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Expect the unexpected.
That’s the only certainty of planting season across the Corn Belt. Heat. Frost. Insects. Too much rain, or none at all. Now add the distress the Trump administration has cursed farmers with: Broken markets. Tariffs. Rising fuel costs.
Never, though, has the unexpected included this spring’s surprise: serious consideration of the harm from industrial crop and animal production. Farming’s mammoth water pollution and its consequences for public health are on the ballot in Iowa, where the election primary occurs tomorrow.
Candidates of both parties for governor and secretary of agriculture have included among their campaign priorities Iowa’s rising cancer incidence and the nitrate water contamination that may well be responsible. For the first time, the health and environmental damage from farming has moved from the margins to the center of political priorities in Iowa, an agriculture colossus that is the nation’s largest grain and pork producer.
What Candidates Are Saying
In the governor’s race, Rob Sand, the state auditor and Democratic candidate, has proposed aggressive water quality and public health initiatives to contend with Iowa’s second-in-the-nation cancer incidence. On April 30, Sand introduced new ideas to limit farm nutrient discharges, require better manure management practices, restore Iowa’s stream monitoring capacity, protect wetlands, and establish a task force to address cancer incidence. No candidate for governor in Iowa has ever supported such an anti-cancer, anti-pollution agenda. “Cancer doesn’t care who you vote for, doesn’t care what your politics are, doesn’t care where you live,” he tells audiences.
Chris Jones, a Ph.D. chemist, author, and former manager of Iowa’s stream monitoring network, is running as a Democrat for state agriculture secretary. He is even more strident in his critique of the harms caused by contemporary farm practices, and more aggressive in proposing solutions.
Jones promotes diversifying the state’s harvest away from corn and soybeans to aid farm incomes and reduce reliance on pesticides and fertilizer. He’s even called for the unthinkable in Iowa: ending the national ethanol production program. The break from orthodoxy is necessary, he says, because ethanol is an inefficient source of energy, consumes up to 60 percent of all the corn produced in Iowa, and causes 700 million pounds of nitrogen fertilizer annually to drain off fields. That nitrogen mixes with oxygen to form toxic nitrate, a suspected carcinogen, which flows directly into groundwater, lakes, and rivers. It’s even the primary cause of the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.
“There are 555 impaired rivers, 127 lakes, seven reservoirs, five wetlands; 80 percent of our monitored streams have been impaired for at least 10 years and 43 percent of monitored lakes have been impaired for at least 10 years,” Jones tells audiences. “One third of Iowa’s public water supplies are vulnerable to nitrate contamination; 7,000 private wells have tested above the safe drinking water level.”
Republicans, Too
That cancer and water pollution are campaign issues in Iowa, and candidates are openly criticizing agriculture, is unheard of. In Iowa, the third rail of politics is not denigrating Social Security, it’s speaking derogatorily about farming.
For years farm-related pollution and its effects on health were discussed, but ever so politely in academia and state agencies. The conversation was subtle, like the sound of bees pollinating spring blossoms. A persistent buzz in the branches but not nearly as powerful or as influential as the bellicose denials of causes and consequences issued by farm group leaders and the political allies of Iowa’s $40 billion agriculture sector.
That’s no longer the case. Even Republican candidates for governor are embracing anti-pollution and anti-cancer campaign messages. Zach Lahn, a farmer and businessman, asserts that Iowans “have been lied to for a long time by large agricultural companies about the safety of their products.” He’s also framed farm pollution in moral terms: “Having clean water is a pro-life issue. Cutting our cancer rates down is a pro-life issue,” Lahn says.
Brad Sherman, a former one-term state Republican representative campaigning for governor, said he was open to more stringent requirements for managing fertilizer and manure, framing it as a “life issue.” He states, “It is the job of government to protect life. So, yes, government has to get involved.”
Unmistakable Evidence of Serious Consequences
How is it that the health and environmental damage from farming moved from the margins to the center of Iowa’s political priorities? One ready answer is that the threat gets worse annually. Iowa, one of three states with rising rates of cancer, has the nation’s worst water pollution. Virtually every mile of streams and rivers, and almost every lake is polluted with toxic farm chemicals, bacteria, and nitrates draining from crop fields and spread by Iowa’s massive animal production facilities.
Last year Des Moines, the state’s largest city, restricted water use because the rivers that supply its drinking water were too contaminated by nitrates. A report in March by the Iowa Environmental Council and the Harkin Institute for Public Policy found that Iowa’s high use of pesticides and rampant nitrate pollution are environmental factors linked to the state’s rising cancer rate. Another study made public last year by Polk County, the state’s most populous, found that agriculture was responsible for almost all of the nitrates contaminating the waters of central Iowa.
“There is a huge public health threat,” John Norris, who as administrator of Polk County helped initiate the study, told The New Lede. “It affects business and the economy too. This report tells us exactly where the problem is coming from. Now it is up to us to have the courage to tackle it.”
The story of cancer and pollution are now reported aggressively by news groups in and outside Iowa. Public interest has been elevated by the agriculture industry’s penchant for trying to hide the evidence and drumming its prominent critics out of their jobs.
The Legislature, for instance, has been trying for three years to kill the statewide stream water quality monitoring network that reports levels of nitrate contamination.
Polk County Administrator Norris was forced out of his position in March 2025 months before the pollution study was made public. Similarly, Chris Jones was pushed out of his post at the University of Iowa in 2023 by conservative state senators close to agriculture. The lawmakers wanted to shut down Jones’s pointed assessments of agriculture’s irresponsible conduct that were posted regularly on his University of Iowa-sponsored blog.
Evidence of Harm
It’s essential to note that carcinogenicity stems from any number of environmental factors, and with the exception of a few confirmed sources – family history, radiation, smoking, exposure to the sun, and certain toxic chemicals – rarely can any one factor be held responsible.
But nitrates are gradually emerging as a prime suspect for Corn Belt cancers. Nitrates are suspected by the World Health Organization to cause cancer, and epidemiological studies by the National Cancer Institute support that premise. Moreover, state and federal monitoring of surface, ground, and drinking water across the Corn Belt show that levels of nitrates are unusually high and in most of the region are also not decreasing.
Summed up, millions of Americans are drinking water that is contaminated with potentially hazardous levels of nitrates. The most recent assessment of this scandal was completed by the Environmental Working Group, which has been tracing water quality for years. It says 62 million Americans drink water with elevated levels of nitrate. The worst contamination is found in the farm states at the center of the country.
Of the 14 states with the nation’s highest cancer incidence four are in the Corn Belt, according to the latest federal figures. In Nebraska, another farm colossus, the counties with high levels of nitrate water pollution have the highest juvenile cancer rates west of the Mississippi River.
The veil of silence that kept contaminated water and rising cancer rates off the political agenda has been pierced. The conversation could well spread to other polluted farm states after tomorrow’s primary. For now, at least, Iowa voters are seeking and getting answers.