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With intensifying attention, the big TV networks and national news desks are dispatching correspondents to report on a story that has surged to the apex of voter concerns in the American Heartland — the perilous conduct and unstable condition of industrial agriculture.

It’s a big change for national media, which typically confine their interest in events in the U.S. to stories coming out of just four places: Washington, D.C., Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. But this is an important campaign year, and for the first time since 300,000 farmers were forced into foreclosure during the financial crisis of the 1980s, agriculture could decide elections across the Midwest and Corn Belt states…and hence, the nation. 

In Iowa, candidates of both parties are talking about rising cancer incidence and industrial farm practices causing the nation’s most polluted water.

In Nebraska it’s imported beef, labor shortages caused by deportations, and rising costs. 

In Kansas, those same issues, along with the competition for water between agriculture and data centers, are hot topics in the race for governor. 

In fact, in every farm state at the center of the country high prices for diesel fuel and tariffs that wrecked export grain markets are dominating campaigns. 

Farm state Republicans warn that the fight for Senate control may be decided in the Heartland, where four seats in Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas are all in play for reasons linked to farming. Republican lawmakers say they are wary of a “farmageddon.” Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, told reporters that Trump “is in serious trouble in farm country.”

Though the data points about cancer, pollution, and rising expenses are new to national correspondents hitching rides in combines and doing standups in corn fields, an expanding corps of reporters and editors, working for much smaller regional and national news organizations, are on the frontlines – notably among them Circle of Blue – and have been reporting the myriad hazards of industrial agriculture for some time now.  

Like never before, nonprofit news desks, podcasts, and a number of commercial news operations, like the Minneapolis Tribune and The Gazette of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, are revealing the full measure of hazardous farm conduct.

“Right now, food issues, food system issues, are driving political narratives in ways we haven’t ever seen, or haven’t seen before in a long time,” Theodore Ross, editor-in-chief of Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN), told me. “If you’re looking at the races whether for governor or for the Senate in Iowa and Kansas and Nebraska, a lot of this stuff is turning on issues related to the food system. Whether it is harmful chemicals, whether it’s pollution in the water, or you know, the price of meat. All of those things are top-of-mind political narratives in ways that are pretty big.”

To some extent the perils of industrial farm and food production are an old story that episodically stirs journalists and writers to undertake penetrating work in the public interest. Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” in 1906 exposed the filthy conditions of meatpacking and led to the nation’s food safety laws. James Risser and the Des Moines Register won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for articles on soil erosion and water pollution from agriculture. Art Cullen won another with the Storm Lake Times in 2017 for editorials that challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa over nitrogen runoff and water pollution. 

In 1996 Melanie Sill, Pat Stith and Joby Warrick of the Raleigh News and Observer won the Pulitzer Prize for documenting the environmental and health risks of a torrent of manure produced in North Carolina’s hog industry.

Active Online News Desks
Never before though has agriculture’s largely unregulated discharges to water, its consequences to health, and how it depopulated rural communities been the subject of sustained coverage, principally by nonprofit news organizations. 

“Public awareness of industrial agriculture’s pollution, the toll on our health and our environment, has never been higher,” said Phoebe Trotter, communications manager for Food and Water Watch, the leading national environmental organization challenging farm pollution. “Journalism certainly has an important role to play in driving that public discourse. Another key driver is that industrial agriculture pollution is getting worse. So little has been done to address the course we’re on. So it only stands to reason that as these impacts become more visible, become more acute, media coverage will grow. We’re seeing that.”

Another platform for amplifying agriculture journalism is podcasts focusing on farm threats.  The space is rich in programs determined to reveal the underbelly of industrial agriculture. They include Reveal, The Center for Investigative Reporting’s documentary-style podcast that explores the connections between food production, agricultural chemicals, public health, and food policy. 

A Great Podcast
One podcast I especially like is Real Organic Podcast, which started during the 2020 pandemic and broadcasts weekly with new pods on Tuesdays. Its co-host is Linley Dixon, who farms organically near Durango, Colorado, and comes to safer food production and broadcasting with a Ph.D. in plant pathology and a master’s degree in organic farming systems. 

The hour-long episodes feature some of the most thoughtful and courageous people exposing the perils of industrial agriculture. Among them is Chuck Benbrook, an agriculture economist and expert on the toxicity of Roundup herbicide, and Austin Frerick, author of Barons – Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry (Island Press, 2024), an important exposé of how corporations evaded antitrust regulation to monopolize whole sectors of the food production system. Those companies now function with few restraints on their discharges to air and water, and thin limits on what they charge consumers. 

The Real Organic Podcast, in short, is one of the liveliest conversations out there about the dangers of contemporary farming and the safer organic alternative. 

“The reality is we are overproducing,” Dixon said in an interview. “It’s ridiculous. If we just grew food for people, we’d still have way too much food. Instead, we’re growing food for ethanol and food for confined livestock instead of putting them on pasture. Forty percent of our land is prairie. Get it back into native prairie grasses and get those animals land-grazed. That’s how you raise meat. You don’t grow corn and soy, and then use all this fossil fuel to ship it to animals in confinement. That’s just producing so much more methane. The animal hasn’t evolved to eat that. It’s just this messed up system.”

You bet. Those who’ve followed our Toxic Terrain reporting at Circle of Blue understand that mainstream agriculture is a rogue industrial enterprise financed with tens of billions of public dollars annually and operating with scant constraint within the laws it contorted for its own benefit. 

The consequence is that agriculture is the worst water polluter in the nation’s history. It’s one of the worst air polluters. It’s driven millions of people off the land, out of communities, and sickened or killed tens of thousands of Corn Belt residents. 

That story, developing for decades prior, is now one of the most significant U.S. scandals unfolding in the early decades of the 21st century. It’s prompting responses from political campaigns this year in the Heartland, and attracting skilled and persistent attention it merits from news desks and broadcast media. 

Make no mistake. Agriculture is encountering a reckoning unlike anything it has ever faced. In the era where attention matters, exposing the grievous practices of American agriculture will steadily push farming and food production to much safer ground.

Lead image: Ethanol plant in Aurora, Nebraska. Photo © J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

Circle of Blue's senior editor and chief correspondent based in Traverse City, Michigan. He has reported on the contest for energy, food, and water in the era of climate change from six continents. Contact
Keith Schneider