nitrates

May 7, 2024

An Iowa farm county seeks answers amid cancer rates 50% higher than national average

By Keith Schneider

EMMETSBURG, IOWA –Raised in rural Iowa, 71-year-old Maureen Reeves Horsley once considered her tiny hometown in the northwest part of the state to be a blessed space. She recalls a time when the streams here ran clean and the lake water was clear.

The family farm where Horsley grew up was one of more than 1,200 farms in Palo Alto County in 1970. In her memory, the county’s 13,000 residents enjoyed a thriving agricultural-based economy and close-knit neighbors. Cows grazed in verdant pastures. And seemingly endless acres of corn marched to the horizon.

“We had good crops, corn and soybeans,” Horsley said of her family’s farm along the West Fork of the Des Moines River. “You could make it on a small amount of farmland. You felt safe. It was a good life.”

Two generations later Emmetsburg and Palo Alto County have been radically transformed into a place where many residents worry that the farms that have sustained their livelihoods are also the source of the health problems that have plagued so many families.

Horsley, a certified nurse practitioner who still lives in the county, is among many Iowa residents who ask whether the farms that make up the lifeblood of Iowa’s economy have become a source of disease and death due to the toxic chemicals and other pollutants indelibly linked to modern agricultural practices.

“We drank the water on our farm,” Horsley said in an interview. “My sister had breast cancer. She was only 27 when she died. She grew up here. My other sister had uterine cancer. As a nurse practitioner I’m aware of five people now with pancreatic cancer. I know 20 people who have other cancers or died of cancer here. Look at the obituaries in our newspaper. Everybody is aware this is going on.”

April 17, 2024

EPA called to address “long-ignored health crisis” in Iowa drinking water

By Carey Gillam

US regulators must take immediate action to address a “long-ignored health crisis” stemming from dangerously contaminated drinking water in Iowa, according to a legal petition filed by environmental and health advocacy groups this week.

The Iowa Environmental Council (IEC) and 12 other organizations are calling for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take a series of steps to reduce harmful nitrate pollution found in water supplies in Northeast Iowa.

The petition highlights the fact that for many years, nitrate concentrations found in thousands of private wells and some public water sources have exceeded the federal limit of 10 milligrams per liter for drinking water.

State agencies have documented the contamination, but have “failed to do what is needed to correct the pervasive threat to human health,” the petition states.

“For decades, Northeast Iowa residents have been exposed to dangerous levels of nitrate contaminated water,” Food & Water Watch attorney Dani Replogle said in a press release. “As the state reckons with high cancer levels and ongoing pollution regulation rollbacks, federal action is needed to safeguard the right to clean water. EPA must exercise emergency authority to hold polluters accountable and deliver safe drinking water in Iowa.”

Food & Water Watch is among the groups joining IEC in its petition. Others include the Environmental Working Group, the Center for Food Safety, the Environmental Law & Policy Center, and several state organizations.

All signs indicate that “dangerous contamination levels will continue or worsen, absent EPA action,” the petition states.

Farm operations are largely to blame for the contamination, both from the runoff of fertilizer applied to fields of corn and other crops, and the runoff of liquified manure generated by large livestock operations that is also often spread on farm fields. The runoff carries nitrates and phosphorus into surface and groundwaters, and ultimately drinking water.

Iowa is one of the nation’s largest farm states for crops and livestock, and Northeast Iowa is particularly vulnerable to farm pollutants because of its “karst” terrain, which features porous limestone that allows surface pollutants to more quickly move into groundwater. All of the drinking water in the karst region of northeast Iowa depends on groundwater aquifers.

Despite these facts, only a small fraction of private wells are tested regularly for nitrates, which are known to cause health problems at high levels, especially for infants. Cancer is a specific concern with nitrate exposure. Still, more than 1,200 wells in the 12-county karst region tested above the federal threshold for safety from 2016 to 2023, the petition states.

April 15, 2024

“It’s getting worse” – US failing to stem tide of harmful farm pollutants

By Keith Schneider

VENICE, LA. Kindra Arnesen is a 46-year-old commercial fishing boat operator who has spent most of her life among the pelicans and bayous of southern Louisiana, near the juncture where the 2,350-mile-long Mississippi River ends at the Gulf of Mexico.

Clark Porter is a 62-year-old farmer who lives in north-central Iowa where he spends part of his day working as an environmental specialist for the state and the other part raising corn and soybeans on hundreds of acres that his family has owned for over a century.

Though they’ve never met, and live 1,100 miles apart, Arnesen and Porter share a troubling kinship – both of their communities are tied to a deepening water pollution crisis that is fouling the environment and putting public health in peril across multiple US states.

Arnesen’s home lies near an oxygen-depleted expanse of the northern Gulf known as the “dead zone,” where dying algae blooms triggered by contaminants flowing out of the Mississippi River choke off oxygen, suffocating shrimp and other marine life.

Porter’s farm is positioned at the center of the Upper Mississippi River Basin where streams and other surface waters saturated with farm wastes flood into the big river, and contaminated groundwater permeates drinking water wells. Cancer incidence in Iowa is among the nation’s highest, and is rising.

The culprit at the center of it all is a colossal tide of fertilizer and animal manure that runs off fields in Iowa and other farm states to find its way into the Mississippi River. The same agricultural pollution problems are plaguing other iconic US waterways, including Chesapeake Bay and Lake Erie.

US farmers use more fertilizer and spread more manure than in most other countries, accounting for roughly 10% of global fertilizer use, behind China and India. But while the nutrients contained in animal manure and fertilizer are known to nourish crop growth, the resulting nitrogen and phosphorous that end up in waterways are known to create severe health problems for people.

A grand government plan to address the problem has cost taxpayers billions of dollars with minimal results so far, and nowhere is the problem more pronounced than in the Mississippi River Basin.

The reasons for the persistent pollution problem are multi-fold, including strong industry opposition to regulations to control the farm contaminants, and a perverse system in which some government programs incentivize farming practices that add to the pollution even as other government programs try to induce farmers to reduce the pollution.

“You’re talking about systemic dysfunction,” said Matt Liebman, professor emeritus of agronomy and sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University.

A typical pen format for swine in many Iowa animal feeding operations

March 4, 2024

New report sparks questions and controversy over possible causes for Iowa “cancer crisis”

By Keith Schneider

Amid increasing scrutiny of a potential link between Iowa farm chemicals and cancer, a new report is generating controversy as it blames rising cancer rates not on the toxins used widely throughout the state, but on something else entirely: binge alcohol consumption.

The Iowa Cancer Registry, a health research group housed at the University of Iowa, reported on February 20 that Iowa has the second-highest and fastest-rising incidence of cancer among all states. An estimated 21,000 new cancer cases are expected to develop this year and 6,100 Iowans will die from cancer, Iowa Cancer Registry Director Mary Charlton said in announcing the new report. Iowa, she said, has the highest rate of binge drinking in the Midwest with 22% of residents reporting binge drinking, more than the national average of 17%. Overall, Iowa has the 4th highest incidence of alcohol-related cancers in the US, according to the report.

“Alcohol is a known carcinogen and a risk factor for several cancers including oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, rectum, liver, and female breast cancers,” Charlton said in a news conference.

The assessment has drawn questions and sparked doubts, however, from state leaders and health and environment researchers who have been calling for a probe into just how much the state’s agricultural industry may be contributing to the spread of disease.

“Is alcohol responsible for the increase in cancer incidence here since 2014? I personally doubt that,” said James Merchant, a retired professor of occupational and environmental health, and former dean of the University of Iowa College of Public Health.

“What needs to be looked at are things that are probable or possible carcinogens that have increased beginning about 1990, because of the well-recognized latency of environmental cancers,” Merchants said. “Those carcinogens associated with industrial agriculture are the ones that really need to be looked at very closely.”

nitrates and phosphorus by keith schneider

January 31, 2024

Cancer in the corn belt sparks actions to fight farm chemical contamination

By Keith Schneider

When directors of the public water utility in Des Moines, Iowa, went to court in 2015 to try to stop toxic farm nutrients from contaminating the city’s drinking water, they knew the federal lawsuit they filed would be seen as not just a desperate step to protect public health, but also a brazen act of defiance that would provoke a ferocious response from Iowa’s powerful farm and political leadership.

As they anticipated, a cohort of agricultural interests joined then-Gov. Terry Branstad in beating back the lawsuit, which Branstad declared an act of “war on rural Iowa.”

Des Moines Water Works alleged that drainage districts in three Iowa counties had polluted the Raccoon River with nitrates, forcing costly efforts by Des Moines to render the polluted water safe for drinking. A The case was dismissed in 2017 after a court ruled that Iowa law immunizes drainage districts from damage claims.

It was the last time a government entity in Iowa or any other Corn Belt state made a focused attempt to reduce human exposure to suspected cancer-causing commercial fertilizers and a flood of livestock manure that routinely drains from farm fields into groundwater, streams, and rivers.

Until now.

Prompted by compelling research showing that cancer-related diseases and deaths are climbing as contamination from common agricultural chemicals and manure increases in key farm states, lawmakers and health officials in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska are pursuing an array of new strategies aimed at reducing the risks to human health presented by the ongoing farm-related contamination.

A top concern for lawmakers and health professionals in the three states is reducing exposure to nitrates, which form when nitrogen from fertilizer and manure combine with oxygen. Babies can suffer severe health problems when consuming nitrates in drinking water, and a growing body of literature indicates potential associations that include an increased risk of cancer.

“It’s pretty obvious that in the areas where levels of nitrates and other agrichemicals in water are higher, you get more pediatric cancers and birth defects,” said Eleanor Rogan, chair of the Department of Environmental, Agricultural, and Occupational Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. “So that sort of tells you maybe you should do something about this and get the levels down.”

December 15, 2023

“We can’t sit back” – Amid climbing cancer rates, Iowa health officials eye farm chemicals

Faced with a startlingly high cancer rate in the key US farm state of Iowa, public health leaders are taking the politically precarious step of acknowledging that preventing disease necessitates cutting exposure to potentially cancer-causing chemicals, including those used in agriculture.

In a departure from other state cancer prevention programs, which rarely address environmental risk factors for cancer other than radon, a known cause of lung cancer, Iowa is working to better understand and make the case for limiting exposure to pesticides, commercial fertilizer, and animal manure used and generated by Iowa agriculture, among other environmental contaminants.

“These broader array of environmental risk factors are absolutely there for cancer. But they’re not paid attention to in state cancer control plans,” said Molly Jacobs, an epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts, who is working with Iowa health authorities. “It’s quite unique that Iowa has addressed this as a priority in their plan. I applaud Iowa for taking on this task of thinking much broader and bigger, and changing this paradigm.”

The work to address environmental factors to reduce cancer cases began earlier this year and is being undertaken by the Iowa Cancer Consortium. It’s a 21-year-old, 650-member coalition of public health professionals, researchers, and health providers focused on controlling cancer. The consortium is led by Dr. Mary Charlton, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa College of Public Health who also is research director of the Iowa Cancer Registry, which collects cancer data on Iowa citizens.

The consortium has launched an Environmental Task Force and a five-year plan for cutting public exposure to “environmental carcinogens.”

Farmers, agricultural executives, and state lawmakers have spent decades resisting any changes in farm practices that reduce the use of chemicals and nutrients, saying the inputs are needed to ensure ample food production.

But public health advocates say evidence tying the farm pollutants to disease is too strong to deny.

“We can’t sit back and say, ‘Wow. Somebody may not like this.’” said Kamyar Enshayan, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa. “Knowing what we do know, it’s just prudent that we support practices and systems that require significantly less fertilizer and pesticides.”

November 8, 2023

US regulators order Minnesota to clean up nitrate contaminated water

By Keith Schneider

In recognition of pervasive farm-related water contamination, federal regulators have ordered three Minnesota state agencies to address “imminent and substantial endangerment to the health” of thousands of residents who are being exposed to high levels of nitrate contamination in their drinking water.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered state officials to urgently address a nitrate-contaminated drinking water crisis threatening the karst region in southeastern Minnesota and provide safe, alternative drinking water for impacted residents.

The EPA directive, which was issued last week, comes in response to a petition filed last spring by the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA) and ten other groups calling on the agency to investigate. The action also comes as federal and state authorities in Corn Belt states are expressing growing concerns about threats posed by farm-related water pollution.

“The feds are interested in human health,” said Jeff Broberg, director of the Minnesota Well Owners Organization, an advocacy group. “That’s been the missing link in considering the hazards of nitrate pollution.”

Nitrates form when nitrogen from commercial fertilizer and animal manure are exposed to oxygen. Nitrate exposure has been linked to a range of health problems, including heart and lung problems and certain cancers. Nitrates are known to be particularly dangerous for babies.

The EPA demands for action on nitrate pollution came in a letter to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, the Minnesota Department of Health, and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. In its letter, the EPA said the state must stringently regulate manure management at large livestock operations, a primary source of the contamination. Crop and livestock production accounts for roughly 70 percent of the state’s nitrate pollution, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

“We know what causes this pollution. It’s time for Minnesota’s agricultural lobby and the Department of Agriculture to come to the table and agree to real solutions to eliminate this public health threat,” Leigh Currie, MCEA director of strategic litigation, said in a press release.

September 13, 2023

Could farm fertilizers be driving Corn Belt cancers?

By Keith Schneider

BERNE, Minn. – It was a hot afternoon in mid-July and 60-year-old Brian Bennerotte was making a pilgrimage of sorts, navigating a shotgun-straight, gravel road south of Minneapolis on a journey through a landscape stitched with crop and livestock farms as far as the eye can see.

Bennerotte is one of only three surviving members of a family who farmed for three generations along a mile-long stretch of County Road B. As a long-haul truck driver, Bennerotte rarely gets back here. But with a visitor at his side, he finds his way.

From the passenger seat of a rented vehicle he scans both sides of the road, then points to a dust-scoured barn leaning into the wind. The building is all that remains of his family’s farmstead, which once encompassed 200 acres and a home large enough for Bennerotte’s parents to raise five boys and a girl.

Down the road a bit further, he recognizes neighboring properties: There is the Glarner farm, and the Spreiter farm and the Serie farm. All are connected by circumstances of geography, topography, agriculture, and social commerce.

All are also joined by disease and death.

Among the four families who lived for decades along County Road B, 12 people developed cancer and seven died. Bennerotte was one of three people who developed lymphoma. The disease nearly killed him in 1983 when he was 20 years old. His father and three brothers would not survive their own bouts with cancer.

For some, County Road B has a different name: They call it Cancer Road.

“Every family along here was affected. Every one,” said Bennerotte.

August 25, 2023

Advising farmers on fertilizer, universities add to water pollution woes

By Keith Schneider

WINONA, Minn. – Corn drapes every curve and rise here in Winona County, Minnesota – seemingly endless fields of grain that contribute to the food, fuel and finances of a robust US agricultural economy.

But the bucolic landscape belies a dark and dangerous truth: Much of the groundwater in the porous limestone beneath this area of southeast Minnesota is contaminated with some of the nation’s highest levels of nitrates – harmful pollutants released into the environment by the use of nitrogen chemicals and livestock manure as fertilizer on farmland.

Close to 200 wells in the county have been contaminated with nitrates at levels higher than what is considered safe, according to state officials and in parts of Winona County, half of all households have nitrate-contaminated drinking water. It’s frightening data for area residents because nitrates are linked to a range of health problems, including heart and lung problems and certain cancers. Nitrates are known to be particularly dangerous for babies.

Crop and livestock production accounts for roughly 70% of the state’s nitrate pollution, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, a fact that recently led a coalition of 11 state and national environmental groups to petition federal regulators to investigate.

The groups are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect residents of Winona and seven other southeast Minnesota counties from “imminent and substantial endangerment” caused by nitrate contamination. The agency’s regional office has begun to interview state officials.

The issue is not unique to Minnesota. State and federal data show that since 1990, nitrogen spread on fields in ten major US corn-growing states has increased 26%, with more nitrogen than ever pouring off the land and into US waters.