Agriculture | ModeShift

At Last, A Jailbreak On Water And Cancer in Iowa

by Keith SchneiderJuly 28, 2026July 28, 20261

Real change occurs in America when civic pressures from outside the centers of influence force insiders to retreat. Arguably the most compelling example of systemic change in how a state could operate is now unfolding in Iowa. Severe water contamination from crop and livestock production linked to the nation’s second highest and fastest rising incidence of cancer developed into the election year issues of their time in Iowa, one of the country’s most important farm …

Ethanol Was Marketed to Help Agriculture. But It Fouled Our Water and Injured Our Health.

by Keith SchneiderJune 17, 2026June 17, 20260

Just like his presidential predecessors – George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden – Donald Trump has a thing for ethanol. But why? Inordinately expensive to taxpayers, monstrously polluting, and now linked to mounting cancer incidence in Midwest Corn Belt states, fermenting ethanol from a third of America’s corn crop would appear to sane people as an insane pursuit. Not to corn growers, ethanol refiners and their allies in farm industries, the White House, Congress, …

Cancer, Farm Pollution On Iowa’s Ballot

by Keith SchneiderJune 9, 2026June 9, 20260

Expect the unexpected. That’s the only certainty of planting season across the Corn Belt. Heat. Frost. Insects. Too much rain, or none at all. Now add the distress the Trump administration has cursed farmers with: Broken markets. Tariffs. Rising fuel costs. Never, though, has the unexpected included this spring’s surprise: serious consideration of the harm from industrial crop and animal production. Farming’s mammoth water pollution and its consequences for public health are on the ballot …

Chris Jones Campaigns For Iowa Agriculture Secretary

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 28, 2026July 28, 20260

Three years ago Chris Jones was a decorated research engineer at the University of Iowa, where he directed Iowa’s network of stream pollution monitors and published details about state water quality in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Secure in his academic perch in 110-year-0ld Trowbridge Hall, Jones also contributed to his university-sponsored blog, where he prepared aggressive, masterfully written, and widely read reports that identified agriculture as the primary source of the state’s calamitous water pollution. In …

Combatting Agricultural Pollution: Michigan’s New Manure Management Rules

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 7, 2026January 7, 20260

LANSING. Mich. – Because lawmakers and regulators embrace the principle that agriculture’s primary objective is to feed people, farming is a sacrosanct industrial sector in the United States. Understand that every industry in the U.S. except for agriculture is required to limit water pollution. But ever since 1972, when Congress exempted farming from most of the water-cleansing requirements of the Clean Water Act, farms have been perfectly free to discharge into the environment some of the most …

Spain’s Hog Haven Pollutes Catalonia’s Water

by Keith SchneiderDecember 15, 2025December 15, 20250

BARCELONA – Go anywhere in the world, and an agricultural mess awaits. Even here in Catalonia, an autonomous self-governing region in northern Spain bordered by the Pyrenees mountain range and glorious Mediterranean beaches. Catalonia, it turns out, spent two generations developing industrial farm practices that turned it into a hog haven. With 8 million hogs, it is the largest producer in Spain, which itself is Europe’s largest pork producer. Readers of Circle of Blue know …

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 …