America’s Big Agriculture Problem Is Getting Worse

We have been struggling with high nitrate levels in our source water. It could be farm runoff, fertilization, number of things. Nearly every Iowa county in the Hawkeye State is battling against manure being released into their water. 11.12, that is over the limit. Treatment plants across central Iowa are having a hard time treating it. We have what was at one time the largest nitrate removal facility in the world and unfortunately even that wasn't able to keep up with the level of nitrate that we're seeing in the rivers. We have beaches in Iowa, but they're closed. They have algae, they have bacteria. The lake, it's really showing up green right now. It's really sad. Nitrogen pollution is a big problem in Iowa. It's dangerous for people and for the environment, but there's also a whole other side of this story that's frankly more troubling. It's about the big and powerful vested interests who have really allowed the contamination on such a wide scale. I don't think it would be a surprise to anyone that there's pressure on legislators and government officials from special interest groups. The status quo in Iowa is working for some people and not working well at all for many others. I think in 07 we were made aware that our nitrate levels were higher than normal. Everybody is connected to a farmer. Everybody is connected with somebody who has had cancer. I'd say four or five people for sure. Everybody knows that amount who have died of cancer and it's becoming creepy. I'm Steve Pick. I'm in Remsen, Iowa. I'm 67 years old and I've been here most of my life. I was a city clerk and utilities for about 34 years. There has to be some correlation between nitrate levels and cancer. Iowa's cancer rate has been climbing in near lockstep with the rising use of nitrogen on farms for decades. Scientists though aren't sure if the correlation is causative or merely coincidental. What we do know is that age-adjusted Iowa has the nation's fastest growing and second highest cancer rate overall after Kentucky and is one of only two states in the U.S. where the cancer rate is still growing at all. Iowa used to be sort of this marshy swamp land and to make it as productive as we have we've essentially plumbed a lot of our fields so that we can get the water off the land and make the land more amenable to crop production. Iowa is really among the most heavily modified landscapes in the entire country. Starting with European settlers it was literally carved up into squares for individual farming families. With the endless green fields it's hard to see how farming in Iowa could have a negative impact. But if you look a little closer you realize it's like any other major industry driven by market forces entirely indifferent to ecological and human health. Most of what is grown goes into animal feed and ethanol for fuel. Corn yields have risen enormously in the last 50 years. To achieve that productivity the state's farmers spread nearly 4 billion pounds of nitrogen from fertilizer and manure on Iowa's 13 million acres of corn every year. Many in the scientific community are worried. This is essentially our like sample intake lab. So those are treated seeds. That's how we do agriculture these days. And that seed is colorful because it's painted with pesticides. We spray on there an insecticide, a fungicide, maybe an amaticide and this is something we spent a lot of time studying. These coatings once the seed goes in the ground if there's rainfall these do get washed away. Farmers just will buy what they're being sold. This is what their local representative will say is this is your seed for this year and they'll just use it. There are challenges when it comes to water quality and I think concerns over the challenges that might be there for public health as well. This is our well field here that supplies our water. We had one bad well. Well number eight was extremely high. To get the nitrate out of the water, Steve Pick organized the community of Remsen, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy almost 100 acres of farmland above the well field. They replaced the rows of corn and soybeans that were growing there with native prairie grasses and the deep roots of those grasses successfully absorbed much of the pollution. Steve Pick won a clean water award as nitrate levels in Remsen's wells plummeted about 40 percent in just a few years. But then it was all cut down. Fifteen thousand dollars worth of seed of planting all this and wildflowers to be just thrown away. To be sprayed. That was pretty disheartening. Starting in 2010 more conservative politicians came into power across the state and the project was effectively killed. Steve Pick was fired in 2012. A few years later in 2015 nitrate levels had shot back up. This is when the story gets really interesting. Iowa's Department of Natural Resources sent a scientist to investigate the rising levels of nitrate in Remsen. That investigator identified the Tentinger cattle feedlot on the edge of town as the source of the pollution. It comes from there down through this creek down that way between the ball fields and then weaves through town through Beck Park and eventually ends up in our well field. Emails show that the DNR's chief of compliance at the time Barbara Lynch closed the investigation to avoid political blowback. DNR records show residents repeatedly complained about the farm's manure flowing through town but state investigations were shut down at least twice. By 2017 Remsen's shallow wells were so filled with nitrate they had to actually be turned off. Remsen now has a 10 million dollar water plant to treat deeper wells and much higher water bills. Nobody really questions it at all they just live with it. Political interference like that is not unusual in Iowa. In fact what happened in Remsen was a microcosm of how agricultural interests wield extraordinary power over the Department of Natural Resources and other state institutions to protect the ag industry endangering public health. I'm Claire Ruby. I work for the Department of Environmental Science and Sustainability here at Drake. For 20 years before that I worked for the Department of Natural Resources of Iowa. In 2019 Claire Ruby co-wrote a research paper that was led by Chris Jones of the University of Iowa. The 2019 paper, oh boy. That report examined the waterways around Remsen in northwest Iowa where livestock feedlots have proliferated in recent decades alongside a leap in crop farming. Nitrate is a byproduct of both. What the paper showed was that there was a doubling of nutrient application in those watersheds leading to significantly higher nitrate concentrations in the surface water. It's completely unnecessary. Folks aren't just applying what is needed to grow those crops. I discovered that there was a meeting about this with a number of the powerful ag players. I looked through the door and I saw on the screen a PowerPoint that talked about activist scientists. And things really went downhill after that. At that meeting was a group called the Iowa Farm Bureau. Advocating for family farms on issues raised by local farmers the Iowa Farm Bureau fits the true definition of a grassroots movement. The Iowa Farm Bureau projects a wholesome image but essentially it's a lobbying machine for the big ag businesses in Iowa. These guys don't look exactly like the typical farmer. Established in 1918 the Iowa Farm Bureau includes all kinds of investors and bankers and lawyers and goes far beyond farmers. It has unusually deep pockets for an industry trade group as well thanks to corporate profits that it earns from an insurance subsidiary that's very large. The IFB is so influential that it was able to insert entire passages from its own publications without any citation into an early draft of the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy the state's voluntary blueprint for reducing nitrogen and phosphorus emissions. This regulation-free rulebook is what allows the agricultural industry to operate on a volume imperative. The system involves farmers who are incentivized to maximize harvests by huge demand for livestock feed and also the federal mandate to turn corn into ethanol for auto fuel. The federal government basically indemnifies them against losses by subsidizing crop insurance. I worked about 20 years for the Iowa Farm Bureau as the director of research and commodity services. I was quite involved with some of the discussions on the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy. It's really just how much nitrogen do we need to grow a bushel of corn. Right now in Iowa we do about one pound of nitrogen per bushel of corn. That's highly efficient. 1980 we were a pound and a half of nitrogen. Nitrogen is the most expensive input I have on this farm. I don't want to waste it. Now could it be done more efficiently? Theoretically yes. Applying blanket fertilizer has become the norm for modern farming systems but some believe there are better and cleaner ways to do it. Iowa State University agronomy professor Matt Liebman founded and ran the Marsden Farm project from 2002 until retiring just a couple years ago. If you look at what's down below, the oats here, you can see alfalfa plants that were planted at the same time as the oats. So corn likes to grow after alfalfa. And you can grow that corn with less fertilizer after alfalfa because roots can move more quickly through the soil to greater depth and explore the soil for more water and nutrients. Liebman proved that by rotating corn and soybean with alfalfa and grains, such as oats, farmers could actually earn more money while using 85% less nitrogen fertilizer. The principles and practices that you're seeing out here are well known for decades, for centuries. Most farmers have been moved toward a financial situation where they're trying to maximize their gross revenue. And if they find shortfalls in their profit because input costs are high or market values are low, the government, through your subsidized insurance, helps them maintain profitability. Because we don't assign a cost for externalities, for what happens downwind, downstream and downhill, the production economics favor the high use of inputs and the high use of farming practices that don't necessarily translate into good environmental and human health outcomes. Some folks will say regulation is the way, but regulation is a real dirty word here in Iowa. And, you know, folks don't want to have that conversation. I'm not blaming farmers. This is the system as it stands. This is what in the U.S. we call a food production system. I would argue the Farm Bureau system is the envy of the world relative to getting quality agricultural input and involvement of producers in ag production policy. And so when we talk about regulations, no, I'm a fan of set out voluntary guidelines and make sure this system rewards sound economics. The Iowa Farm Bureau has been campaigning for years to be sure that farmers do not have to follow strict regulations. That has allowed environmental policies to remain secondary to economics in the state. Lobbying records in the state legislature show the IFB has consistently opposed and tried to repeal any measures that could take up farmland for other purposes, such as solar panels and environmental restoration. While Big Ag prefers to maintain the status quo, new science suggests a rethink might be wise. There's been some concern that maybe that 10 milligrams per liter standard is not health protective enough. And there's been plenty of science that has started to find associations between nitrate and drinking water and chronic health impacts like bladder cancer, colorectal cancer, thyroid cancer, and birth defects. So here in Iowa, we've got communities that are routinely drinking levels of nitrate where people are wondering, is this truly safe, even though the EPA tells us it's below the standard. Back in 2010, the EPA acknowledged that there was new data around nitrate and chronic health effects that suggested that they needed a new health assessment. But here we are in 2025, and we have not completed that health assessment. Today, I'm pleased to make the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history. For years, federal environmental laws and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have really stood in as nature's last line of defense in Iowa and elsewhere. Now, though, the current administration wants to disband EPA's science and research division, the only branch that does these risk assessments, as President Trump seeks to slash EPA's budget by more than half. What happens downstream of us, this just kind of keeps continuing and continuing and continuing all the way to the Gulf, really, where you see the hypoxia zone. This is a whole interconnected system. This is not isolated to us. Why do the fish kills keep happening? It's death by a thousand cuts. We just keep doing this over and over. So it's not just a drinking water problem. It's an ecosystem problem. But we've gotten used to it. It starts to feel normal. Seems like the bigger the operations around here get, the more they're reliant on chemicals. I'd like to see a happy medium in there, but it seems like it's just going way too far out of whack. Looks pretty clear, but I still wouldn't drink it.