Advertise on podcast: What Doesn't Kill You

Accross the farm belt, cancer cases are spiking, and states are getting serious about tracking and providing guidelines for exposure to agro-chem. Journalist Keith Schneider has been digging into this for months and reports.

Straight outta the NY Times, a groundbreaking article by journalists Christopher Flavelle and Somini Sengupta shows the highway between mcNuggets and our diminishing supply of fresh clean water for human consumption. Flavelle joins the show to describe what he and his colleague uncovered as part of an ongoing and important series in the NYT.

John Rumpler, Clean Water DIrector and lead attorney for Environment America, joins to talk about the long overdue revision of regulations governing wastewater from slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. Decades overdue, public hearings on the subject are being held January 24th and 31st 2024. Learn more about how much toxic waste could be captured if these revised regulations are allowed to pass. Aside from reducing contamination of our drinking water, these revisions would also have an impact on wildlife, recreation, human health, and the ecology of rivers and streams currently unprotected.

Chris Jones, author of the Swine Republic, featured here in June, is back to talk about the remarkable series of conversations he is now having around Iowa and his region about big ag and water pollution. We will also talk about heavily funded mitigation tools that are not mitigating, but are lining some peoples pockets with taxpayer money.

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.

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???

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.