Adam Shriver is the host of the Canary in a Cornfield Podcast and Substack. He’s been writing and organizing around the connection between agriculture and public health in Iowa for the past five years.

First of all: much appreciation to Laura for letting me cross post my podcast here! You can find the Substack version here.

In this episode of Canary in a Cornfield, I speak with John McCracken, a reporter at Sentient Media, about the outlet’s nonprofit model and its focus on industrial agriculture and corporate accountability.

John explains Sentient’s Inside Iowa project and walks viewers through a new interactive map that plots roughly 11,000 medium-to-large factory farms across all 99 Iowa counties, estimates about 126 million animals and 170 billion pounds of manure annually, and links facilities to Iowa DNR records, violations, and nearby waterways and flood zones.

We discuss what the mapping data reveals about the scale and concentration of CAFOs, how the tool improves public access to hard-to-find information, recent in-depth Iowa polling conducted by Sentient, and a short documentary featuring Hardin County farmer Nick Schutt about Iowa’s cancer crisis.

Here’s the full episode:

Links from the episode:

Sentient Media Mapped Every Factory Farm in Iowa and Are Releasing the Data for Free

Sentient Survey of 1,000+ Iowans on Factory Farming

Iowa Built an Agricultural Powerhouse: What did it cost?