Today in pink slime: Republicans cause cancer

There are 23.4 million hogs in Iowa's concentrated animal feeding operations or about 7.3 pigs for every human in the state. Voluntary buffer strips and other conservation practices have simply failed desertifying parts of the state and causing the Raccoon River to be named one of the most endangered waterways in the United Snakes. 

Recall that in 2015, Republican then-Iowa Governor Terry Branstad helped to block a federal lawsuit that could have stopped industrial agriculture from polluting the Des Moines drinking water supply. That same year a judge appointed by Republican then-South Dakota Governor Denny Daugaard heard the case brought against ABC News for its role in dubbing so-called lean, finely textured beef "pink slime." 

Dakota Dunes-based Beef Products says it was forced to close three of its four plants and erase hundreds of jobs after consumers realized what is in the crap. Using ammonia to reduce bacteria BPI had a processing plant in Iowa but moved its headquarters to South Dakota to take advantage of the regressive tax structure and lax environmental oversight. 

According to court documents released to the Associated Press the slaughter house was in the business clique that raised concerns about a state official Branstad tried to force from office. BPI donates generously to Republican candidates like Senator John Thune (Earth hater-SD). 

Branstad was then picked by the corrupt Trump White House to replace Montana's Max Baucus as Ambassador to China.

Today, most of the corn grown in the US is fed to domestic livestock but a third of it will be processed for ethanol this year and subsidies of up to $700 an acre are the incentives to plant even more next year. 20 of Iowa's 99 counties are devoted exclusively to food that is ultimately burned for automobile fuel. Iowa contributes some 40% of the pollution killing the Gulf of Mexico. 

Roundup® is a threat to human life and is known to cause birth defects and spontaneous abortions despite assurances from manufacturer Bayer but high levels of glyphosate, a known endocrine disruptor, are still found in oats, chickpeas and corn sugars.

In Iowa, first-term Democratic state Rep. Austin Baeth, an internal medicine specialist from Des Moines, is leading a bipartisan effort in the state legislature to end what he calls “Iowa’s cancer crisis.” Working with Democrats and Republicans, Baeth says a number of bills are being drafted for legislative consideration later this year. A proposal that Baeth and colleagues are developing would fund an epidemiological research program to more precisely evaluate potential causes of cancer, identify the sources of exposure, the number of people sickened, and the places where excess cancers are developing. Commercial nitrogen fertilizer and nitrogen-rich livestock and poultry manure are the leading sources of nitrate contamination that is increasing in the region’s surface and groundwater, according to state environment and agriculture agencies. According to many studies, as much as 70% of the nitrogen applied to farmland leaked off fields and drained toxic nitrates into the region’s waters. In 2023, alarm bells started to ring in Iowa when the state cancer registry reported that its citizens were suffering with the second-highest incidence of cancer in the U.S. [Cancer-related diseases and deaths spur actions to fight farm chemical contamination in Corn Belt]

Iowa farms use more toxic weed killers (237 million pounds), apply more commercial fertilizer (11.6 billion pounds), and produce more nitrate-generating manure (50 million tons) every year than any other state, say federal and state data. New Toxic Terrain article coming.

— Keith Schneider (@modeshift) March 1, 2024