Toxic Terrain | ModeShift

Chippewa Falls Developed Its Clean Water for Beer — Now It’s Keeping Cancer-Causing Nitrates Out of the Tap

by Keith SchneiderAugust 21, 2026August 21, 20260

Ever since Jacob Leinenkugel discovered spring waters here that were pure enough to brew his famous beer, this small Wisconsin city’s devotion to clean water has been paramount. That’s why in 1997, when Chippewa Falls utility managers detected potentially dangerous concentrations of nitrates in a well supplying city water, officials acted. They installed new filtration equipment in their treatment system and drilled deeper wells into cleaner aquifers to ensure the water delivered to the city’s …

Despite Supreme Court Decision, Bayer Faces More Challenge Over Roundup

by Keith SchneiderAugust 2, 2026August 2, 20261

Top executives of Bayer, the German chemical maker, were understandably elated on June 25, the day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in their favor in a product injury case involving the company’s Roundup herbicide. The high court reversed a state court decision and dismissed the legal theory that prompted a jury to award $1.25 million to a Missouri man who accused Roundup of causing his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “This decision is good for American farmers who …

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 …

Traces of Old Farm Chemicals Contaminate Water Across the U.S.

by Keith SchneiderNovember 20, 2025November 20, 20250

Even though it delivers airtight data and analysis essential for understanding and managing the risks industrial societies pose to water, land, and health, the U.S. Geological Survey is a federal science agency that rarely attracts public notice. So when my colleague, Brett Walton, told me about a new USGS study that found diminishing concentrations in groundwater for all but one of a group of twenty-two old-school pesticides widely known to cause disease in humans, I got interested. …

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 …

MAPA – Make America Polluted Again Starts in Iowa

by Keith SchneiderAugust 22, 2025August 22, 20250

President Donald Trump’s campaign to carve up federal environmental agencies and paralyze statutes that cleared the air, cleaned U.S. waters, and protected wildlands marks the opening of MAPA, the new era to make America polluted again. With uncanny speed and premeditated precision, Trump and his Cabinet are cutting budgets, slicing protections from statutes, and pushing thousands of seasoned scientists and resource managers out of the federal government’s principal environmental agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric …

Regulators Battle Oregon and Washington Farmers Over Limits to Farm Contamination

by Keith SchneiderDecember 30, 2024December 30, 20240

SUNNYSIDE, Washington – Waters from the snowpack of the Cascade Mountains support orchards, vineyards and dairies here in the Yakima Valley of eastern Washington State, boosting a flourishing farm economy and helping to stock store grocery shelves nationwide. But as the waters flow, so do a host of dangerous farm pollutants, contaminating drinking water wells in the valley and through the adjacent Lower Umatilla Basin across the state line in Oregon. Regulators and citizen groups …

Huge Organic Farm In Iowa Thrives Without Toxic Chemicals

by Keith SchneiderNovember 22, 2024November 22, 20240

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 …