We transition, ever so slightly, to a topic that has a special hold on our hearts: A transcript of the speech given by Barbara Stein and Craig DeVrieze to induct Franklin “Whitey” Barnard Inducted into Iowa Golf Hall of Fame, held at the Echo Valley Country Club in Norwalk, Iowa, on 17 October 2025. When you consider the arc of Whitey’s life, you’re also getting a history lesson about golf in the Quad Cities: A Bettendorf kid keen on golf while trying to keep his head above the waterline of the Depression becomes a caddy, then a legit golfer, and finally the founder of the annual John Deere Classic Tournament, a PGA event that’s been going for 55 years and to date has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Whitey, who died in 2000, is special to us because he was unstoppable in pursuing his heart’s desire, and he never forgot there were others in the world in their own individual pursuits. Against his initial skepticism about the Reader’s viability, all the way back in 1993, he took a chance and bought some adverting to help the Reader become a realized desire.

Whitey was human in the best sense of the word — meaning, he wasn’t an algorithm. Algorithms might help a business, or a fundraiser, reach its goals. What it can’t do is figure out why the need exists for an enterprise in the first place.

So suck it, algorithms.

Rochelle Arnold contributed Don’t Kill the Dandelion Messenger, an analysis of how farmers can improve the quality of their yields, rather than allow the over-application of ammonia nitrate to bleed off a substantial amount of nitrogen (28%) and deprive the soil of the micro-organisms which help keep it healthy. Agriculture companies who claim they want to keep in line with the second iteration of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission’s report would do well to listen to local farmers, like Monte Bottens of Cambridge, Illinois, a sixth-generation farmer who adheres to Grateful Graze’s Five Soil Health Principles. Individual farmers don’t go into the family business expecting to contribute another Dust Bowl in their lifetimes. Big Ag businesses should keep that point in mind as well.

Finally, Dr David Hartsuch contributed What If Housing Were Free?: The Suppressed US So-Called Healthcare System and a Welcome Market-Driven Alternative, hoping to do his part in heading off at the pass societal trends toward socialism and proposing market solutions that don’t encourage physicians to think in terms of quantity of sick people against the quality of service. People don’t want agriculture companies to apply their algorithms to soil health, but they’re willing to accept their use in health care?

That doesn’t sound smart.

Original broadcast on WQUD 107.7 FM November 12, 2025 – River Cities’ Reader publisher Todd McGreevy and WQUD GM Aaron Dail bid Neil Young a happy eightieth birthday, extol Gov’t Mule’s cover of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs, and give big ups to the Reader’s promotion of Jason Bermas’s Deep in The Weeds: A Rough Cut — Bermas himself being a recurring feature on WQUD. (JB can also be heard on his podcast, Making Sense of the Madness with Jason Bermas.) McGreevy and Dail run through their disagreement about the influence of AI: Dail thinks it’s insidious all around, while McGreevy believes its application in the arts, particularly music, will be salutary (perhaps as long as musicians use AI to help figure out how their individual arrangements are going to sound, and not act as a replacement for their own creativity, by which point AI will be using other AI results for its search parameters and wind up producing an incestuous beast of tired clichés and banal sounds which no one will want to listen to, and the market will respond accordingly).

Dail sounds ready to start scrutinizing McGreevy’s human autonomy, but instead talks about his own anxieties about AI’s palpable impact on the economy, allowing himself to let McGreevy off the hook (for now). Then he segues to his appreciation of Rich Miller’s 27 October 2025 column (about the Illinois Federation of Teachers’ demand for $4.6 billion in funds that the state budget cannot disburse because they aren’t there). Dail believes Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to be little more than Jackie Chiles writ municipally (JC being the Johnny Cochrane pastiche portrayed by Phil Morris on Seinfeld — you’ll notice they share the same initials [touches nose]). Given the applause-seeking, content-free speeches Mayor Johnson has been giving over the past year, that conclusion has a solid basis in the real world.

Concerning the contents of the November edition of River Cities’ Reader, there is a transcript of the October 16, 2025 speech given by David K Clements at the Scott County Republican Party Reagan Dinner, which was a well-attended event, with Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate and Attorney General Brenna Bird at the head table with Clements as well as dozens of Republican legislators and candidates from all over Iowa in the 400+ audience. Clements’ speech, concerning how election integrity can be upheld, was a real speaking-truth-to-power moment. Clements made the 2023 documentary Let My People Go, a two-hour program that’s worth sitting still for.

Adorned by a lovely illustration by Ed Newman, Kathleen McCarthy’s If It Can Happen in Mesa County, Colorado, It Can Happen in Scott County, Iowa, which discusses the chain of custody of ballots cast and how some common-sense issues — ballots sent by mail, for example — seem to cause the counters to spit out their skulls in confusion. It’s especially egregious when, in Scott County, the average voter has no conception of the chain-of-custody-of-ballots policy — indeed, after a quarter-century of transparency, that voter isn’t even allowed to know how that chain is arranged or how the language spells it all out. It’s confidential; you wouldn’t understand; in fact, the more you know, the greater the chance that certain vectors within the process can be weaponized against it.

Really. This isn’t as complex a subject as certain officials would make it out to be. But treating it as if it were a row of cellular cultures under glass being used to track the life of an illness? That’s creating a layer of obfuscation that is designed to make the eyeballs of even a dedicated politico glaze over in incomprehension. Which would be simply ridiculous if the effects weren’t in service of some really craven perspectives. How can one figure out how the democratic process in a republican system even works if the gatekeepers act like Druids monitoring the safety of a bunch of rocks?

Among the less pressing matters in this edition is “The Story Has to Go on”: Fourth Wall Films’ The Last to Fall From Hero Street, November 8 at the Putnam Museum and Science Center by Jonathan Turner and Mike Schultz’s review of “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” the majestically ordinary biopic of New Jersey’s The Boss. Don’t get us wrong: Culture is dead important. But your future won’t be determined by whether or not anyone can make a biopic about Bruce Springsteen that doesn’t indulge in the sort of clichés that Jake Kasdan eviscerated so beautifully in the 2007 film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, will it? Of course not. (Aired 12 November 2025)

Dave Levora, Darren Pitra, and Mike Schulz talk film and holiday breaks — the latter meaning no show until the new year. Oh, and Rob Reiner is gone. Let us now praise famous men. . .

On the screen:

On their way:

“Ella McCay,” “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” and “Oh. What. Fun.”

Dave Levora, Darren Pitra, and Mike Schulz talk film and discuss Netflix’s potential acquisition of Warner Bros with something akin to dread.

In theaters:

Coming attractions:

“Hamnet,” “Jay Kelly,” “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Fackham Hall,” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2”

Dave Levora, Darren Pitra, and Mike Schulz have shook off the Thanksgiving turkey torpor and have reconvened in studio to discuss film with the level of poise, invention, and couthiness that we’ve come to expect from the trio.

Open for business:

Forthcoming:

“Wicked: For Good,” “Rental Family,” and “Train Dreams”

Dave Levora, Darren Pitra, and Mike Schulz prepare for next week’s holiday by going over the stuff out there, both in theaters and streaming. Anyone who watched Angus Wall’s Netflix doc on Eddie Murphy, Being Eddie, expecting earth-splitting, scandalous revelations that will make you rethink your whole conception of what it means to be Eddie Muprhy, clearly doesn’t know that celebrities like Eddie Murphy don’t sign deals with Netflix expecting their soiled undies to be paraded before the world. That’s something we all learn to come to grips with, eventually — no?

What’s up:

What will be up:

“The Running Man,” “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” “Keeper,” “Nouvelle Vague,” “Being Eddie,” and “The Perfect Neighbor”

Dave Levora, Darren Pitra, and Mike Schulz discuss film and ponder its mysteries — all for the cinematographically illiterate folk in the world. Job’s a good ‘un.

The reviewed:

The forthcoming:

“Predator: Badlands,” “Frankenstein,” “Nuremberg,” “Die My Love,” “Christy,” and “It Was Just an Accident”

Dave Levora, Darren Pitra, and Mike Schulz have a lot more films to catch than they’ve seen thus far. Frankenstein is already on Netflix, so you know.

What’s in theaters:

Forthcoming:

“Bugonia,” “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” “Hedda,” “Ballad of a Small Player,” and “KPop Demon Hunters”