ModeShift

Iowa Campaigns Pivot on Farming Perils

by Keith SchneiderOctober 15, 2026October 15, 20260

TIPTON, Iowa – Democrats filed into the Cedar County party headquarters late last month to hear Chris Jones, the Democratic candidate for state agriculture secretary, propose the most aggressive agenda for curbing pollution and human disease from the crop and livestock sectors ever uttered by a candidate running for a statewide office in Iowa. In order to sharply reduce the billions of pounds of nutrients causing Iowa’s worst-in-the-nation water quality, and address the fastest-in-the-nation increase …

Wendell Berry’s Water Intelligence

by Keith SchneiderOctober 5, 2026October 5, 20260

In the shadow of wooded hills near the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio rivers is Lanes Landing, the 125-acre farm where Wendell Berry tended the land and published the most trenchant appeals in American letters to tame the damage from industrial agriculture. “No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it can, for long, disguise its failure to conserve the wealth and health of nature, eroded, wasted, or degraded soils, damaged or …

Kansas Prairie Festival Celebrates Agriculture That Protects Soil, Water, and Communities

by Keith SchneiderOctober 5, 2026October 5, 20260

SALINA, Kan. – In 1976, Wes and Dana Jackson launched The Land Institute as a nonprofit school to teach a small group of students ways to grow food that respected nature, conserved energy and water, and managed wastes. As one of the nation’s first regional nonprofit environmental and farm research organizations devoted to land stewardship, the Institute set sail in the powerful current of alternative ideas and new organizations in that era that were determined …

Chippewa Falls Developed Its Clean Water for Beer — Now It’s Keeping Cancer-Causing Nitrates Out of the Tap

by Keith SchneiderAugust 21, 2026August 21, 20260

Ever since Jacob Leinenkugel discovered spring waters here that were pure enough to brew his famous beer, this small Wisconsin city’s devotion to clean water has been paramount. That’s why in 1997, when Chippewa Falls utility managers detected potentially dangerous concentrations of nitrates in a well supplying city water, officials acted. They installed new filtration equipment in their treatment system and drilled deeper wells into cleaner aquifers to ensure the water delivered to the city’s …

Jim Olson Led Michigan’s Embrace Of Public Trust Doctrine To Protect Great Lakes Waters

by Keith SchneiderAugust 5, 2026September 23, 20260

I met environmental attorney Jim Olson 35 years ago, just as he was developing uncommon expertise in Michigan law and exhibiting an appealing measure of courtroom flair, both of which make him a towering figure in Great Lakes resource protection. At the time he was defending the shoreline of the Crystal River in Leelanau County from being damaged by a golf course development proposed by Bob Kuras, owner of the Homestead Resort. I was a …

Despite Supreme Court Decision, Bayer Faces More Challenge Over Roundup

by Keith SchneiderAugust 2, 2026August 2, 20261

Top executives of Bayer, the German chemical maker, were understandably elated on June 25, the day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in their favor in a product injury case involving the company’s Roundup herbicide. The high court reversed a state court decision and dismissed the legal theory that prompted a jury to award $1.25 million to a Missouri man who accused Roundup of causing his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “This decision is good for American farmers who …

At Last, A Jailbreak On Water And Cancer in Iowa

by Keith SchneiderJuly 28, 2026July 28, 20261

Real change occurs in America when civic pressures from outside the centers of influence force insiders to retreat. Arguably the most compelling example of systemic change in how a state could operate is now unfolding in Iowa. Severe water contamination from crop and livestock production linked to the nation’s second highest and fastest rising incidence of cancer developed into the election year issues of their time in Iowa, one of the country’s most important farm …

Ethanol Was Marketed to Help Agriculture. But It Fouled Our Water and Injured Our Health.

by Keith SchneiderJune 17, 2026June 17, 20260

Just like his presidential predecessors – George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden – Donald Trump has a thing for ethanol. But why? Inordinately expensive to taxpayers, monstrously polluting, and now linked to mounting cancer incidence in Midwest Corn Belt states, fermenting ethanol from a third of America’s corn crop would appear to sane people as an insane pursuit. Not to corn growers, ethanol refiners and their allies in farm industries, the White House, Congress, …

Cancer, Farm Pollution On Iowa’s Ballot

by Keith SchneiderJune 9, 2026June 9, 20260

Expect the unexpected. That’s the only certainty of planting season across the Corn Belt. Heat. Frost. Insects. Too much rain, or none at all. Now add the distress the Trump administration has cursed farmers with: Broken markets. Tariffs. Rising fuel costs. Never, though, has the unexpected included this spring’s surprise: serious consideration of the harm from industrial crop and animal production. Farming’s mammoth water pollution and its consequences for public health are on the ballot …

Solar, Wind, and E.V.s Rise from Shadow of Trump’s Iran War

by Keith SchneiderMay 21, 2026May 21, 20260

Here are two more reasons to be appalled by President Trump’s order to attack Iran. First, fuel shortages caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz exemplify why and how China took command of renewable energy and electric vehicle manufacturing, the primary water-saving, climate-conserving, fossil-energy-eliminating industries of this century. Second, battery-powered vehicles and solar photovoltaic cells, which convert sunlight to electricity, were developed in the United States and are now being industrialized more intelligently …