Factory Farms Poison Iowa's Drinking Water to Make Spam for China

OnEarth published an investigative cover story on Monday regarding Iowa’s staggering rise of hog production over the last decade and its impact on local drinking water and surrounding communities.
The piece, Hog Wild: How Factory Farms Are Poisoning Iowa’s Water, explores the lapses in environmental oversight and regulation and the potentially fatal effects of Iowa's 8,500 factory farms that produce unparalleled volumes of fecal waste. It also investigates Iowa factory farms' push to significantly bolster its Spam sales in Chinese and other Asian markets.
Ted Genoways, OnEarth's editor-at-large, went on site to some of Iowa's largest hog confinement facilities and reported on how manure goes virtually untreated before being spread onto millions of acres of cropland as fertilizer, where it then washes into nearby waterways.
This water pollution has resulted in Iowa drinking water supplies that have alarmingly high antibiotic levels, and dangerous amounts of bacteria and nitrate levels deemed high enough to be deadly to small children, said Jacqueline Wei, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) media associate, in a prepared statement.
To tell the story, Genoways gained unprecedented access to Hormel Meats, a hog finishing facility on Iowa’s Des Moines River watershed, as well as an Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) inspection of the facility, allowing him to weave together big agriculture, science and politics and uncover the struggles of tackling industrial farm manure pollution.
He writes:
"Between May and July 2013, as downpours sheeted off drought-hardened fields, scientists at the Des Moines Water Works [DMWW] watched manure contamination spike to staggering levels at intake sites on the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers. These two major tributaries of the Mississippi are also the usual sources of drinking water for roughly one out of every six Iowans. But at one point last summer, nitrate in the Raccoon [River] reached 240 percent of the level allowed under the Clean Water Act, and the DMWW warned parents not to let children drink from the tap, reminding them of the risk of blue baby syndrome. (Nitrate impairs the oxygen capacity of the bloodstream; in babies and toddlers the syndrome can effectively cut off their air supply, rendering them a deathly blue.)"
He adds the number of Iowa DNR staffers conducting inspections has been cut by 60 percent since 2007.
Even though Iowa is the country's leading hog producer, the problem isn't just limited to the rural Midwestern state. There’s very little industry-wide information available about how factory farms handle their waste or even where they are located, said Wei.
The NRDC has been taking legal action to hold the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accountable for protecting America's waterways by pushing for more factory farm transparency and oversight and by fighting industry pollution loopholes.
The NRDC has also been encouraging sustainable farming practices that don’t rely on the abuse of drugs by urging Food and Drug Administration officials to follow two federal court orders that mandate the agency act to limit antibiotics overuse farms.
Visit EcoWatch’s FOOD and HEALTH pages for more related news on this topic.
Sweden's reindeer have a problem. In winter, they feed on lichens buried beneath the snow. But the climate crisis is making this difficult. Warmer temperatures mean moisture sometimes falls as rain instead of snow. When the air refreezes, a layer of ice forms between the reindeer and their meal, forcing them to wander further in search of ideal conditions. And sometimes, this means crossing busy roads.
- San Antonio, Texas Unveils Largest Highway Crossing for Wildlife in ... ›
- Wildlife Crossings a Huge Success - EcoWatch ›
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
Heatwaves are not just distinct to the land. A recent study found lakes are susceptible to temperature rise too, causing "lake heatwaves," The Independent reported.
- Climate Change Will Be Sudden and Cataclysmic Unless We Act Now ›
- There's a Heatwave at the Arctic 'Doomsday Vault' - EcoWatch ›
- Marine Heatwaves Destroy Ocean Ecosystems Like Wildfires ... ›
Trending
By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
- Biden Reaffirms Commitment to Rejoining Paris Agreement ... ›
- Biden Likely Plans to Cancel Keystone XL Pipeline on Day One ... ›
- Joe Biden Appoints Climate Crisis Team - EcoWatch ›
In many schools, the study of climate change is limited to the science. But at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, students in one class also learn how to take climate action.