Category: Toxic Terrain

WEST BEND, Iowa – People who think seriously about how to limit the toll industrialized American agriculture takes on communities, land, and water ought to visit the Fehr family’s organic Clear Creek Acres in northern Iowa. With just shy of 800 residents, West Bend is barely a blip on a prairie landscape, but it has become home base for an uncommonly large expanse of organically grown crops- operations that have found success in challenging the …

On July 31, 2024 the Michigan Supreme Court issued one of the most significant decisions in decades to strengthen safeguards for the state’s natural environment and especially its clean water. With a 5-2 majority, the court ruled that the state Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) had full authority to “take all necessary steps” to protect Michigan waters from agricultural pollution. The import of the decision cannot be overstated. It reverses decades of …

EDON, OH — For 60 years, this one stoplight Ohio town has been known as a place where time appears to stand still. With more than 400 Amish residents settled in and around the rural community that straddles the Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan state lines, it is common to see large families traveling by horse-drawn black buggies to and from farms where they milk dairy cows and grow corn. Adhering to a strict religious doctrine …

FREMONT, MI. – Anticipating a surge of funding for building manure biodigesters that capture methane for electricity and transportation fuels from millions of tons of farm animal wastes Michigan’s environmental agency last year drafted more rigorous operating rules to protect state waters from a new tide of farm-based pollution. The action by the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy gained powerful legal justification in late July when the Michigan Supreme Court decided that EGLE …

For the third time in two decades the Environmental Protection Agency appeared in federal Appellate Court this week to defend its admittedly flawed approach to regulating the billions of pounds of manure running off into the nation’s waters from large industrial animal feeding operations. But unlike the previous Appellate Court cases in 2005 and 2011, when the plaintiffs were the major agricultural trade organizations seeking to weaken or eliminate agency regulations, this time the case …

VENICE, LA. —  Kindra Arnesen is a 46-year-old Louisiana fishing boat operator who spent most of her life among the pelicans and bayous 20 miles upstream from where the Mississippi River ends at the Pass A Loutre State Wildlife Management Area on the Gulf of Mexico. Clark Porter is a 62-year-old farmer who lives close to Reinbeck, Iowa where he spends one part of his day as an environmental specialist for the Iowa Department of …

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 …

America’s immense, productive, polluting, and disease-generating farm sector is a big target for reform and improvement. It has been every year since Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture during the Nixon administration counseled farmers to “plant fence row to fence row,” and “get big or get out.” Congress complied with changes in farm policy that encouraged payment of subsidies for field crops that eventually were uncapped, promoted ethanol from corn as a substitute for gasoline, …