Editorials: The talk of the midterms

Water quality and cancer are emerging as central issues in Iowa politics, and should lead the debate in the 2026 midterm elections. More people are paying attention to our polluted water and the fact that our state is the only one with rising cancer rates. Gov. Kim Reynolds even threw $1 million for research on why Iowa has this huge problem with cancer. She says it’s probably for the binge drinking.

So we asked a urologist: Why does Northwest Iowa have the densest cluster of prostate cancer on the continent?

“The chemicals,” the good doctor replied. “But I don’t know that for sure.”

It’s in the air. Dr. James Merchant, the founding dean of the University of Iowa College of Public Health, described for us how feces paints a fine patina on playground equipment in places surrounded by livestock confinements. If you can smell it, gravity dictates that it gravitates. It’s in the water. Nitrate from our fields spiked in the Raccoon River, making water conservation mandatory in the Des Moines metro area.

The Harkin Institute at Drake University on Friday hosts a discussion of a new report commissioned by Polk County by leading scientists concluding that ag chemicals are the root of most surface water pollution in the Tall Corn State. This is hardly news. It has been studied to death for decades. We know what our noses tell us. The report is a discussion point that keeps people talking about why Iowa does so little in response.

The Iowa Cancer Registry has been holding information sessions for each of the 99 counties. Palo Alto (Emmetsburg) was among the first, appropriately since it has the highest cancer rates. Dickinson County (Spirit Lake) also ranks among the highest. It may be just coincidence that the highest rates are in the most ag-intensive counties that were drained from slough to make the most productive farmland in the world.

The registry has come to no conclusions about the causes: high radon levels, combined with other environmental factors, perhaps? A million dollars won’t necessarily get at the full truth in a state where the regulatory regime is charged to facilitate greater hog and egg production/processing. Our state economy revolves around it.

Iowa has been dancing around the issue as we watched a generation of independent livestock producers get elbowed out of the business or to become hired men on their own farms.

It feels like the conversation has changed. We at least are at the point where we can admit we have a problem that spun out of our control. Even the governor can acknowledge that we have a cancer problem, although she sees no point in regulation because it stifles innovation. Packing hens into a barn is not exactly innovative. It’s just that the barn has to be so big that Old McDonald doesn’t have access to enough capital to manage. The river is not what it used to be, the agronomists will tell you, since we changed our approach to the landscape nearly 50 years ago.

Everyone knows what the problem is but we don’t like to talk about it. We’re getting around to it. Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig insists that voluntary action will lead to change. It hasn’t over the past 20 years. Our surface water is as bad or worse than ever.  When you have breast cancer, you don’t have another few decades to wait for improvement.

What we breathe, eat and drink can kill us. Few issues are as urgent or command focused attention. When asked directly, Iowans say that clean water is their priority. They approved a constitutional amendment to increase the sales tax for natural resources 15 years ago. The power structure has been able to ignore it.

The Iowa Farmers Union has been hosting forums on cancer alongside the Iowa Environmental Council. People spoke up in places like Spencer about chemicals and pollution quietly killing us. When Gov. Reynolds is willing to throw $1 million at it, you know the issue is hitting way close to home.

If you approach our problems with clean water and air, you approach our problems with community — loss of ownership, loss of seeing each other as stakeholders instead of placeholders, loss of control over our affairs to the dark money shrouding us, loss of our sense of neighborliness. The costs of water even in Storm Lake are rising beyond our means as hungry interlopers slake their thirst — denizens notice when the rates jump year after year after year. For hogs, poultry and ethanol, whence the corporate reapers leave just enough behind for us to scratch over.

These issues are only intensifying. They are not going away. Water and cancer should be what animates our politics in the here and now. It sounds and feels like a shift could occur, but we are optimists.

Protecting our base

In the context of water: A report released a couple weeks ago confirms earlier science that a mega-drought in the Great Plains and West will last several more decades. This has major implications for US food production, as most of the nation’s vegetable and beef production take place in those parched regions.

Then this one from The New York Times on Monday: Tehran, the capital of Iran, is running out of water and electricity as the heat index rises to 145 degrees, the hottest city on Earth.

Per The Times: “Lush wetlands have crusted into beds of sand and dust storms, and wells have gone dry. Crops and livestock are dying. Parts of the country are sinking at alarming rates after water aquifers have been sucked up — in Tehran, parts of the city are sinking over 12 inches a year, officials said. Lakes and water reservoirs where boating, fishing and swimming were once summer staples have dried or shrunk.”

The president of Iran said Monday that Tehran will run out of water in weeks, and that “we cannot continue this way.”

Israel may not be Iran’s greatest threat. Drought is.

Which brings us back home: We must protect what we have, because indeed we cannot go on draining our aquifers and shipping our precious soil downriver.

Many places in the world cannot sustain themselves in a warming climate that spawns extreme weather — persistent drought, extended heat spells, disastrous monsoons hitting dry hardpan. You can barely grow maize near the equator where it was domesticated 11,000 years ago. Agricultural resilience should be the watchword. We remain busily mining resources as the Persians did over the centuries until it resulted in the  wasteland we see. Our soil base is eroding with stunningly heavy downpours — Central Iowa got up to eight inches in one dose last week. Unfortunately, we cannot keep up with the pace of change. Our land is exposed most of the year to increasingly violent elements that ultimately will endanger our food security. We should be as maniacal about resiliency as we are about making money, since we will be as broke as southwest Kansas without good black soil.

Places out West are bidding for our water, to pipe it out so you can irrigate alfalfa in the desert. They demand that we grow more cheap corn and soy for livestock as other environs become inhospitable. We are paying for it with our own natural resource depletion. We should be resolute in protecting our water and soil, but we are mainly in it to turn the quick buck. We are fending off the water requests for now, but the soil is drifting away with every rain and new derecho. Hogs suck up our water, and when they get hauled to the pack the check goes someplace else. We are sitting on world food security right here in the heart of Iowa while acting oblivious to the threat.

Then comes a reminder from Tehran that life itself will be impossible within a matter of weeks. Hang on to your bombs. Eventually even the mullahs won’t find their daily bread or a drop to drink. We’re sitting on the real black gold if we stop to realize it. The trick is to quit squandering it. This is what the next farm bill should be about. The power brokers are talking about something very different, which would stifle conservation and ignore our basic security.