What Doesn't Kill You

Big Ag and Big Oil are getting in bed together to promote the buildout of bio-digesters to manage animal waste. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing masquerading as a good thing? Reporter Keith Schneider gives some context on this long overdue attention to pollution from the animal agriculture segment.

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Professor Sylvia Secchi from University of Iowa joins to talk about how ethanol is a giant giveaway to the ag industry, purporting to be a partial solution to fossil fuel impacts. Instead, the excessive cultivation of corn is having disastrous impacts on soil and water... and guess what? It's anything but fuel efficient. How did we get here???

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Journalist Keith Schneider examines a spate of cancer diagnoses in farm country in Minnesota. On one short stretch of a road in Berne Minnesota, shared by four farming families, 12 people developed cancer, and seven of them died. What linked these people in disease is the contamination of their drinking water with excess nitrates, the chemicals used to encourage bumper crops of corn, soy, and other crops. It has yet to be definitively proven, but the science shows excessive nitrate in drinking water is increasingly connected to cancer clusters such as this one in Minnesota.

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Organic food purchasers buy organic and pay the extra for a reason. New regulations being proposed by some members of congress would make it much easier for corporate food businesses to use that premium label to sell product that doesn't actually meet the real benchmarks of organic. Tom Chapman, CEO of the Organic Trade Association, and others have introduced the new Continuous Improvement and Accountability in Organic Standards to counteract these efforts to dilute the organic label.

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The National Family Farm Coalition is advocating for the Farmland For Farmers Act introduced by Senator Cory Booker in July of this year. Agricultural land needs to stay accessible to actual farmers, rather than offer an opportunity to corporate entities to capitalize on high land prices, at the same time driving those prices into a stratosphere no mere mortal can possibly attain. Our food security depends on measures like this. Tune in to see how this fits into the Farm Bill, and its chances at passage.

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Western states are home to herds of grazing beasts, and to keep them in the right place, thousands of miles of fencing is required. Conservation Northwest Associate Director Jay Kehne advocates a different path: shock collars for cattle. The cattle stay put, but other wildlife (think deer, elk, and other ruminants) can run free instead of fouling the fence. A big win for wildlife, and for a rancher's bottom line.

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Award winning journalist and author, and favorite guest, Tom Philpott returns to talk all things Farm Bill. What will change, what is new, and what is, sigh, same old, same old?

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Every day a new article describes the prevalence of PFAS in our water, land, food, and bodies. David Cwiertny, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and in Chemistry at the University of Iowa, takes us through the impacts, the options for remediation, and what to expect from regulatory bodies in the wake of increased knowledge on the ubiquity of "forever" chemicals.

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Iowa State University Water Quality expert Chris Jones, @riverraccoon, just published a damning indictment of the governing officials of Iowa and Big Ag in overseeing the disastrous consequences of our profit over people driven agricultural model. Learn how the Department of Natural Resources and a host of other agencies collude in allowing agriculture to extract maximum payment from taxpayers, even as they flush ever increasing quantities of pollutants into the water system.

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Tom Philpott, author of Perilous Bounty, was prescient in his 2020 book in a lengthy description of the 1862 floods that inundated Central Valley in a once in a century flood. Now Central Valley is facing an even more catastropic scenario as climate disruption adds fuel to an already volatile area now packed with dairy farms, oil wells, and massive swaths of land planted to almonds, pistachios, tomatoes, and cotton. What will ensue with the predicted flooding caused by potential rapid snowmelt is a desperate scenario indeed.

Read Tom's latest piece here.

Read an excerpt from his book here.

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