1 Taking Stock
life-threatening condition in which the blood cannot distribute oxygen,
as well as other afflictions including bladder cancer, thyroid problems,
and birth defects.
Health concerns have come to a head in Iowa, the Mecca of corn,
soybeans, pork, and egg production, where agriculture is the top con-
tributor of nitrates in water. The Des Moines Board of Water Works
sources its drinking supplies from rivers downstream of farms, spending
heavily on specialized technology to strip out contaminants. After years
of struggling to stay ahead of rising nitrate levels, the water utility sued
three northern counties for violating the Clean Water Act. The suit was
dismissed by a federal judge who ruled that water quality was governed
by the Iowa legislature.
The issue has divided agricultural interests (the state’s largest in-
dustry) against individual and public health advocates. As the battle
has intensified, so has the collateral damage. Legislation was introduced
to dismantle the independence of water utilities like the Des Moines
Board of Water Works. The editor of the Storm Lake Times (the local
paper of a small northern Iowa city) won a Pulitzer Prize for calling out
powerful agricultural interests. As of this writing, the legislature passed a
$282-million bill to improve water quality, though there is no agreement
on how any improvements will be measured.
Within a year of winding down my role in the nitrogen initiative, I
left Farmland. It was not an easy decision. The company was doing
well. My future looked promising. Yet buried in my jumbled thoughts
at the time was a bubbling anxiety that I was giving too much credit
to human ingenuity and not enough deference to nature and the envi-
ronment. At some point, my enthusiasm for devising novel models to
ratchet up food production had hit a ceiling.
When offered a position in Colorado at the United States Depart-
ment of Agriculture (USDA), I accepted. Leveraging my previous
research in college, I focused on animal diseases that might limit meat
and milk production, including bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(“mad cow disease”), bovine tuberculosis, and E. coli O 1 :H.
The charge of the center I directed was to assess emerging issues for
policymakers. Pathogens were always the enemy. Each risk assessment