Adam Shriver is Director of Wellness and Nutrition at the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement. This essay was first published on his Substack newsletter, Canary in a Cornfield.

Iowa has a serious problem with nitrates in our drinking water that we’ve known about for decades, and these problems are only getting worse. Numerous studies—extremely high-quality studies—and detailed accounts of underlying biology all present a strong case that nitrates levels in drinking water lower than the current 10 mg/L NO3-N standard are linked to different types of cancer. We discussed that research in my interview with the Chair of a Denmark Ministry of the Environment Report, and the recent Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors in Iowa report covered those studies in detail.

For that reason, it’s extremely important for Iowans to have the best possible data measuring the amount of nitrate in our drinking water throughout the year.

Despite the urgency of the problem, the Iowa legislature cut off funding to the the University of Iowa’s IIHR Hydroscience and Engineering Water Quality Information System in 2024. The Walton Family Foundation agreed to step in and fund the network for two years, but they were very clear that this was only a temporary measure. In short, they were giving Iowa a couple years to get ourselves together.

What that means now: if the legislature does not restore funding in the state budget for fiscal year 2027, many of the sensors in the IIHR network may need to be removed or discontinued, putting Iowans at risk.

Adam Shriver is Director of Wellness and Nutrition at the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement. This essay was first published on his Substack newsletter, Canary in a Cornfield.

Earlier in the year, I wrote a response to some of Republican State Senator Ken Rozenboom’s comments in the Senate Agriculture Committee where he made some interesting claims based on his recent trip to the Netherlands. I pointed out that, contrary to his claims, nitrates have been a very serious issue in the Netherlands for decades and that the European Union had a different way of representing nitrate concentration in water, which was the only plausible explanation I could think of for his claim that nitrates levels in Amsterdam were far higher than what we saw in Iowa last summer.

On April 1, Rozenboom delivered some remarks on the Senate floor that indicated more confusion about the science around nitrates. (He may have been triggered by Democratic State Senator Janet Petersen’s comments the previous day; she asked Rozenboom if a bill allowing boats to display blue lights would be the water safety bill the Senate will consider this year.)

Rozenboom claimed the connection between nitrates and cancer is a “myth,” suggested Republicans had been making great progress on Iowa’s water problems since 2017, and said that if you are really worried about nitrates, you should look at the amount of nitrates in spinach.

You can find the full video of his comments and the responses at this link but I’ve pulled out the relevant sections. Here’s the first relevant clip:

Adam Shriver is Director of Wellness and Nutrition at the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement. This essay was first published on his Substack newsletter, Canary in a Cornfield.

Republican State Senator Ken Rozenboom spoke at the Iowa Senate Agriculture Committee’s first meeting of the year on January 13. I appreciate that he raised the topic of nitrates in drinking water. He also made some comments that deserve a response.

I clipped a video from Rozenboom’s opening remarks, which I’ll focus on here:

Adam Shriver is a concerned resident of Des Moines.

Laura Belin’s been doing an awesome job keeping track of the situation with Dr. Ian Andre Roberts, the former Des Moines Public Schools superintendent who was detained by ICE on September 26 and resigned four days later.

I’ve been seeing a lot of misinformation floating around on right-wing spaces about this, so I thought I’d note a few that need to be corrected.

Former Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf shared multiple false and/or misleading points during a recent Fox News appearance.