Agriculture | ModeShift

Toxic Algae Bloom Forecasts Are a Study in Negligence

by Keith SchneiderAugust 22, 2025August 22, 20250

Back in 2003, when researchers began predicting with excellent accuracy how much of western Lake Erie would be coated with the green slime of a toxic algae bloom, there were important points to be made. The annual forecasts, largely funded with $20 million annually from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provided water quality regulators and public health authorities in the U.S. and Canada real-time assessments on where the poisonous algae, which is capable of …

Nuclear Energy’s Unsettled Revival

by Keith SchneiderJune 30, 2025June 30, 20250

In January, executives at Constellation Energy startled the world with their plan to restart the closed and cold 840-megawatt Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island nuclear power station, site of one of the most dangerous meltdowns in atomic history. Not so long ago such news, like the specter of the ruined Unit 2 reactor core that remained after the 1979 accident in southern Pennsylvania, would have attracted more than surprise. It would have generated …

Trump’s Attack on Science Drowns Common Sense

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 26, 2025February 26, 20250

Attacking the virtue and validity of research science is nothing new in certain corners of American culture. A century ago, in the famous Scopes trial, a high school teacher in Tennessee was prosecuted for teaching evolutionary biology in violation of state law and religious doctrine. In the 21st century, Christian conservatives are at it again. They’ve united with fossil fuel industry executives to attack the scientific research that projects with astonishing accuracy the pace and damaging …

Jason Rowntree’s Cattle Grazing Practices Enhance Water and Environmental Quality

by Keith SchneiderAugust 16, 2024August 16, 20240

LAKE CITY, MI – Two facts about Michigan agriculture are scarcely recognized outside the fences and beyond the drainage ditches of the state’s 45,000 farms. The first: farming is among the most technologically sophisticated industrial sectors in Michigan and every other state. Second: livestock farms are the state’s largest source of water pollution from toxic nitrates and phosphorus, and air pollution from methane, a powerful climate change gas. Here on Michigan State University’s 1,100-acre livestock …

Movement To Limit CAFO Pollution Emboldened By Michigan Court Ruling

by Keith SchneiderAugust 15, 2024August 15, 20240

A recent state court decision has the potential to significantly transform how animal agriculture is regulated in Michigan and could influence how other states and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency oversee the industry’s mammoth waste stream, said environmental lawyers and activists. On July 31 , in a case that pit the administration of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer against the state’s Farm Bureau, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that he Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and …

Breaking Through Big Ag’s Shroud of Resistance to Environmental Protection, Michigan Supreme Court Sets Stage For Curbing Mammoth Tide of Farm Waste

by Keith SchneiderAugust 2, 2024August 2, 20240

In a rare rebuke to the industrial farm sector, the Michigan Supreme Court this week ruled that state environmental regulators have full authority to require big livestock and poultry operations to improve their handling of billions of pounds of manure that contributes to serious contamination of state waters. The 5-2 decision issued Wednesday is one of the most significant environmental protection measures in Michigan in years. It comes after four years of battles between state …

Cancer-Related Disease and Deaths Spur Actions to Fight Farm Chemical Contamination in Corn Belt

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 31, 2024January 31, 20240

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 …

Toxic Terrain’s Dogged Reporting

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 14, 2024January 16, 20242

The essential purpose of project investigative journalism is to engage readers with new information about a subject of relevance and importance. In doing so, journalists seek to prompt changes in policy and behavior that benefit the public interest. As Upton Sinclair once said of his dogged journalism about the filth and danger of Chicago slaughterhouses: “The source and fountain-head of genuine reform in this matter is an enlightened public opinion.” Those who’ve followed my work …

“We Can’t Sit Back”– Amid Polluted Water and Climbing Cancer Rates, Iowa Health Officials Eye Farm Chemicals

by Keith SchneiderDecember 18, 2023December 18, 20230

With one eye fixed on Iowa’s startlingly high cancer rate and the other wary of a political pushback, public health leaders are embracing a novel strategy for preventing malignancies in the nation’s largest farm state. 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 …

Only In Iowa; Barrels of Waste Buried On Farm Go Untested

by Keith SchneiderDecember 11, 2023January 7, 20240

The Iowa Capitol Dispatch, one of the fine non-profit online news organizations at the center of the country, posted an article last week by Jared Strong that caught my attention. Following more than a year of administrative pondering the Iowa Department of Natural Resources on November 30 fined a prominent cattle farm in Stockton $5,000 for illegally burying barrels of chemical waste on its land. Why, you ask, would such a modest fine issued by …