Nick Schutt grew up as a free-range kid in the tiny central Iowa town of Williams in the early 1980s. His parents were small-scale farmers, but when the nation’s steepest agrarian crisis since the Great Depression hit, they worked jobs in town to make ends meet. Nick and his friends would often mount their bicycles in search of after-school adventure amid the corn and soybean fields. Sometimes, they’d find themselves playing behind the abandoned local co-op, the place where—until the recession had wrecked its business—the community’s farmers would store their corn and soybean harvests for sale, and buy their seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides. After rains, puddles would form back there, and the kids would splash around in them, catching tadpoles. “We didn’t have a bowling alley or anything for kids to play in, so we did what kids do,” he said. One image, though, from this otherwise-idyllic memory haunts him: the sight of “rotted out” Lasso cans, inundated by recent storms and leaking out, strewn about their makeshift playscape. Lasso is the brand name of a potent herbicide called alachlor, then widely used on the region’s landscape-dominating corn and soybean fields.
A lot has changed since then. For one, Schutt’s family members, himself included, have recorded 17 instances of cancer or mutated cells that could turn cancerous. His sister died in 2024 of “the same thing my mom and my aunt had”: kidney cancer. His brother and other sister are both cancer survivors, and his father has endured bouts with breast and prostate cancer. Schutt himself has cysts on both kidneys, which so far haven’t been found to be cancerous. The list goes on. Cancer can take years to develop, often from multiple factors, so no single case can directly be traced to any particular exposure to toxic chemicals. But alachlor turned out to be highly toxic, declared a “probable” carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1986 and ultimately banned in Canada and the European Union and, finally, effectively phased out in the United States (unfortunately, in favor of other likely to be carcinogenic herbicides).
While those rusty Lasso cans behind the co-op are seared into his memory, a symbol of the poison miasma he encountered in his youth in the global epicenter of chemical-intensive farming, Schutt now knows alachlor was hardly the only likely cancer-triggering agriculture-related compound he and his family encountered and still encounter—and not just in the surrounding landscape, but also in their own homes.
Three Million People—and Nearly 25 Million Hogs
Today, Iowa has the nation’s second-highest cancer rate—behind only cigarette-heavy Kentucky—and also its fastest-growing. Breast, prostate, and kidney cancers made up three of the top eight new cases recorded this year, according to the 2025 Iowa Cancer Registry. Like everyone in the modern world, Iowans live amid known cancer triggers that have nothing to do with proximity to industrial farming: alcohol consumption, exposure to microplastics and industrial chemicals, and poor sleep patterns. “But if you look from 50,000 feet at what’s going on in Iowa, two things stand out that really distinguish us as very much outliers from surrounding states,” said Richard Deming, director of the Cancer Center at MercyOne Hospital in Des Moines.
One is radon, a well-established source of lung cancer. Due to glacial activity hundreds of thousands of years ago, the state has the nation’s highest presence of the radioactive gas. That was nature’s doing. The second factor, however, was not. “The second thing is, you look at the amount of ag chemicals that are spread across our very fertile soil,” he said. “It took decades to prove conclusively that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer—and we probably will never have such a clear association with which of the thousands of chemicals cause which of the dozens of cancers.” Radon is a steady background presence, meaning it wouldn’t be expected to drive an increase in cancer rates. Iowa’s agricultural runoff, however, changes over time.
Another potential carcinogen that the young Schutt didn’t see memorably represented by an old can, but that was already ubiquitous, is nitrate. About two-thirds of Iowa’s entire landmass is devoted to just two crops: corn and soybeans. Growing them on such a grand scale requires titanic annual doses of herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides, and traces of them appear routinely in Iowans’ drinking water. It also requires vast quantities of nitrogen fertilizer. From 2011 to 2017, the state’s farmers apply around 1.2 billion pounds of synthetic nitrogen to feed their crops. To supplement it on the cheap, they add a staggering 110 billion pounds of nitrogen-rich manure from the state’s eye-popping concentration of industrial-scale hog facilities.
When he was a kid, Schutt said, “everyone had pigs.” Most farm families raised “20, 30 head of pigs—whatever fit on a horse trailer” to take to the abattoir at slaughter time. It was a niche business that provided an economic buffer to fluctuating corn and soybean prices. But the days of hog farming as “mortgage lifter” for family-scale enterprises has long passed, Schutt said. The numbers bear him out. In 1978, according to U.S. Census of Agriculture data, around 59,000 Iowa farms produced 14.8 million hogs. By 2022, the number of farms with hogs had plunged by more than 90 percent—while the total number of hogs raised swelled more than 60 percent. A single company, Iowa Select Farms, markets more than five million hogs annually. Its owners have a private jet emblazoned with the slogan WHEN PIGS FLY, reports Austin Frerick in his 2024 book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.
In Hardin County, where Schutt grew up and lives today, just 105 operations keep more than 860,000 hogs (the human population is under 17,000). Each operation stuffs around 5,000 hogs into metal structures just big enough to hold them when they reach slaughter weight, and many have several placed side by side. “I’ve got about 16 buildings within a five-mile radius of me,” Schutt said. In 2017, when I was on a reporting trip for my 2020 book Perilous Bounty, Schutt drove me through the country roads around his Hardin County home. The fecal stench that assaults your nose as you approach these operations is unforgettable.
A retired University of Iowa professor calculates that Iowa’s swine population of nearly 25 million generates as much solid waste as 83 million people (the state is home to 3.2 million people).
All told, Iowa’s annual hog population stands at nearly 25 million—more than any other state, and dwarfing its human population of just over three million. In his 2023 exposé of Iowa’s water woes, The Swine Republic, veteran water-quality researcher and former University of Iowa professor Chris Jones notes that Iowa occupies 1.5 percent of the U.S. landmass yet houses a third of the nation’s entire hog herd, and that a modern-breed hog generates three-and-a-half times the fecal matter of an average human being. He calculates that Iowa’s swine population generates as much solid waste as 83 million people (the state is home to 3.2 million people). When you add in cattle, turkeys, and hens (Iowa is also the nation’s number one egg producer), “these five species generate the waste equivalent to that produced by about 134 million people, which would place Iowa as the 10th most populous country in the world, right below Russia and right above Mexico.”
To maximize yield, farmers essentially overfertilize their crops, which take up at most around 40 percent of what’s applied. So, much of the annual tsunami of synthetic fertilizer and manure is prone to leaking away—even more so as climate change increases the intensity and volume of rain that pummels fields. So it’s no surprise that nitrate leaks from farm fields into waterways—and ultimately into Iowa residents’ faucets, whether through public utilities or private wells. When he was at the University of Iowa, Jones worked at the Institute of Hydraulic Research, where he ran a state-funded network of waterway sensors, drawing real-time measurements of nitrate content in 80 stream, river, and lake sites across Iowa.
In 2019, based on that data, he estimated the amount of nitrate entering Iowa’s waterways for every year since 1999. Based on five-year running annual averages—used to account for weather fluctuations—he found that the amount of nitrate in the monitored waterways doubled between 2003 and 2019. In a peer-reviewed paper published that same year, he and researchers from Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources and the Iowa Geological Survey looked at nine watersheds in western Iowa. They found the two most hog-intensive ones delivered on average twice the nitrate load to streams as the others—suggesting that the explosion of intensive hog farming has driven the surge in nitrates in water. More disturbing still, they found that, in those hogshit-besotted watersheds, farmers applied roughly the same amount of conventional nitrogen fertilizer that their peers in other areas of the state did. This suggests farmers are spreading manure on land mainly to get rid of it, not to fertilize crops.
The State Legislature Acts—and Makes It Worse
The Safe Drinking Water Act, passed in 1974, obligates public utilities to limit the presence in tap water of chemicals the EPA deems toxic. (Importantly, the act does nothing to protect people who rely on private wells. As many as 290,000 Iowans fall into this group, including Nick Schutt and most of his family.) In 1991, the EPA added nitrate to its list of regulated chemicals, limiting it to 10 parts per million in drinking water. At the time, the agency’s main concern was preventing a condition called blue-baby syndrome, formally known as methemoglobinemia. When we metabolize nitrate, it reacts with hemoglobin and reduces blood’s ability to carry oxygen—an effect that can essentially suffocate babies even at low levels. The agency set its limit to prevent blue-baby syndrome, and the effort has proved successful—no case of the condition has occurred in Iowa since the EPA imposed its limit.
Back then, little evidence linked exposure to the chemical with cancer, so the EPA did not consider it as a factor. Testing the long-term effects of routine low exposure to potentially toxic chemicals is notoriously difficult, because meaningful double-blind experiments—those in which neither patients nor researchers know which treatment the subjects are receiving—with human subjects given precisely controlled diets, chemical exposures, etc. would require decades and would be clearly unethical. You can’t risk poisoning people. So scientists have to mine data from long-term health-tracking studies of human populations exposed to a variety of chemicals in daily life. Such epidemiological research is much messier and less authoritative than the double-blind kind, a fact the pesticide industry has used to attack unwelcome evidence and minimize regulation. But it’s the best we have.
It was only two decades ago that epidemiological research began delivering disturbing results about nitrate. A 2007 study co-written by National Cancer Institute researcher Mary Ward tracked a population of Iowans who had lived in areas with drinking water laced with nitrate at a level between five and 10 parts per million (that is, under the EPA limit) for 10 or more years. They found that, for people who consumed above-average amounts of red meat or below-average amounts of vitamin C—both quite common scenarios—risk of kidney cancer nearly doubled. Similar studies co-written by Ward and other National Cancer Institute researchers found heightened risk of thyroid cancer (2010), ovarian cancer (2014), and bladder cancer (2015). Together, these studies suggest nitrate exposure heightens cancer risk at levels below the EPA’s limit.
Potential noncancer health harms turned up, too. A 2013 study by Texas A&M and University of Iowa researchers looked at birth outcomes for 3,300 mothers in Texas and Iowa who lived with significant rates of nitrates in their tap water against 1,121 mothers who encountered low rates. Their results: Exposure to water nitrate at less than six parts per million showed double the risk of birthing babies with spina bifida; boosted the risk of limb deficiencies by 1.8 times; and the risk of cleft palates by 1.9 times.
In 2017, the EPA’s Office of Water decided that enough new evidence of harm from routine low-level nitrate exposure had accumulated that it was time to reevaluate its 10 parts per million limit. It launched a formal science-evaluation process for doing so. Enter Donald Trump. His first administration unceremoniously halted the reevaluation in 2019. The Biden administration restarted it in 2023, and, formally, the process remains ongoing. But in July 2025, the new Trump administration did something more radical than just ending the review: It announced the elimination of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, which, among other functions, oversees evaluations of toxic chemical exposures. This action was purportedly part of an effort to cut $748.8 million from the agency’s budget. In response to a query about the nitrate review’s timetable, an EPA spokesperson would say only that the agency “is not forecasting a date for release” of the draft reassessment. Translation: Don’t hold your breath.
Similar inertia prevails in Iowa, where the state politicians, Republican and Democratic, are closely allied with the agrochemical industry. In 2013, the state’s Department of Natural Resources, in conjunction with the EPA, came out with a Nutrient Reduction Strategy, with the goal of slashing the amount of nitrate entering waterways from the state’s landscape by 45 percent. Iowa policymakers were responding to pressure from Mississippi River Delta states, because in addition to fouling local drinking-water supplies, Iowa’s nitrogen runoff ultimately drains into the Mississippi River and feeds an annual algae-driven aquatic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that in some years equals Connecticut in size. (A 2018 paper by Chris Jones and University of Iowa colleagues found that Iowa contributed on average 29 percent of the nitrate entering the gulf annually.) The Nutrient Reduction Strategy contained two howlers. One, the DNR declined to include a timeline for achieving the goal. And two, the program is completely voluntary. Rather than mandate actual reductions in nitrate runoff, the Nutrient Reduction Strategy offers farmers cash rewards to adopt practices that mitigate nitrogen runoff. Every year, the federal government delivers around $400 million to Iowa farmers for such conservation measures, and the state government adds around $25 million. These public investments have yielded at best comically slow progress. A 2022 report on the 10-year anniversary of the strategy’s launch by the Iowa Environmental Council calculated that a voluntary approach based on piecemeal conservation practices, at the pace established over its first decade, would require 22,325 years to meet the 45 percent reduction target. What’s the rush?
Despite the annual expenditures, the state is moving backward on nitrate pollution, said Jones. In his 2019 calculations, he found—based on running five-year annual averages—that nitrate leaving Iowa had risen 46 percent between 2013, when the Nutrient Reduction Strategy launched, and 2019. The amount has continued rising since, he told me. Farmers are implementing more practices that trap nitrogen and keep it out of waterways, like restored wetlands and planting offseason cover crops, he said. “But the problem with that approach is, at the same time you’re implementing this conservation program, we’re also doing more bad stuff,” like applying more fertilizer and manure. “We’re just canceling it out and then some.”
Rather than making any progress whatsoever on its pledge to slash nitrate entering waterways by 45 percent, Iowa’s government has managed to slash nitrate monitoring by 75 percent.
The punch line: In 2023, the deep-red Iowa legislature slashed the funding that keeps the University of Iowa’s network of waterway nitrate sensors humming—the network Jones managed until that year. The university’s Institute of Hydraulic Research kept it operational through this year but announced that budget considerations meant it will have to shutter 60 of the 80 sensors in 2026. Jones told me that when he was running it, the program cost around $400,000 annually to operate and maintain—a fraction of what the state pays out to farmers each year for conservation practices that haven’t moved the needle. Rather than making any progress whatsoever on its pledge to slash nitrate entering waterways by 45 percent, Iowa’s government has managed to slash nitrate monitoring by 75 percent.
Meanwhile, amid the state and federal regulatory gridlock, disturbing information continues to emerge. In a 2018 paper, the National Cancer Institute’s Mary Ward and other nitrate experts reviewed the epidemiological literature and reported that “the strongest evidence for a relationship between drinking water nitrate ingestion and adverse health outcomes” is for colorectal cancer, thyroid disease, and neural-tube birth defects in fetuses. They added: “Many studies observed increased risk with ingestion of water nitrate levels that were below regulatory limits.”
On the birth outcomes front, a 2021 study in California, whose ag-intensive regions have nitrate issues that rival Iowa’s, Stanford researchers looked at mothers who had given birth to two consecutive children, one in an area with high levels of drinking-water nitrate, and the other in a low-nitrate area. The result of this “within-mother retrospective cohort study”: Pregnancies in the high-nitrate areas showed heightened odds of preterm birth, at exposures lower than the federal drinking water standard of 10 parts per million. A 2025 study by a University of Colorado researcher, also analyzing pregnancies of California mothers, came to similar conclusions about early birth, and also evidence for a negative effect on birth weight.
A Cocktail of Pesticides
Nitrate isn’t the only potentially toxic agrochemical that leaches into Iowa’s waterways. To churn out the state’s gargantuan corn and soybean crops—which, again, cover two-thirds of the state’s landmass every year—farmers resort to a dizzying variety of pesticides to control weeds, insects, and fungus pests. During Nick Schutt’s childhood, it’s no wonder he saw cans of Lasso gathering rust behind the co-op—it was a blockbuster herbicide, used on 29.1 percent of the state’s soybean acres and 40 percent of corn acres in 1979, according to Iowa State University reports. A onetime University of Iowa survey of pesticides in the state’s public water systems over a yearlong period in 1986–1987 listed it among the “pesticides most commonly found,” along with atrazine and 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, more commonly known as 2,4-D.
While alachlor is no longer in use, the latter two very much are. Atrazine is now used on 65 percent of corn acres, while 2,4-D is now used on 65 percent of Iowa soybean acres. Both are suspected of being endocrine disrupters, or compounds that can interfere with human hormonal systems at very low doses. A 2024 study of pesticide applicators in Iowa and North Carolina by National Cancer Institute researchers found links between atrazine exposure and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, as well as cancers of the prostate, pharynx, and kidney. And 2,4-D and atrazine are far from the only two in heavy use. The usda counted no fewer than 11 different herbicides being applied to at least 10 percent of Iowa’s soybean acres in 2023.
The EPA regulates 2,4-D and atrazine chemicals under the Safe Drinking Water Act, forcing public utilities to keep them at low levels in drinking water (though, again, people reliant on private wells are on their own). But the agency regulates chemicals on an individual basis, not accounting for the fact that people encounter them in various combinations in tap water. It’s generally accepted that such low-level pesticide mixes can combine to cause more harm than the sum of their expected individual impacts—that is, a contaminant that may be considered harmless at a low concentration can become a health threat when mashed together with other low-level substances. But teasing out the “synergistic” or “cocktail” effects of specific combinations is even more difficult than quantifying the damage of individual ones. And so far, the EPA has chosen not to regulate chemicals based on their potential toxic synergy when they end up mixed together.
“I don’t know that we ever envisioned the scope, scale, intensity, and complexity of [farm chemical] mixtures that we use here in Iowa,” said David Cwiertny, director of the University of Iowa’s Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination. “Mixture toxicity is something we just don’t understand very well—and Iowa is one big mixture of chemicals.”
Cwiertny also pointed to a heavily used class of insecticides that the EPA does not regulate in drinking water, but whose use in corn and soybeans has exploded since they were introduced in the mid-1990s: synthetic chemicals designed to mimic nicotine, which kills insects by overstimulating their nervous system. The pesticide industry heavily markets these neonicotinoids, as they’re known, as seed treatments—that is, rather than spray them on crops to battle insect infestations, farmers buy seeds that have been coated with the chemicals, which then infuse the growing crop, killing bugs that try to feed on them. This prophylactic strategy often delivers little economic value to farmers, according to the EPA, Canadian researchers, and European researchers. Even so, a 2024 investigation by Civil Eats reporter Lisa Held found: “Nearly all commodity corn farmers receive seed coated with neonics at the start of each season; many cannot identify the chemical that’s in the coating and don’t even know if another option exists.”
Since the mid-2000s, evidence of neonicotinoids’ harm to pollinating insects and birds has accumulated. Newer research, including rodent studies from pesticide companies, suggests possible neurotoxic effects on mammals. And in Iowa water, they suffuse waterways and many aquifers. “We throw around the word ‘ubiquitous’ a lot in science, but in Iowa [neonics] really are,” Cwiertny told me. “We cannot find a water sample that doesn’t have at least a trace level—we even see them coming out of wastewater treatment plants.” He added: “We’re just really scrambling and beginning to understand health impacts” of “constant, low-level exposure to them.” We know even less about how they interact with nitrates and other agrochemicals in our bodies, he said.
Evidence of harm is emerging. In a 2024 study, Stanford researchers overlaid pesticide-use data from 1997 to 2006 with prostate cancer cases across the United States in 2011 to 2020, to account for the time it takes cancer to develop. Adjusting for demographic factors, they found strong associations with three herbicides as well as a neonic bug killer thiamethoxam, all of which are widely used in Iowa.
Even apart from Trump’s attack on the EPA, it’s difficult to imagine the agency taking action to limit neonics, no matter what the science says. As Annie Snider showed in a 2017 Politico piece, the EPA hasn’t added any chemicals to its regulated list under the Safe Drinking Water Act since 1996, even as “tens of thousands of new chemicals have come into use, with more than 85,000 now on the market.” The reason: severe pressure from the chemical industry.
The Bipartisan Logjam
Generally speaking, Iowans elect politicians who mostly defend the interests of Big Ag against attempts at regulation on behalf of public health. These days, MAGA-aligned Governor Kim Reynolds presides over comfortable GOP majorities in both chambers of the statehouse. The Republican Party has claimed the governor’s mansion since 2011, and it has enjoyed its current power trifecta since 2017—after the same election that saw Trump take the state, once a swing state that Barack Obama carried twice, by 10 percentage points. Reynolds can be counted on to toe the agribusiness line.
As for the state’s Democrats, they, too, have largely looked the other way while Big Ag erodes the state’s water quality (along with its precious blanket of topsoil, a related problem). Tom Vilsack is the walking embodiment of the twenty-first-century Iowa Democratic establishment. He served as governor from 1999 to 2007—the last two-term chief executive from his party—and then ran the Department of Agriculture for the full Obama and Biden administrations, a combined 12 years. Vilsack fervently supports Iowa’s pork and corn-ethanol industries. As recently as July 2025, he joined Reynolds in embracing the current all-carrots-no-sticks approach to cleaning up the state’s water—a rare point of agreement between hard-MAGA and conventional-Democratic political operators.
Iowa boasts a strong corps of clean-water advocates and NGOs, including the Iowa Environmental Council, the state’s Sierra Club chapter, and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, which have been organizing against industrial agriculture pollution for years. Such efforts have bent some statewide elections in progressive directions around farm issues. In 2008, Obama won both the state’s Democratic caucus and general election on a platform promising to “strictly monitor and regulate” pollution from large, concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, with fines for those who violate tough air- and water-quality standards. During the 2020 Iowa caucus, when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren together won 44.1 percent of delegates while vowing to rein in Big Ag, versus just 15.8 percent for Joe Biden, who tapped Vilsack to run his agribusiness-friendly campaign there. However, such thinking remains pretty rare in the Democratic ranks of the state legislature, said Laura Belin, a Des Moines–based journalist who covers state politics for Bleeding Heartland and her own Substack blog.
But in 2025, a couple of developments have shaken things up. The first is that, on May 30, Central Iowa Water Works—a conglomeration of utilities charged with delivering drinkable water to 600,000 people in the state’s largest metro area, Des Moines, and surrounding towns—asked residents to cut lawn watering by 25 percent. The reason wasn’t extreme heat or drought. The opposite, in fact. After a dry couple of years, central Iowa had experienced an extremely wet spring, and all of that rain had triggered a massive transfer of nitrate and other chemicals from agricultural soils to waterways. The utility’s two main water sources, the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers, were so full of nitrate that Des Moines’s nitrate-removal machine—among the world’s largest—could not keep up. Within less than two weeks, the reduction request rose to 50 percent. And by June 12, Central Iowa Water Works banned lawn watering outright. “CIWW has made the decision to enact the first-ever lawn watering ban to ensure that treatment facilities can produce enough water for lifeline essentials amid water supply challenges caused by high nitrate concentrations in raw source waters,” the agency declared. Running full blast, Des Moines’s denitrification system can cost around $16,000 daily.
In the summer of 2025, heavy nitrate pollution overwhelmed the system’s ability to deliver a full supply of water that met the EPA’s standard. In mid-June, the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers were both showing nitrate levels near 15 parts per million, Central Iowa Water Works reported in daily updates to its users. Levels fluctuated through the end of July, mostly above the limits. On July 30, with levels in both rivers just below the 10 parts per million threshold, the agency ended the watering ban and transitioned to allowing residents to water every other day.
Even though Central Iowa Water Works carefully avoided naming Iowa’s agriculture industry in its daily web updates, all the blunt information of high nitrate levels in source water sets the stage for another shake-up. On July 1, at the height of furor over the water ban, a water-quality report commissioned two years before by Polk County, which houses Des Moines, was released. This wasn’t a typical dull “County Issues Report” story. It dominated media home pages and radio reports because it broke through a veil of Iowa-nice silence about the state’s dire water situation to deliver straight talk. Its authors were a team of 16 scientists from across Iowa and the nation, including Larry Weber, Chris Jones’s former supervisor at the University of Iowa’s Institute of Hydraulic Research and his co-author on several water-quality papers.
Although agriculture players and their political allies often suggest that sources like municipal wastewater plants and golf courses contribute an outsize portion of Iowa’s nitrate load, the paper, titled “Currents of Change,” dispenses with that, flatly stating that 80 percent of it comes from agriculture. It details the great lengths and expense to which public water utilities must go to meet the 10 parts per million standard; teases out the growing body of literature linking chronic nitrate exposure to cancer and birth defects; and notes that “many of these additional health impacts arise at nitrate levels below current regulatory limits.” It also lays out the pesticide problem and the uncertainty around the health impacts, noting that “only a few of these chemicals have drinking water standards, while most have not been studied well enough to determine what appropriate standards should be.” It’s equally blunt about two other gaping water-quality issues affecting Iowans: lakes and streams made fetid by E. coli and other bacteria from manure runoff, as well as harmful algae blooms, also fed by manure and fertilizer runoff.
In my 2017 reporting trip with Schutt, I got a close-up look at the problem. He took me to Pine Lake State Park, which contains a lake he had fished and swum in as a kid. In our walk to the lake from the parking lot, a sign confronted us: “Concentrations of E. Coli Bacteria and/or Toxins From Blue-Green Algae Exceed Acceptable Guidelines for Recreational Use.” The sign urged visitors to keep kids and pets well clear of the water and advised boaters to avoid green patches. “Clean Fish Well and Discard Gut,” it added. I wrote: “When we got to the water, I saw what the fuss was about. In the distance, the opposite shore was inviting, with water gently glistening against a backdrop of gorgeous oaks. The shoreline, though, was empty of people, as was ours. The beach at our feet was grotesque: water the color of pea soup, the bright green broken up by buggy orange scum. A breeze carried a fetid, lightly fecal odor.”
More than 500 people attended a Polk County–sponsored August 9 event in Des Moines, where several of the authors presented their findings in plain English. The crowd cheered during the Q&A, when a journalist suggested that the Nutrient Reduction Strategy has failed, and asked whether regulation might be in order.
One section of the report that got little attention, at the meeting or in media coverage, was the one on Iowa’s economy. A simple pie chart on page 20 of the 227-page document breaks down Iowa’s gross domestic product by sector. Agriculture—by all serious accounts the main driver of the water crisis—makes up just 7 percent of GDP, tied with health care. The sectors that carry more economic weight are manufacturing (18 percent of GDP), finance and insurance (13 percent), government activities (10 percent), and real estate (9 percent). So while the intertwined corn, soybean, and hog industries constantly trumpet their economic importance to the state, in reality, they’re a bit of a paper tiger.
Moreover, as two decades of research from the experimental plots at Iowa State University’s Marsden farm show, simple diversification—adding more crops to the mix than just corn and soybeans, cutting down on livestock production, while also moving hogs and cattle out of confinements and onto pasture—could dramatically slash fertilizer use and nitrate leaching into water. But such a transformation would require regulation of runoff, not just toothless voluntary measures.
Will politicians take note? Republicans likely won’t anytime soon, said Laura Belin, the Des Moines–based political journalist. But “I think that there are enough people in the Democratic rank and file here in Iowa who want to hear candidates talking about water quality and the cancer rate,” she said. “I think it’s definitely growing in salience as an issue, and I think there’s very little downside to Democrats making it a bigger issue.” The problem, she said: Nine years of Republican domination of state politics have made other issues even more immediately urgent to the rank and file, like attacks on public education funding in the form of school vouchers, and a near-total ban on abortion. “But there are a lot of people who are worried about water quality,” she said. “I think the question is, does it rise to the top of voting issues for those people?” And for the state’s GOP base, many of whom may be getting worried about what’s coming out of their taps, shifting public funding to private religious schools and clamping down on reproductive freedom might still carry more weight than cleaning up the water.
Next year, the state will choose a new governor. The Republican side remains fragmented at this point, without a clear front-runner having emerged. That gives Democrats a slight opening. As of late August, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination is Rob Sand, whose job as state auditor makes him one of Iowa’s rare Democratic statewide elected officials. Sand was running as a moderate who will push back on Republican extremism, but not as an ag reformer or clean-water crusader. His main rival, longtime party political operator Julie Stauch, has put water at the center of her campaign, Belin said. In a July op-ed in The Cedar Rapids Gazette, Stauch called for a “moratorium on any new animal confinement construction until environmental protections are approved”; new “manure management plan requirements to align application amounts with crop needs”; and “policies that align fertilizer inputs with recommendations from Iowa State University.” But as of August Sand remained the solid front-runner for the nomination, Belin said: “It’s just hard when he has 40,000 Instagram followers and just has an enormous footprint—it’s difficult for anybody else to get any attention.”
So on his small patch of Hardin County land, Nick Schutt will have to wait before his own children and grandchildren can have a future free of extraordinary toxic exposures in his home state. He hopes to retire soon from his job helping to run a nearby landfill. He plans to shift his 40-acre share of the family land away from feed corn and soybeans, and toward stuff people can eat: apples, sweet corn, and chickens raised outside for meat.
He’d like to see his neighboring farmers, most of them working large-scale operations heavily subsidized by federal farm programs, make some changes, too. He offers a simple fix to Iowa’s ag pollution woes. He thinks such subsidies should be linked to assurances that beneficiaries aren’t overapplying chemicals that leach into water—and that they adopt less destructive farming practices. “I think it should be a requirement—if the government’s helping you out, you should be meeting them halfway,” he said.
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