Jennifer Breon is a Senior Iowa Organizer with Food & Water Action, the political and lobbying sibling organization of the national environmental group Food & Water Watch. She is based in Iowa City.
Matt Hildreth is the Executive Director of Rural Organizing, a national organization working to rebuild a rural America that’s empowered, thriving, and equitable. Originally from eastern South Dakota, Matt is based in rural Washington State.
Industrial agriculture’s public health crisis is on full display in Iowa.
As residents of the state with the nation’s fastest-rising cancer rates, the most factory farms and highest waterway toxic nitrate concentrations, Iowans are desperate for change. If Iowa Democrats want to regain power this fall, they need to prove to voters that they are serious about solutions.
If they can get it right, new polling from Rural Organizing outlines the opportunity this issue offers Democratic candidates: Iowans are so fed up with high and rising cancer rates that fully 11 percent of Trump’s rural Iowa voters would consider voting for a different party over this issue. Indeed, recent Food & Water Action polling found that few issues are as concerning to Iowa voters as cancer rates and clean water.
Politics is so often a game played in the margins, with opportunities for flipping voters between parties few and far between. Democrats would be wise to seize this rare opening.
It’s not hard to see why this issue is so motivating to voters. The Iowa Cancer Registry estimates that nearly 22,000 Iowans will be diagnosed with cancer this year, and 6,400 will die from the disease. Iowa is at the top of the list of states when it comes to cancer rates, but is at the bottom when it comes to cancer care, especially in rural areas. Far too many Iowans share the experience of driving sick family members hours out of state or to urban hubs to receive adequate care.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of central Iowans faced a second straight season of water restrictions earlier this summer, and families are forced to wonder whether the water they drink will sicken them. Central Iowa Water Works’ nitrate removal system has been running for a record high number of days, even as new evidence suggests the nitrate levels it maintains may still not be safe. Statewide, cancer-linked nitrate violations in Iowa drinking water have doubled in the past year.
A majority (57 percent) of rural Iowans believe cancer is caused by pollution. They are right. While cancer causation is complex and multifactorial, the science is clear that environmental factors play a significant role. A recent study published just last month in the journal Environmental Research finds that cancer rates are 4-8 percent higher in areas with more factory farms. Factory farms produce waste laden with several toxins including nitrates, and without regulation to ensure otherwise, many of those cancer-linked toxins end up in drinking water.
Iowa’s cancerous water didn’t happen by mistake. Over decades, leaders of both political parties enabled factory farms’ takeover of rural Iowa by stripping nearly every regulation imaginable from the industry. Today, nearly 4,000 factory farms operate without any water pollution controls at all, and the state has no idea where these facilities’ 100+ billion pounds of waste goes each year. No one does–until it shows up in the water we drink.
Iowans are thirsty for change—and ready to elect candidates that will crack down on industry’s free pass to pollute. According to recent Food & Water Action polling, a vast majority of Iowans (79 percent) support mandatory requirements for industrial agriculture to reduce pollution. All that stands between Iowans, clean water, and healthy communities is the political will to take on Big Ag.
Strong bills, like the Clean Water for Iowa Act that would regulate factory farm pollution at the source have been introduced repeatedly by Democratic State Senator Art Staed and multiple co-sponsors, only to be denied hearings by the Republican majority. Voters will no longer accept this inaction.
Iowa’s clean water and cancer crises are obvious. So too is the political opportunity this fall: To regain power in Des Moines, Iowa Democrats need to get serious about clean water, cancer, and factory farm regulation now.
Top image is by Photo Spirit, available via Shutterstock.
4 Comments
Of course there's a ginormous direct connection between factory farms and Big Corn...
…but Big Corn deserves credit for a large percentage of the Iowa nitrate problem, especially in counties that have the most miles of drainage tile. Other volunteer nitrate testers have also noted that even small creeks that drain conventional cornfields, with no factory farm in the vicinity, can have eye-popping nitrate levels.
But if Food & Water Action has good reason to believe that it is more politically effective to focus on factory farms, then go for it. Yay for anything that will finally start to break the Iowa Farm Bureau’s iron grip on state water policies.
PrairieFan Wed 26 Aug 12:23 AM
Yes, Big Corn
PrairieFan bring up a solid point. The cancer issues are not the least bit limited to areas laden with CAFOs. 300 bu/A corn requires 3X the inputs of 100 bu/A corn. It’s just science. There is no indication corn yield are plateauing, so expect the problems to keep getting worse and worse as long as we maintain the status quo.
The Nutrient Reduction Tragedy and The Fertilizer to Faucet initiatives are Republican smokescreens designed to maintain the status quo.
MantenoLorax Wed 26 Aug 8:49 AM
Nutrient Reduction Tragedy is a great name for it (thank you, ManenoLorax)
I lived for years in the Rust Belt, and after the Clean Water Act passed, manufacturers were required to comply. They weren’t given the cheery option of just ignoring the Act and hiding behind whatever small number of manufacturers might choose to voluntarily reduce their pollution.
But that cheery option is what the majority of Iowa farmers and landowners have taken. That’s because they are free to take it, because farming is a business, because the conventional ag system discourages good conservation, and because, like the vast majority of us humans, the majority of Iowa farmers and landowners aren’t saints.
The result is that farm-conservation professionals, who are expected to get more water-protecting conservation on the ground, are stuck with a begging-and-bribing approach that has limited funding and gets understandably-limited results.
Here’s an excerpt from an email message in my box this week. As indicated below, just getting farmers and landowners into conversations about maybe possibly doing some conservation at some point in the future is (very justifiably, alas) considered a victory.
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In the webinar, “Replicable Farmer Outreach Approaches to Increase Conservation Practice Adoption,” [Jenny] Seifert will introduce two innovative approaches to engaging farmers on the topic of conservation practice adoption.
PrairieFan Wed 26 Aug 3:39 PM
The Clean Water Crowd Misunderstands the Policy, Politics
The clean water crowd, including these rural issues advocates are weak on the politics of the issue, of how the problem was created, as seen in there generalizations. (Read about it in chapter 1 of the Food and Water Watch book Foodopoly.) “Big Ag” and “Industrial Agriculture” are misleading terms. Even small organic farms use the same basic industrial machinery to raise corn, soybeans and other crops. What we really have had is “Colonized Agriculture,” corn that is colonized by agribusiness, with corn prices below full economic costs most of the time since 1981. This forced corn farmers to massively subsidize CAFOs (junk food, biofuels, etc.,) with most farms losing all value added livestock and poultry to CAFOs since 1950. Without livestock, they then lost all pasture and hay ground, sod crops, plus nurse crops for these like oats and barley. This penalization of agriculture devastated the Mississippi River Watershed, https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/mississippi-watershed-farm-reductions-pdf/288620466 but clean water people don’t mention it. Farmers also lost the huge corn acreage reductions that most of them supported, when the farm programs were ended in 1996. https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/farm-program-acreage-reductions-in-watersheds-pdf/288624225 These multi-trillion dollar national policy losses are, at the same time, losses of the Democratic Party New Deal style farm programs that most farmers have wanted. In ignoring this, in accepting this farm bill status quo, the clean water crowd is pro-CAFO, pro-corn/soybeans only. New Deal Democrats were much better. So were 1980s populist Democrats. So were 2020 Democrats Warren, Sanders, Harris, Inslee, and Biden. Choosing to be divided and conquered by pushing farmers away in this way is illiteracy, political naïveté. An effective strategy would end the colonization, not ignore it. It would be pro-farmer. An effective movement would teach this to its members. The political will is there, just not the political strategy.
Brad Wilson Fri 4 Sep 8:34 AM