- Michaelyn Mankel is an Iowa organizer with the national advocacy group Food & Water Watch. She lives in Des Moines.
Cancer rates are through the roof. Well over half our tested waterways are polluted. Water bills are sky high. Year after year, the data tells a story of a worsening water pollution crisis in Iowa. It is clearer than ever that our foolhardy reliance on voluntary cleanup is poisoning us.
Experts have known for decades that industrial-scale concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are water polluters. Yet over the past 30-plus years, the number of large CAFOs in Iowa has more than quintupled. When Big Ag moved in, corporations ran many family farmers off their land and trapped others in contracts that lock in animal-rearing practices predicated on pollution. Today, Iowa is home to more of these factory farms than any other state — so many thousands of operations that even the state can’t keep track. But the numbers we do have speak volumes.
Operating as sewerless animal cities, factory farms pump unimaginable quantities of waste into our water. A Food & Water Watch analysis of USDA and EPA data found that Iowa’s factory farms produce 108 billion pounds of manure every year — that’s 25 times as much as Iowa’s human residents. Unlike human sewage, barely a fraction of CAFO waste is monitored and none is treated. To make matters worse, factory farms stuff animals with pesticide-heavy diets and strict antibiotics regimens to manage the industry’s inherently high disease risk. And as the saying goes, what goes in must come out. The copious wastewater that flushes out of these facilities is chock full of pharmaceuticals, pathogens, nitrates and pesticides — all known to cause human diseases, including birth defects and cancers.