As a teenager, Ryan White learned to harvest manoomin from his father and grandfather on the White Earth Reservation.

The Minnesota lakes are surrounded by towering pines, the shallows hidden by tall grass, where the sacred wild rice grows. Every fall, he rows out on one of these pristine lakes, some of which ban motor boats during harvest season to keep the water pollution-free and the wild rice beds undisturbed.

Among the tall grass, White fills his canoe with the grain that’s part of the Ojibwe creation story. 

“Most ricers start out as polers, and you just push them around,” he said. “As you gain experience, you’ll kind of figure out where the riper rice is, where the thicker rice is, and just get to know the bed and know the lake.” 

But White, a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and the director of advancement and public affairs at Leech Lake Tribal College, also knows to avoid harvesting from a certain part of the lake — Pike Bay Channel. 

The channel abuts an active Superfund site that is part of a federal government cleanup program for some of the most polluted areas in the country. The site sits between State Highway 371 and Pike Bay, a 4,700-acre lake just outside the city of Cass Lake. Groundwater pollution stretches east beneath the channel and is migrating to the surface. And recent testing shows that the groundwater pollution is spreading south to Fox Creek, which flows into Pike Bay. 

It’s putting wild rice harvesting — and Ojibwe traditions — in further jeopardy. And if contamination spreads, it could become a problem for communities downstream. Pike Bay and Cass Lake, the 15,000-acre body of water that gives the city its name, are part of a chain of lakes in Minnesota that form the headwaters of the Mississippi River. 

The Environmental Protection Agency has been working to clean up the hazardous waste contamination in Cass Lake for more than 40 years. The primary solution is a water treatment plant that takes groundwater from multiple wells on the site, filters out the toxic pollutants and pumps the treated water into Pike Bay Channel, which connects Pike Bay and Cass Lake. 

The system is meant to clean the contaminated groundwater and prevent its spread.

“It’s failing in both respects,” Eric Krumm, the Leech Lake band’s Superfund coordinator, told Buffalo’s Fire.

From 1957 to 1985, the St. Regis Paper Company operated a wood preserving facility in Cass Lake. During that time, it used the land as a dumping ground for its waste. 

Workers placed wood soaked in hazardous preservatives next to homes, filling them with the smell of tar and mothballs. They burned waste products and discharged about 500 gallons of sludge and wastewater per day into onsite holding ponds, storm drains and the city dump.

The main chemicals of concern are creosote, a tar-like byproduct of burning coal or wood, and pentachlorophenol, a manufactured chemical that the EPA is phasing out and will ban by 2027. Both substances are considered potential carcinogens by the EPA.

When the facility was active, the community was directly exposed to these chemicals at a swimming hole dubbed “Rainbow Pond” because of the iridescent sheen on the water from creosote runoff. In the neighborhood next to the facility, residents breathed in toxic fumes from the burning of the facility’s waste product, and contaminated soil and dust were tracked into homes. 

The EPA designated the 163-acre facility as a Superfund site in 1984 and placed it on the National Priorities List. A year later, the St. Regis Paper Company stopped operations. Residents were bought out of their homes. Businesses closed. And 42,000 cubic yards of contaminated sludge and soil were excavated and buried in a lined containment vault a quarter mile from downtown.

The South Side neighborhood of Cass Lake is now a vacant field called “the great expanse,” surrounded by short, stunted pines. It serves as a reminder of the paper company’s pollution. 

A ‘stable’ situation … or ‘stagnant’

The cleanup plan is now led by International Paper Co., a paper manufacturer headquartered in Tennessee, which acquired St. Regis and assumed cleanup in 2000. The EPA oversees cleanup, with the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe Division of Resource Management and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency providing feedback.

The groundwater treatment plan has remained unchanged since water extraction wells and the on-site water treatment facility were constructed in 1987, but the federal government and the band differ on its effectiveness

The EPA’s 2025 Five-Year Review showed decreasing contamination at the core of the plume, but it also showed unsafe pentachlorophenol levels east of the plume near Pike Bay Channel and south near Fox Creek. Of 89 monitoring locations on the site, 58 had pentachlorophenol levels that exceeded the band’s standards, greater than 0.02 parts per billion (ppb), and 36 exceeded EPA standards, greater than 1 ppb. 

The EPA calls these levels “stable.” Krumm calls them “stagnant.” 

The treatment plant was supposed to reduce the groundwater plume and render it effectively contained by 2011. Yet, the treatment plant is still required today — 40 years later — to keep the plume in check. And according to the EPA’s 2025 report, the groundwater “cleanup timelines could extend well beyond 2051 if the system were to remain operating as-is.” 

Groundwater testing by the Leech Lake Band shows that the plume has spread beyond the extraction boundaries and beneath Pike Bay Channel. 

The EPA said this doesn’t necessarily mean that the plume is growing. Rather, as the agency does more testing, “the shape of the plume is changed to reflect that new data.”

There are also fears other chemicals may be present. 

While the plant removes most contaminants, Krumm said, treated water “regularly exceeds” healthy limits of dioxins. This group of highly toxic chemical compounds is believed to have been introduced to the soil and waters of Cass Lake by workers burning waste and wood at the St. Regis facility in the ’80s.

Limits placed on traditional foods

Brenda Eskenazi, a University of California Berkeley public health professor who studies dioxin exposure, told Buffalo’s Fire that dioxin is a potent carcinogen that interferes with hormones and can cause fertility and developmental problems. 

“It has a very, very, very long half-life,” she said, which “means it hangs out in the body and in the environment for very long periods of time.” 

In 2001, the EPA conducted testing on white fish in Cass Lake, which showed dioxin levels in some was 10 times higher than those in nearby lakes. That has fed concerns that community members may be taking in chemicals indirectly through their food sources, including white fish and wild rice, which are staples of the Ojibwe diet. 

The Leech Lake Band advises tribal members to remove as much fat, where dioxin accumulates, from Pike Bay and Cass Lake fish, while recommending that pregnant women and children avoid eating them altogether. But as stated in the band’s 2024 report, “consumption advisories for Treaty fish are like telling average Americans to limit meat or bread consumption.”

Limits are also placed on wild rice. Though the band has not issued a consumption guide for the grain, out of the thousands of pounds of wild rice it buys from tribal members each year for processing, Krumm said none are from Pike Bay Channel. 

Brandy Toft, environmental director for the band’s Division of Resource Management, told Buffalo’s Fire that there aren’t enough extraction wells to capture the contaminated groundwater and prevent its spread. 

Standing among the tall grass at Fox Creek next to EPA monitoring wells, she said the groundwater is like a wave pool, and the contamination is like dye dropped into it. The extraction wells are like straws trying to suck all the dye out of the pool, but there just aren’t enough straws, she said. 

“Especially in a subsistence Indigenous community that has every right, literally every right, to hunt, fish, gather in these areas or surrounding areas without fear or without exclusion from those zones because of contamination,” she said. 

International Paper has not included plans to update the water treatment plant, beyond replacing filters, in its most recent remediation report. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Disrupting a way of life

Back at the Leech Lake Reservation, White harvests wild rice every year with his sons, 16-year-old Debwe and 14-year-old Arrow — a tradition he is passing down. 

Eight years ago, he took his sons ricing for the first time. White said they were just “moseying along,” collecting rice here and there, when Arrow saw another little boy with more rice in his boat than him. Competitive, Arrow looked at his dad with excitement, urging him to hurry up. 

Arrow’s love of ricing came “naturally,” said White. “He had just seen it in our people and how much we care about that rice. Even at a very young age, you know that it’s important.”

Minnesota Ojibwe tribes, including Leech Lake, harvest wild rice in beds along the St. Louis River and in shallow lakes that make up the headwaters of the Mississippi River — and have been for centuries. Ojibwe ancestors were sent to the region by a prophecy that told them to travel west from the East Coast until they found the “food that grows on water.” 

“It’s called the sacred berry, or the good berry,” said White. “It’s food, but also, it’s medicine. It’s who we are.”

He said wild rice has also provided for the Ojibwe. Today, many tribal members rely on a steady wild rice harvest to supplement their income in the fall.

“There’s times where I had to use my income from wild rice to pretty much pay the bills, keep a roof over my head and keep the lights on,” said White. 

But they have been limiting where they harvest since Pike Bay Channel is off-limits to tribal members.

“That’s what may happen in the future for the entire Pike Bay and the surrounding waterways,” said White, “and all that connects to the Mississippi River. And we’re pumping that directly into the lake.” 

Community impact

So, why can’t Leech Lake tribal members just fish and harvest wild rice at a different lake? 

Harvest practices are deeply tied to place and identity for Native communities, Anton Treuer, a Leech Lake citizen and a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, told Buffalo’s Fire. 

“Being a Leech Lake Ojibwe person is connected to harvesting fish at Leech Lake,” he said. “The argument that someone should just pack up their bags and drive to Lake of the Woods and harvest a walleye that doesn’t hurt them is silly for a variety of reasons.”

The St. Regis Paper Co. hasn’t used Cass Lake as its dumping ground for more than 40 years, but Treuer said it’s still in the consciousness of tribal members today. He explains it as “an icky feeling.” Is it safe to drink tap water? Is it safe to go swimming in Cass Lake? 

“It never feels as safe as it should be, and people intentionally avoid that space to the degree that they reasonably can,” he said, which has an “immediate impact on people’s ability and willingness to participate in certain cultural practices.”

On top of limiting where tribal members can practice subsistence fishing and harvesting, the Superfund site also impacts ceremonies, said Treuer, who lives on the reservation near Cass Lake. Cedar, commonly burned in ceremonies, must be harvested out of town, he said, and the Superfund site occupies the area where first-kill ceremonies, a rite of passage for young Native hunters, were traditionally held. 

Toft, from the band’s Division of Resource Management, called the Superfund a “black cloud over Cass Lake.”  

“It just keeps hanging there,” she said. 

The fight to preserve Ojibwe culture

But community members are making efforts to promote Ojibwe culture and language on the reservation.  

Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig, a K-12 school, serves more than 200 students of various tribal backgrounds. Operated by the band, the school is located 15 miles from the town of Cass Lake, teaches kids the Ojibwe language and encourages cultural engagement. The school holds a Culture Camp each year where students take language classes, learn traditional crafts like drum making and beading, and take part in traditional Ojibwe pastimes. 

The Leech Lake Tribal College also offers a course on nationhood and manoomin, taught by Leech Lake elder Elaine Fleming with help from White.

“When we’re on the water, I’ll be the one out there showing them how to rice — how to use the pole, how to knock, how to knock in a good way,” he said.

Treuer said other tribal initiatives are helping the band reclaim their land, language and culture. Around Cass Lake, signage is printed in both Ojibwe and English. And in June 2024, more than 11,000 acres of ancestral land, previously managed by the Chippewa National Forest, was returned to the band. 

“The Ojibwe at Leech Lake, and really everywhere, we’re in for the fight of our lives,” said Treuer, “to keep our language alive and to keep our cultural practices vibrant.” 

Even if part of the reservation hadn’t been turned into a Superfund site, he said, the Ojibwe community would still be building back their culture from other impacts of colonization, including residential boarding schools and the mass slaughter of buffalo. 

While 40 years of Superfund cleanup has accelerated those impacts, Toft said, in the centuries of Ojibwe history, a few decades aren’t deterring the community from fighting for their land and culture. 

“We think differently,” she said, “and we’re in for the long haul.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. 

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

A Superfund site in Minnesota is spreading, disrupting a tribe’s way of life is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Members of an ad hoc Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources committee are urging wildlife regulators to work with a national expert as they finalize recommendations to guide state beaver management policy for the next decade.

Researchers and conservationists serving on the advisory body — which is largely composed of DNR staff and government and tribal representatives — hope that including additional scientific expertise, and even a potential computer-guided aerial beaver dam mapping survey, could assist regulators at a time when climate change is beginning to significantly alter Wisconsin weather patterns and pose widespread ecological risks.

“We’re taking our species out faster than they can recover, and when we are overexploiting our trout, when we’re overexploiting animals, plants, habitats, that’s going to make us lose these species faster,” said University of Minnesota ecohydrology professor Emily Fairfax, who has helped review and fact-check several beaver management plans and recently spoke to the committee. “I don’t think we have time to wait — full stop.”

A shift would transform long-standing beaver policy that frames the critters as a nuisance species.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s wildlife services program has removed beavers and their dams in Wisconsin since 1988 under contract with the state, along with local governments, railroad companies and Indigenous tribes.

At least five states across the Mississippi River basin and Great Lakes region contract with the federal wildlife services program for beaver removal, but Wisconsin stands out among states for the quantity of beavers and dams USDA employees clear, the millions of dollars Wisconsin has invested to do so and the state’s justification.

Current trout policy includes killing beavers 

USDA killed roughly 23,500 beavers across 42 states in 2024, about 2,700 of which were in Wisconsin, ranking the state among the top five in the nation.

In Wisconsin, the agency focuses on abating transportation hazards, such as flooded roadways. But, perhaps most controversially, about a third of sites where USDA traps beavers are coldwater streams.

Wisconsin currently prioritizes maintaining free-flowing conditions on the state’s prized coldwater streams, partly to appeal to its “customers” and their fishing preferences.

But the strategy has faced increasing scrutiny, even among anglers, who are divided over the issue. Some beaver advocates say the state agency charged with protecting and enhancing natural resources shouldn’t let commercial interests unduly guide its decisions. 

In 2025, the agency trapped and cleared dams in more than 1,550 miles of coldwater streams — roughly the driving distance from Milwaukee to Salt Lake City, Utah. The DNR uses proceeds from annual trout fishing stamp sales to finance the annual undertaking.

At least two other states, Minnesota and Michigan, have employed the USDA for trout stream clearing, but at a significantly reduced scale.

The DNR doesn’t know the impacts of these policies on Wisconsin’s beaver population, as it ceased conducting aerial surveys in 2014. Agency staff, instead, estimate beaver numbers and harvest impacts using trapper surveys and voluntary reporting of annual take. Staff believe the population remains stable statewide or is even growing.

Conservationists are calling on the DNR to systematically survey the state’s beaver population. Without obtaining a reliable count, they say, it’s impossible to devise a science-based management plan. Even if beaver removal continued on trout streams, critics say the state could better estimate the population by having trappers register their beaver take, as the DNR requires for turkey, deer, bobcat and bear harvests. 

Meanwhile, an expanding body of research is showcasing beavers’ ecosystem and economic benefits and the drawbacks of removal.

Beaver dams help limit flooding

When beavers remain on the landscape, they create wetlands, which mitigate climate change impacts like drought, wildfires and flooding. Problems thought to be endemic to the American West are now creeping eastward.

Thunderstorms wreaked havoc in southeastern Wisconsin last summer, bringing more than 14 inches of rain to some parts of Milwaukee within 24 hours on Aug. 9-10. Roughly 2,000 homes sustained major damage or were destroyed in the ensuing floods, and the county now faces more than $22 million in public infrastructure repairs after being twice denied federal disaster assistance.

Beaver dams can dissipate torrents of water when the sky opens — even to the city’s benefit.

Using computer models, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers estimated that the Milwaukee River watershed could accommodate enough beaver colonies to reduce flood water volumes by 14% to 48%.

Wisconsin beaver policy understudied

But scientists face decades of institutional consensus in Wisconsin that beavers degrade stream habitat and threaten wild coldwater fisheries.

DNR fish biologists say that beavers warm water temperatures and plug coldwater streams with silt. When unobstructed, the water bodies, which tend to contain few fish species, flow fast and hard.

“Past studies have identified some positive but mostly negative effects of beavers on trout, and my research builds upon this,” DNR fisheries scientist Matthew Mitro told the beaver management committee. “The option for lethal removal (of) beavers is an important tool that should remain available for resource managers.”

Yet critics charge DNR biologists with managing streams for the primary benefit of one species by trapping out another, justifying the practice using research that hasn’t undergone scientific peer review.

A 2011 academic review of beaver-related research conducted in the Great Lakes region, which predated Mitro’s recent research, found that 72% of claims concerning beavers’ negative impacts are speculative and not backed by data, while the same held true for 49% of positive claims. The negative claims included the idea that beaver dams warm stream temperatures and block trout passage.

DNR biologists often note that academic literature largely has been conducted in the western United States and can’t be directly transplanted to Wisconsin’s comparatively flat landscape.  

That is all the more reason to get off our haunches and wade into beaver ponds, Fairfax said.

“We have to follow that up by collecting our own data sets,” she said. “We have to publish them in peer-reviewed journals and get that scientific stamp of approval.”

Beaver trapping and natural predation are distinct from targeted eradication, Fairfax noted. The former can be sustainable, while stream-wide depopulation and dam removal can damage entire ecosystems. 

It’s also possible that stream clearing prevents beavers from moving to parts of Wisconsin where they are wanted or where they could thrive with fewer conflicts.

Federal government assesses Wisconsin’s beaver dealings 

The DNR beaver management plan’s update coincides with a new USDA environmental assessment of the potential impacts of its beaver and dam removal in Wisconsin.

A conservation organization founded by beaver management committee member Bob Boucher announced its intent to sue the federal agency to compel it to update its previous assessment, published more than a decade ago. Then Boucher threatened to sue the DNR after it wouldn’t release a draft of the new one, currently under review.

The 2013 assessment determined that USDA’s involvement in clearing streams and conflict areas did not significantly impact the beaver population. It estimated wildlife managers would only trap about 2,000 beavers annually, but the agency exceeded that figure within a few years.

The USDA recommends staying the course, using lethal and nonlethal methods. When analyzing alternatives, the agency concluded that other wildlife managers would continue trapping with or without federal involvement.

The USDA allocates some funding for the installation of flow control devices that can reduce the footprint of beaver ponds by lowering water levels. But nearly all beaver conflict sites the USDA handles in Wisconsin are managed through trapping. Levelers do have limited effectiveness in settings like high-flow streams or infrastructure-heavy floodplains. 

Wildlife managers say that they need flexibility because no two beaver sites are identical. 

“We’re not against beaver complexes,” DNR fisheries biologist Bradd Sims told committee members. “We’re not against ecosystem diversity, and I don’t know why people try to paint us that way. We’re an open-minded bureau that’s open to different management styles.”

Trout and beaver proponents do agree that climate change poses an existential threat to biodiversity. While the former group might view beavers as harmful to coldwater streams, the latter see their potential as a partner in creating resilient landscapes that accommodate not only fish, but also frogs, turtles, bugs, bats, birds and humans.

The committee’s next meeting is March 18 in Rothschild, Wisconsin. Ultimately, DNR staff will rewrite the current plan, release a draft for public comment and discussion at open houses, and present a revised document to the state’s natural resources board for ratification.

This story was produced in partnership with the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network, of which Wisconsin Watch is a member. Sign up for Wisconsin Watch’s newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Pest or climate ally? DNR weighs new beaver management plan under mounting scrutiny is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was originally published on Investigate Midwest.

Lisa Lawler wasn’t surprised when diagnosed with breast cancer in 2025. Her mother had breast cancer and died in 2016. It seemed like cancer had become a common diagnosis for many of her neighbors and friends. 

“With how many people seem to get cancer in our community, you just assume you will get it,” said Lawler, who lives in rural Hardin County, Iowa. “But no one really talks about what’s causing it.”

After 10 rounds of radiation and a surgery to remove the tumor, Lawler’s cancer was in remission. Last year, she took a test to determine if her cancer was likely genetic, meaning a high chance of recurrence, which could lead her to have her entire breast removed. 

She was surprised by the results. 

“The genetic test they ran for me was one that covered 81 genes that are typically related to breast cancer,” Lawler said. “After the test, they told me my cancer is likely not genetic, but likely environmental, based on these 81 genes.

“Your next thought is, then what’s in the environment that caused my cancer?” 

Increasingly, pesticides are being blamed for rising cancer rates across America’s agricultural communities. 

Hardin County, home to around 800 farms, has a pesticide use rate more than four times the national average and a cancer rate among the highest in the state. 

Most of the 500 counties with the highest pesticide use per square mile are located in the Midwest. Sixty percent of those counties also had cancer rates higher than the national average of 460 cases per 100,000 people, according to an analysis of data from both the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Cancer Institute.

Last year, Investigate Midwest, in partnership with the University of Missouri, investigated the link between agrichemicals and cancer in Missouri, finding that many were rural communities that already lacked access to health care. 

Investigate Midwest expanded on that coverage by analyzing data across the country, along with interviewing more than 100 farmers, environmentalists, lawmakers and scientists as part of a partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship. The result was the picture of a nation at a crossroads in dealing with this public health crisis that has not just been ignored by state and federal health officials, but aided.

This story was also supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

“Cancer is everywhere and it’s an experience that is unfortunately all too common,” said Kerri Johannsen, senior director of policy and programs at the Iowa Environmental Council, a Des Moines-based nonprofit that has been studying the state’s growing cancer rate. 

Agrichemicals have helped America become a crop-producing power, increasing yields of commodity crops — such as corn and soybeans — used for food, fuel and animal feed.

Sprayed from airplanes, drones, tractors and handheld devices, these chemicals can drift through the air or run off into nearby rivers and streams.

And for decades, some farmers and pesticide users have developed neurological and respiratory issues. Thousands of lawsuits have alleged that pesticides and the companies that make them were to blame. 

Pesticide manufacturers often rejected those claims while sometimes concealing research by their own employees that raised similar concerns. These companies — such as Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and BASF — have also spent millions to lobby federal and state lawmakers for laws that would limit their legal liability and continue to allow them to sell agrichemicals. 

“This is one of the most transparently reviewed products ever,” said Jessica Christiansen, the head of crop science communications for Bayer, speaking about her company’s production of Roundup, a glyphosate-based pesticide. “This product is so well studied … been on the market for over 50 years with thousands and thousands of studies. There is no linkage to cancer, there just isn’t.”  

Under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture have also hired dozens of former pesticide executives and lobbyists, some of whom have already pushed for deregulation of their industry. The Department of Health and Human Services has also altered its own reports to downplay the harm of pesticides. 

Two states — North Dakota and Georgia — recently passed laws limiting their residents’ ability to sue pesticide companies, and at least a dozen other states will consider similar laws in the coming months. 

“We’ve gotten to a point in the U.S. … where we’ve stopped treating pesticides as if they are dangerous tools,” said Rob Faux, who manages a small Iowa farm and has advocated against pesticide liability shield laws. “Instead, these companies tell these stories that these pesticides are completely safe and we are encouraged to use them anytime. We’ve been convinced that we must use them or we are not going to have enough food to eat.”

In Iowa, a state with heavy pesticide use — 53 million pounds last year — and the nation’s second-highest cancer rate, doctors and health officials have been sounding an alarm for years. 

The state has become ground zero in the fight to limit the impact of pesticides on health and the environment. Farmers have gathered at the state Capitol to advocate for increased laws and funding to address the rising cancer rate. That advocacy likely helped defeat a bill last year that would have protected pesticide makers from some lawsuits.

I call myself a Republican, but this is not about politics; this is about money, about the almighty dollar.”

— Bill Billings, a resident of Red Oak, Iowa, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2024

“I believe the groups wanting this (bill) to go through didn’t expect any substantial resistance, but there was enough resistance,” said Faux, who also works for the Pesticide Action and Agroecology Network, a nonprofit advocating for less agrichemical use.  

The Iowa bill was strongly opposed by environmental and health organizations, which have traditionally been left-leaning. But there was also strong opposition from many conservative residents and farmers. 

“I call myself a Republican, but this is not about politics; this is about money, about the almighty dollar,” said Bill Billings, a resident of Red Oak, Iowa, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2024. 

Initially, doctors told Billings, then 61, he would likely be dead in a matter of months after discovering lymphoma in his lungs. A health enthusiast and hospital administrator, Billings had been a regular user of Roundup, the popular Bayer pesticide used on farms and residential properties. 

“The cancer specialist said, very directly, (my) cancer is a result of being exposed to chemicals,” Billings said. “In my records, it literally says that I have cancer as a result of exposure to Roundup and agrochemicals.” 

Billings was prescribed a five-drug regimen, along with chemotherapy. In September, he was declared cancer-free. 

Last year, he hired a lawyer to file a lawsuit against Bayer. 

“The irony is … Bayer Pharmaceuticals makes one of the drugs that treated my cancer,” Billings said. “It’s disturbing to find out you are in this financial circle — not only as a consumer, but as a patient.” 

Research increasingly links pesticides to growing cancer risk 

Cancer is a complex disease and can be caused by numerous environmental and genetic factors. Some links have been clear — such as smoking and lung cancer — while other forms can be impossible to trace back to an original cause. 

But scientific research linking pesticides with certain types of cancers has been growing. 

“Our findings show that the impact of pesticide use on cancer incidence may rival that of smoking,” scientists wrote in a 2024 study, which was published in Frontiers in Cancer Control and Society.

The study linked pesticides to prostate, lung, pancreas and colon cancers. Pesticides have also been associated with lymphoma and Parkinson’s disease, the study claimed. 

Many doctors in agricultural communities say the link with pesticides is hard to deny. 

“Iowa has a super high rate (of cancer) and when you look at all of our modifiable risk factors … tobacco, obesity, too many calories, highly processed foods, lack of physical activity, alcohol consumption, getting vaccinated for HPV, sun exposure, and so on, Iowa doesn’t really stand out dramatically at any of those,” said Dr. Richard Deming, medical director at MercyOne Cancer Center in Des Moines. “But one thing that distinguishes Iowa from other states is our environmental exposure to agricultural chemicals.”

Deming and other health experts also point to Iowa’s high radon levels, a naturally occurring radioactive gas produced by uranium and radium.

The state also has high levels of fertilizer-derived nitrate in its water, which has been associated with increased cancer risk. 

“But we use tons of ag chemicals that make it quite likely that the volume of these chemicals is contributing to what we’re seeing in Iowa in terms of the increased incidence of cancer,” Deming said.

A direct correlation can be difficult to determine, as cancer development times can range from months to decades. Overlaying cancer rates onto a map, however, highlights the nation’s top crop and vegetable growing regions, where pesticide use is highest. 

The Midwestern states of Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Missouri — leading corn-growing states — had the highest rates, while rates were also high in California and Florida, high fruit-growing states. 

Lawler, who developed breast cancer in Hardin County, grew up on her family’s 400-acre farm, where her father grew corn and used 2,4-D, a pesticide made by Dow Chemicals. She and her siblings moved out of state after high school, but Lawler returned in 2010. 

Pesticides have become indispensable in farming, Lawler acknowledged, but she wishes more people would ask questions about the risks. 

“We change products all the time when we learn about the health impacts,” Lawler said. 

As lawsuits mount, Bayer pushes state laws to limit liability

In early 2022, Rodrigo Santos had just been promoted to the head of Bayer’s crop sciences division, a prestigious position within the German-based chemical company. But a global pandemic, climate change and a pending war in Ukraine were disrupting the global production and sale of crops — a direct hit to the company’s pesticide sales.

“The global food system is in crisis,” Santos wrote in a column for the World Economic Forum, going on to say that the world needed to grow more food without a significant increase in the amount of land devoted to crops. 

But beyond the pandemic and war, another crisis presented an existential threat to one of the company’s top-selling products. Roundup, the glyphosate-based weed killer produced by Monsanto, which Bayer bought in 2018, had been blamed for causing cancer in thousands of lawsuits. 

In 2019, a California jury ordered Bayer to pay $2 billion in one lawsuit (the amount was later reduced). Since then, more than 65,000 lawsuits have been filed against the company, according to Bayer, and the company has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in settlements. 

Since purchasing Missouri-based Monsanto, Bayer’s stock price has dropped more than 90% over five years. 

In recent years, Bayer executives, including Santos, openly discussed discontinuing glyphosate production. We are “evaluating all the alternatives that we have for the business,” Santos told investors last year when asked about a possible sale of its Roundup division. 

But while Bayer publicly said it was reconsidering its glyphosate business, a review of lobbying disclosure statements, campaign finance records, state legislative records and other documents reveals the world’s largest pesticide company remains committed to expanding its sales. 

Under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the EPA regulates the warning labels on pesticide products. While state-level lawsuits have claimed that federal labeling is insufficient, pesticide companies, including Bayer, have argued that federal regulations should trump state laws. 

Bayer, along with other corporate agriculture groups, has pushed for bills in more than a dozen states that would codify the view that federal labeling regulations are sufficient warning, effectively voiding state-level lawsuits. 

Christiansen, the head of crop science communications for Bayer, disputed that these laws will stop lawsuits and said courts have yet to begin interpreting those that have passed. 

“Folks can still sue a company, and they should if there’s a problem,” Christiansen said. “But the litigation industry has a lot to lose with these (bills) that are out there.” 

Founded by Bayer, the Modern Ag Alliance has lobbied for these bills and promoted opinion articles downplaying the health impacts of pesticides. 

“If farmers lose access to crop protection products because of misguided ideological agendas, U.S. agriculture would be upended, potentially forcing many family farms to shut down and driving up food costs for every American,” said Elizabeth Burns-Thompson, executive director of the Modern Ag Alliance.

The Modern Ag Alliance has spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on state lobbying since 2024.

In Idaho, the organization spent one in four lobbyist dollars last year. In Iowa, Bayer has spent $209,750 on lobbying since 2023, double what the company spent in the previous decade. 

Most of the bills came up short in 2025, but Georgia and North Dakota passed liability shields that will complicate local lawsuits. 

Georgia’s Senate Bill 144, which took effect Jan. 1, received some bipartisan support but was mostly approved by the Republican majority and opposed by Democrats. 

Similar bills have been filed in at least 10 states for this year’s legislative sessions. 

In 2024, the Iowa bill was passed by the state Senate with a 30-to-19 vote. Ahead of a vote in the House last year, farmer and environmental groups lobbied against the bill. 

The session ended without the House taking up a vote. The bill could return in 2026, but Faux, the Iowa farmer, said he also worries about it being “snuck into” another bill or budget agreement. 

“I don’t think we can just assume this fight is over,” Faux said. 

In other states, backlash seemed to stop liability shield bills before they got started.

In Oklahoma, Rep. Dell Kerbs, a Shawnee Republican, authored a pesticide liability shield bill he said was meant to end “frivolous” lawsuits against pesticide makers. 

“What’s happened in our country is we have … judges that have decided they need to be in the labeling business,” Kerbs said when introducing his bill at a Feb. 11, 2025, hearing of the House agriculture committee. 

State Rep. Ty Burns, another Republican, asked Kerbs why he chose to author the bill. 

“I was first approached by Bayer,” Kerbs responded. 

“But this is a labeling bill; it is not an immunity bill. It is just clarifying on EPA labeling regulations,” Kerbs added. “There is nothing that prevents a lawsuit from any single person. This is not giving a free pass to kill people. This simply is saying that a frivolous lawsuit to potentially pad the pocket of somebody who was not reading the label is not a justification to add that to a label through a state district court.” 

But when Burns asked Kerbs about opposition to the bill, especially from many farmers, Kerbs denied receiving any complaints. 

“That is hard to believe,” Burns told Kerbs, “because I have been bombarded.” 

The bill was never presented to the House for a vote. 

After early promises, MAHA walks back pesticide oversight

While liability shield laws have been largely advanced by Republican lawmakers, the push to further regulate pesticides has transcended partisan lines. 

Both left-leaning environmental groups and conservative health movements, which have targeted agrichemicals and some vaccines, have called for reducing or eliminating the use of pesticides. 

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been a longtime critic of pesticides. In a May 2025 report, his Make America Healthy Again commission linked pesticide overuse to children’s health issues, which drew praise from both political camps. 

George Kimbrell, co-executive director of the Center for Food Safety, which has advocated for stronger pesticide regulations, called the initial report a “baby step” forward and said he was encouraged after decades of inaction by the federal government. 

“Going back my entire career, 20-plus years now of doing this work, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Democratic administration or a Republican administration, they have been beholden to and done the wishes of the pesticide industry,” Kimbrell told Investigate Midwest last year. “So, this is a unique moment where … there’s a chance that there could be some positive change in terms of responsible oversight for these toxins.”

Corporate agriculture groups heavily criticized the report, including the American Farm Bureau Federation and CropLife America, a national organization representing many large agrichemical companies, including Bayer, Corteva Agriscience and Syngenta. 

Many of those groups and companies had been large financial backers of Trump. But Kennedy downplayed any concerns that the president would avoid taking a hard position against pesticide companies because of that support. 

“I’ve met every president since my uncle was president, and I’ve never seen a president (like Trump), Democrat or Republican, that is willing to stand up to industry when it’s the right thing to do,” Kennedy said at a May 22, 2025, MAHA commission meeting as the president sat smiling to his right. 

Three months later, Kennedy’s MAHA commission published its final report, which contained no calls to further regulate pesticides. In fact, it called for the federal government to work with large agrichemical companies to ensure public “awareness and confidence” in the EPA’s current pesticide regulations. 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment from Kennedy.

Many of the groups that expressed optimism over the initial report were outraged over the change. 

“This report is … a clear sign that Big Ag, Bayer, and the pesticide industry are firmly embedded in the White House,” said David Murphy, the founder of United We Eat and a former finance director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. 

The Trump administration has employed several pesticide executives, researchers and lobbyists at the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

Kyle Kunker, who was a registered lobbyist for the American Soybean Association, an organization that has advocated for the legal liability shield laws at the state level, was hired last year to oversee pesticide policy at the EPA. 

Three weeks later, the EPA recommended expanded use of dicamba-based herbicides, which federal courts had previously restricted. The EPA proposal was closely aligned with the position of the American Soybean Association. 

In 2025, the EPA also hired Nancy Beck and Lynn Ann Dekleva, both of whom worked with the American Chemistry Council.

Last month, a coalition of MAHA supporters called for the removal of Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA. 

Recent EPA decisions around pesticides “will inevitably lead to higher rates of chronic disease, greater medical costs, and tremendous strain on our healthcare system,” the group stated in a petition circulating online. 

Several prominent MAHA influencers have joined the petition, posting anti-pesticide messages on social media under handles such as The Glyphosate Girl and the Food Babe. “The EPA is acting like the Everyone Poisoned Agency,” wrote Kelly Ryerson, on her Glyphosate Girl Instagram feed. 

As the EPA advances pesticide use, the Trump administration has also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that federal labeling laws invalidate state-level lawsuits. 

“After careful scientific review and an assessment of hundreds of thousands of public comments, EPA has repeatedly determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans, and the agency has repeatedly approved Roundup labels that did not contain cancer warnings,” Trump’s solicitor general wrote in an amicus brief with the Supreme Court. 

However, one of the studies the EPA has often cited in claiming pesticides are safe was recently retracted due to concerns about its authorship and potential conflicts of interest. 

The report, published in 2000 by the scientific journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, claimed Roundup “does not pose a health risk to humans.” The report has been the foundation for numerous other studies, court cases and policy decisions. 

The journal retracted the study last year, noting that court cases had revealed that Monsanto employees had contributed to the study. “This lack of transparency raises serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented,” the retraction stated. 

“This is just one example of how the current process of certifying these chemicals is broken in the U.S.,” said Colleen Fowle, water program director at the Iowa Environmental Council. “At the very least, we’re hoping that this (retraction) eliminates this specific research article from being cited in the future and concentrates more on independent peer-reviewed research as our basis to determine the safety of glyphosate.”

This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Investigate Midwest is an independent, nonprofit newsroom whose mission is to serve the public interest by exposing dangerous and costly practices of influential agricultural corporations and institutions through in-depth and data-driven investigative journalism. Visit online at www.investigatemidwest.org

Pesticide use and cancer risk rise together across America’s heartland is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Rick Bieber reached into the soil, pulled out a handful and took a sniff.

Around him stretched fields of green — an unusual sight for late October in Wisconsin, when harvest is ending and farmers are preparing for winter. Oat and barley grasses, sunflowers, purple top turnip and radish plants blew under a gentle breeze. In the soil in his palm, an earthworm wriggled.

Bieber is the soil adviser for Fields of Sinsinawa, a project intended to help farmers understand what’s happening below the surface and why it matters for the health of people and the planet. The fields are owned by the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa, a congregation of Catholic sisters who have lived for more than 175 years in southwestern Wisconsin at Sinsinawa Mound, overlooking the Mississippi River.

Written into the sisters’ guiding principles is a commitment to share their land for ecological and educational programs to help preserve it for future generations.

As Bieber puts it, “We plant with a purpose.”

Their vision of caring for the Earth as they believe God instructs them is in step with a larger movement happening across the state — and the world — in which faith drives people’s concern for the environment.

Religion can be a powerful motivator for people to pursue environmental stewardship: In a Pew Research Center study from 2022, four in five religiously affiliated Americans completely or mostly agreed that God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a partner of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, is profiling five people or groups in Wisconsin whose environmental actions are driven by their faith. They’re connected by a desire to do good for the Earth, following the writings in their religious texts or the teachings of their spiritual leaders. Importantly, the people drawn into this effort come from different sides of the political spectrum and from many different faiths. That suggests it could be an approach to environmental stewardship that bridges a complicated divide, something especially important as the U.S. government seeks to aggressively roll back environmental protections.

Take the soil, for instance, that Dominican Sister Julie Schwab and the others at Sinsinawa hold so precious.

“Soil is literally the common ground,” Schwab said.

Fields of Sinsinawa

Agriculture is a calling card of the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa. They once farmed the land themselves and are now hosting an organic farming collective and two father-son teams of dairy farmers who produce milk for Organic Valley.

The idea for Fields of Sinsinawa arose from an Ohio farmer named David Brandt, an influential figure in the regenerative farming movement, who was exploring the idea of creating a farmer-led learning center at Sinsinawa Mound. After his death in 2023, a group of like-minded people made it a reality.

The principles of soil health are simple to understand but can be challenging to achieve because our economic system places emphasis on big crop yields. Those at Fields of Sinsinawa believe that soil should be filled with diverse, living roots year-round, which prevents runoff that pollutes waterways and feeds microscopic organisms that can make the soil better suited to support plant life. They want to minimize practices like tilling, which disturb the soil, and encourage grazing livestock on pastures that have time to rest and regrow.

Demonstration fields at the mound are meant to be a “living classroom” that farmers can visit to learn how such regenerative practices work, and more important, why. They host visitors from the next town over and from across the globe, including at their annualSoul of the Soil conference. The on-site dairy farmers work closely with Bieber to try practices out at minimal risk to their business.

“What impresses me most is the deep, deep spirituality of these farmers. They know they’re working with something sacred,” said Sister Sheila Fitzgerald, part of Fields of Sinsinawa’s administrative support team. “It’s a gift, and it’s up to us to keep this gift for the next generation. We do that by learning about this whole sacred environment — the whole blessing of the life that’s in the soil.”

The sisters are also following teachings they see carefully laid out by the late Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical letter, “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.” Earth “cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use,” Francis wrote. “We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth.”

Bieber puts it another way.

“We were formed from the soil, and we’ll go back to the soil,” he said. “Why would you beat it up if it’s going to be your resting place?”

Wisconsin Green Muslims

The same year Francis released his letter, Muslim leaders from around the world published the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, which calls for a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and directs Muslims worldwide to tackle climate change and environmental degradation.

Huda Alkaff was already hard at work. Alkaff founded Wisconsin Green Muslims in 2005 to educate people about Islamic teachings of environmental justice and apply those teachings in real life.

The Earth is mentioned more than 450 times in the Quran, Alkaff said, instructing Muslims to maintain its balance and not upset the order of creation.

“The true practice of Islam really means living simply, treading lightly on Earth, caring for our neighbors and all creatures, standing up for justice, and collaborating with others to care for our shared home,” she said.

Now in its 20th year, Wisconsin Green Muslims has pushed for action on a wide range of environmental issues, including clean drinking water and air, renewable energy, waste reduction and healthy food, with a focus on helping marginalized communities that are disproportionately impacted by environmental problems. The group rotates through these issues monthly, Alkaff said, bringing new people into the fold based on their interests.

Since its beginning, the group has promoted Green Ramadan during the Islamic holy month, encouraging small daily actions to care for the environment such as switching to e-billing or biking to the mosque. Green Ramadan has spread to at least 20 states, Alkaff said.

Alkaff also leads two interfaith organizations: Wisconsin Faith and Solar, which aims to help faith congregations across the state to implement solar energy, and Faithful Rainwater Harvesting for sustainable water collection.

“We see sunlight and water as the commons — everyone should have access to them,” she said. “We need to appreciate them and welcome them responsibly into our homes, congregations and lives.”

Calvin DeWitt

Calvin DeWitt is a household name at the cross section of Christianity and the environment. He lists as friends Al Gore and environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, tells of having given a speech at the ranch of the late Robert Redford, a stalwart environmental advocate, and has been a leading voice for  “greening up” the Christian right.

DeWitt’s story started in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he cared for a pet turtle. For 25 years, he led the Au Sable Institute in Michigan, which offers environmental science courses to students from dozens of Christian colleges. He also taught environmental studies classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Now 90, he lives in the Waubesa Wetlands outside Madison, which he helped establish as a nature preserve.

He’s still publishing papers, running field trips and otherwise speaking loudly about caring for the Earth because, as he puts it, “I can’t think of anything more pleasurable to do.”

DeWitt has become a master at tailoring his message to make the most impact. Some of his most storied work is with evangelical Christians, fewer of whom believe climate change is a serious problem compared with other major religions, according to the2022 Pew study. He was a founding member of the Evangelical Environmental Network, which promotes evangelicals “rediscovering and reclaiming the biblical mandate to care for creation.”

“Someone’s twiddling with the thermostat” is a phrase he might say to enter into a conversation about the world heating up with someone who’d get turned off by the term global warming. In other scenarios, “if you come up with a religious point of view, you’re actually asking for trouble,” he said.

Most often, though, DeWitt tries to boil it down to the development of community, which he said is central to overcoming differences.

Several years ago, a neighbor turned to him while leaving a town hall and said, “Cal, this is just like going to church,” DeWitt recalled. A real community is about love, he said, which extends to love for the land.

“It’s contagious,” he said.

Dekila Chungyalpa and the Loka Initiative

Dekila Chungyalpa once felt like she was living two different lives. By day, she worked as an environmental scientist in the U.S. By night, she was a practicing Tibetan Buddhist. She didn’t know how to bring the two together, and it hurt.

Chungyalpa decided to return to the Himalayas, where she was born, to work with the 17th karmapa, head of the Karma Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. In 2007, she watched him speak to thousands of Buddhists, citing a Buddhist prayer to alleviate the suffering of all beings in his call for those watching to become vegetarians. Livestock production makes up about 14.5% of human-driven greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change.

“That was my moment of awakening. My hand was rising along with all these people,” Chungyalpa said. “People were not doing it because of science or policy, but because a faith leader told them to live up to their faith value.”

The idea that religious leaders could shepherd people toward environmental stewardship sparked something in her. The spark was there when she helped found Khoryug, an association of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries working on environmental protection and resilience to climate change. It also was there when she began the Loka Initiative inside UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds.

Today, the Loka Initiative has two goals. One is working with faith and Indigenous leaders to bring home environmental solutions that feel authentic to them. The other is developing courses that teach contemplative practices, like meditation, somatic healing and even singing, to combat grief and anxiety over the effects of environmental degradation. One recent course, “Psychology of Deep Resilience,” was taken by more than 1,550 students in 70-plus countries, she said.

Chungyalpa sees the immense power in religiously affiliated people to take action for the good of the Earth.More than 75% of people around the world identify with a religion. And religious groups, as major owners of land and buildings, can do so much, from adopting soil health practices to adding solar panels.

“They reach parts of the population scientists never can,” she said.

North Shore Interfaith Green Team

The group of people who gathered at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun in River Hills Nov. 3 had many differences: different cities, different political persuasions and different faiths.

What unites the North Shore Interfaith Green Team is a belief that religious people have a duty to care for creation and a desire to make that happen. Reenie Kavalar, of Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun, began the meeting with a reading from the Talmud, a foundational Jewish text.

“‘See My creations, how beautiful and exemplary they are. Everything I created, I created for you. Make certain that you do not ruin and destroy My world, as if you destroy it, there will be no one to mend it after you,'” Kavalar read. 

She paused and reflected, “I’m thinking – if it’s not up to us, who’s it going to be up to?”

The Green Team’s members are from Conservative and Reform Jewish synagogues, Catholic parishes, and Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches.

Although the group is new, it is ambitious: In April they hosted an electronics recycling drive, which they said saved 20,000 pounds of electronics from the landfill, and they split the money they made among congregations to pursue other environmental projects. For example, Fox Point Lutheran is working on expanding its pollinator garden, said member Anne Noyes. It also spawned conversations about other types of potential efforts, such as clothes recycling and composting.

In 2026, the group will hold two more electronics recycling drives in April and will begin a partnership with Schlitz Audubon Nature Center involving volunteer conservation days. Members hope that by working together, they can come up with new ideas and tackle projects that might be impossible alone.

Susan Toman, of Christ Church Episcopal in Whitefish Bay, said she joined the Green Team in part because she sees it as a way to overcome polarization.

In many respects, her sentiment reflects the movement connecting faith and the environment, whether it’s on Milwaukee’s busy North Shore or across the state on the rural farm fields at Sinsinawa Mound.

“This is a model for how people who could be drawing a line in the sand about our differences instead are saying, ‘Let’s talk about the things that we all agree upon,'” Toman said, “something that comes from the depths of our hearts.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

For these faithful, nurturing the Earth is rooted in spiritual beliefs is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

From the docks of the Port of Santos, a 58-terminal complex covering an area the size of 1,500 American football fields, ships loaded with soybeans prepare to set sail for China. 

Less than 45 miles from São Paulo, the port services nearly a quarter of Brazil’s soybean exports. For decades, U.S. agribusiness giants like Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill have operated facilities at the port. 

Today, they share space with COFCO International, China’s state-owned food conglomerate, which has invested around $285 million in recent years. The expansion will make it the port’s largest dry bulk terminal.

And Santos isn’t alone. In the west, the Port of Chancay is rising on Peru’s central coast.

COSCO Shipping, a state-owned Chinese company, is investing at least $3.5 billion to construct 15 berths, logistics facilities and a 1.1-mile tunnel, enabling cargo to be channeled directly from the port to nearby highways.

Once fully operational, Chancay will function as a regional redistribution hub for exports from Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia: from copper and lithium to soybeans and other agricultural products. Upon completion around 2035, it is expected to become the region’s third-largest port.

These and other recent investments across the region have positioned China to source more agricultural products from Latin America as it pivots away from U.S. farmers in response to President Trump’s higher tariffs. 

China first began that pivot in 2018, when Trump’s first-term tariff hikes ignited a global trade war. But since returning to office, the president has renewed that strategy, and China’s investments signal a generational shift that may not reverse if and when the trade war subsides. 

“What are the signs that China’s here to stay (in Latin America)? Really, the infrastructure,” said Henry Ziemer, an associate fellow with the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a U.S. nonprofit policy research organization that reports 23 ports across Latin America have some degree of Chinese investment.  

“Ports, railways, roads, bridges, metro lines, energy, power plants are probably the best signs that China has a long-term commitment … These are long-term projects.”

Daniel Munch, an economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, said that when a country gains control over ports that make trade faster, cheaper and more reliable, such as the Port of Chancay, trade flows tend to “lock in.” Reversing that trend, he warned, would require the United States to narrow its efficiency gap, noting that none of its container ports rank among the world’s top 50.

“It could entrench patterns,” Munch said.

This is bad news for American farmers, particularly soybean growers. 

Soybeans are a cornerstone of American agriculture, particularly in the Midwest. Nationwide, more than 270,000 farms grow the crop, according to the latest Census of Agriculture. In Illinois, nearly half of all farms depend on soybean production, and in Iowa and Minnesota, about four in 10 do.

In 2024, more than 40% of U.S. soybean production was exported, with about half going to China.

But tensions between the United States and China have risen this year – Trump has increased tariffs and recently threatened a 157% tax on all Chinese imports, while China responded by reducing U.S. soybean imports to near zero for six months. 

A trade deal announced in November ends the suspension and includes commitments for China to buy 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans in the final two months of 2025 and at least 25 million metric tons annually through 2028, according to Purdue University and farmdoc Daily. 

Brazil has stepped in as China’s biggest supplier of soybeans, which are used to feed livestock to support protein demand. 

China has become one of the two main export markets for at least 10 nations, most of them in South America, according to the International Trade Outlook for Latin America and the Caribbean 2023 report by the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

From 2010 to 2022, the region accounted for nearly one-third of China’s food imports. Brazil alone supplied about 21% of those imports over the same period.

“In recent years, there has been significant growth in telecommunications projects and across all areas of transportation – including airports, ports, roads, railways, and subways – as well as in sanitation and urban mobility. These sectors account for nearly 60% of the total number of projects,” said José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, executive secretary of ECLAC, who highlighted the scale of China’s involvement during the 2024 International Seminar on Contemporary China Studies in Costa Rica.

China has viewed Brazil as a strategic partner for several years, primarily because of its soybean supply, and has responded with infrastructure investments, according to Fernando Bastiani, a researcher with ESALQ-LOG, the Group of Research and Extension in Agroindustrial Logistics at the University of São Paulo.

“Today, COFCO has direct access to farmers, purchases soybeans and oversees the entire commercialization chain, including storage and transport to China,” Bastiani said. “In recent years, (COFCO) has also realized it needs to control logistics systems and infrastructure, because that’s a key part.”

In Brazil, Bastiani explained, logistics costs account for 20% to 25% of the final soybean price, mainly due to the long distances between farms and ports and the high cost of trucking. “China understood that by investing in infrastructure, it could help make Brazil more competitive,” he said.

In May, the two countries signed new agreements to deepen their agricultural trade ties, granting Brazil authorization to export meat and ethanol byproducts. 

“Amid the changing and turbulent international landscape, China and Brazil should remain committed to the original aspiration of contributing to human progress and global development,” said Chinese President Xi Jinping.

China’s pullback squeezes US port volumes  

While Latin America has seen growth, many U.S. ports have experienced a significant decline in business.

At the New Orleans District — a dominant grain corridor — soybean exports grew by less than 3% between September 2024 and September 2025, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics at the U.S. Department of Transportation. Shipments through the Los Angeles District fell almost 15%, while the steepest drop came in the Seattle District, where exports plunged 81%.

Nearly half of all U.S. corn, soybean and wheat exports move through the Mississippi River system, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s Market Intel report.

This major inland trade artery connects the Midwest’s farming regions to the Gulf of Mexico, carrying an average of 65 million metric tons annually of bulk agricultural products by barge over the past five years to export terminals near New Orleans, where shipments depart for international markets.

“The facilities that purchase soybeans from farmers extend to our freight railroads, where they don’t have as much volume that they’ve been moving, at least for soybeans,” said Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition. 

Steenhoek noted that corn exports have remained strong, which has helped sustain some port activity — but it hasn’t solved the underlying problem: “China imports more U.S. soybeans than all of our other international customers combined,” he said.

At the Port of Los Angeles, the largest container port in the Western Hemisphere, agricultural exports have also weakened as trade with China cools.

“Exports in general have been very soft, and we attributed it to the retaliatory tariffs that have been put in place by China,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles. “Our single biggest export sector is agriculture … of that, soybeans are the number one export commodity.”

Before the first tariffs were introduced in 2018, China accounted for about 60% of the port’s business. Today, it’s closer to 40% and falling, as trade flows and sourcing shift toward countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. 

“We’ve been very aggressive in finding cargo out of other countries,” Seroka said. “But there is no doubt in my mind that we are concerned every day that these policies could impact the amount of cargo that comes to Los Angeles.”

The decrease in exports is not just a hit to farmers, but also to port workers; each four containers handled at the port generates one job, according to Seroka.

“In Southern California, one in nine people has a job related to this port,” said Seroka, referring to dockworkers, truck drivers, brokers and warehouse employees. “It truly is a conversation of national significance.”

U.S. port traffic isn’t poised for a quick rebound despite a recent trade agreement that ends China’s suspension of U.S. soybean imports. After six months of near-zero shipments due to retaliatory trade measures, Beijing in November agreed to purchase 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans in the final two months of 2025 and to commit to annual purchases of at least 25 million tons through 2028.

A recent analysis from Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture and farmdoc Daily said the announcement offered some relief to U.S. farmers at the tail end of harvest, but overall exports to China this year are still on track to be the weakest since 2018, when trade tensions during the first Trump administration slashed volumes to 8 million tons.

“It is very difficult to take a market (China) of over a billion people and replace that,” said John Bartman, a soybean farmer from Marengo, Illinois.

By October, Brazil had exported a record 79 million metric tons of soybeans to China, nearly 80% of its total soybean shipments during the period, according to a farmdoc Daily analysis of data from Brazil’s Foreign Trade Secretariat. Brazil’s total soybean exports reached about 100 million tons between January and October, already surpassing the country’s full-year total for 2024, which was just under 99 million tons.

“U.S. soybean farmers are standing at a trade and financial precipice,” Caleb Ragland, president of the American Soybean Association, wrote in a statement. 

US trade strategy remains unsettled as China moves ahead

While China builds long-term infrastructure to secure its supply chains, Washington is still struggling to define its trade strategy and to contain the political fallout of renewed tariffs.

In mid-September, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives moved to block Congress from influencing Trump’s tariff policy, even as Senate Democrats prepared to force votes challenging his trade war, The New York Times reported. The maneuver effectively stripped lawmakers of the ability to advance measures to lift tariffs until March 31, 2026, extending a prohibition first imposed in the spring to spare members from taking a politically difficult vote.

“Tariffs not only cause farmers to pay more for their inputs, but they have also seen tariffs reduce markets for U.S. farm products,” said U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, during an October session.

If the November soybean agreement between Trump and the Chinese president holds, Beijing’s purchases would still fall short of recent norms. Even if China buys at least 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually over the next three years, that volume would remain about 14% below the five-year average shipped to China from 2020 to 2024, according to an analysis from Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture and farmdoc Daily.

Some purchases have started rolling in. But April Hemmes, an Iowa soybean farmer who has promoted increased trade with China, said the agreement would be difficult to fulfill, noting that delivering 12 million metric tons of soybeans by early next year is “not very realistic.”  

As China establishes new trade routes across Latin America, every new port or shipping lane makes a future recovery for U.S. farmers more challenging.

Despite the tensions, Hemmes still views China as an essential market. 

“I don’t think our relationship with China has been damaged,” the Iowa soybean farmer said. “China is a low-cost buyer and will need soybeans from the U.S. for a long time. But we will never be their number one source.”

For her, the changing politics and policies have made the United States an “unreliable trading partner.”

“The only way that we become their top choice would be if our soybeans were far cheaper than South America’s.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

China is investing billions in Latin America, potentially sidelining US farmers for decades to come is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Tyler Stafslien is a fourth-generation farmer who’s worked his family’s land in central North Dakota for about 20 years. Roughly half of his 2,500 acres is typically dedicated to soybeans, a major crop in the state and in the Mississippi River Basin. But growing soybeans has become less profitable over the last decade as input costs rose and the Trump administration’s tariff negotiations in 2018 and 2025 destabilized trade and strained farmers’ incomes. 

This year, wary of the precarious export market, Stafslien decreased his soybean acres by half.

“We’ve been experiencing in ag, the last couple of years, a downturn in commodity prices, a lot of that related to just a large supply across the globe of major commodities, but then you add this trade war on top of it, and it’s like the icing on the cake,” Stafslien said.

The administration this month announced a $12 billion fund for one-time payments to row crop farmers to offset a portion of their inflation- and trade-related losses in the 2025 crop year.

Farmers were asking for the federal relief funds and are happy the administration is finally answering, said Stafslien. But he’s still facing uncertainty. The administration has yet to announce how much money per acre eligible growers will be receiving, and the funds will not be distributed until February, further stressing farmers like him with large debt and growing interest.

“Payments announced this week must be followed by additional and expedient efforts to keep farmers on the land and to improve the farm safety net, leaving annual bailouts as cautionary historical context rather than ongoing policy,” David Howard, policy development director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, wrote in a statement earlier in December. 

Farmers and farming associations are looking for longer-term solutions: to diversify trade partners and increase domestic uses for soybeans as export revenues become less certain. Some, like Stafslien, are shifting to other crops, like corn and wheat.

Soybeans are the largest agricultural export in the U.S. The legume covers more than 81 million acres — or 10% — of all U.S. farmland, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in September, and more than 40% of the nation’s soybeans are exported to other countries. 

U.S. farmers received $24.5 billion from soybean exports in 2024, with Chinese purchases accounting for $12.6 billion – roughly twice the amount purchased by the next five largest export partners combined, according to USDA data.

But this year, China stopped purchasing U.S. soybeans during tariff negotiations with the Trump administration, instead falling back on its relationships with Brazil and other South American countries to meet its soybean needs. For U.S. soybean farmers, this growing season ends with low prices, unsold harvests, big financial losses and uncertainty going into the next season despite a tentative new deal with China. 

“We learned firsthand that being heavily reliant on China for export sales is only good when things are good,” said Andrew Muhammad, University of Tennessee professor of agricultural and resource economics.

How did we get here?

Soybeans brought by traders and missionaries from Asia first took root in North America in small quantities in the 1700s, but the USDA did not begin tracking soybeans as a crop until the early 1920s. 

Around that time, the USDA, land grant university extension agents and farm groups started to promote the soybean to farmers as a soil-fertilizing crop that yielded high-protein meal for animal feed, oil and even meat replacements for human consumption. The Mississippi River Basin’s flat plains and intermittent rain proved to be ideal conditions for the crop. 

Soybeans gained a foothold on U.S. farms in “fits and starts” over several decades, author Matthew Roth writes in his book, “Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America,” but really took off  as a cash crop after World War I. Its success was later buoyed by the Agricultural Adjustment Act that allowed soy plantings while restricting other commodities as a way to stabilize crop prices during the Great Depression, policies limiting foreign oils, and the growing need for animal feed and oil during World War II, according to Roth.

The crop helped diversify farming in the South and Midwest. By the 1960s, Roth writes, “the soybean had insinuated itself thoroughly into the American diet,” but indirectly – as feed for the country’s livestock, oils for salads and derivatives in processed foods.

At the same time, soybeans proved to be a desirable product for international trade partners. In 1989, U.S. soybean exports totaled around $4 billion, about a fifth of which went to Japan. The Freedom to Farm Act in 1996 allowed farmers to plant single-crop fields, and with rising export demand from China starting in the early 1990s, many farmers chose to plant soybeans, Roth wrote.

In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization and gained better access to globalized trade with the organization’s members, including the U.S., according to Muhammad and the Council on Foreign Relations. From there, growth in China’s tourism economy and middle class spurred increased demand for meat protein, Muhammad said, heightening the country’s need for animal feed in the form of U.S. soybeans. 

By 2000, the crop was planted on more than 74 million U.S. acres, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

“Over time, China has grown, and it seems to be the case that our total export sales have grown with our exports to China,” Muhammad explained. “They’ve sort of driven that rise over the last two decades.”

Brazil’s soybean industry has competed with American exports since the 1970s, but since 2017 has consistently exported more than the U.S. 

When Trump first upped tariffs on Chinese goods in 2018, China retaliated, Muhammad said, and began investing more heavily in purchases and transportation infrastructure in Brazil. The turn toward Brazil as a primary provider during trade negotiations in 2025 “represents a return on that investment (for China),” he said.

Farmers in the U.S. are reckoning with the fallout. 

Farming pains and changing plans

Justin Sherlock farms 2,400 acres of corn and soybeans in eastern North Dakota. His dad started farming in the early 2000s and he took over the farm in 2012.

“The last, you know, 13 years that I’ve been going, the last decade, has been pretty tough to really try and get established,” he said. 

For Sherlock, China coming to market very late in the 2025 harvest season was a blow to profits. Nearly one-quarter of the state’s agricultural exports hinge on soybeans, with China serving as the largest market for U.S. grain.

Sherlock was able to sell most of his soybean crop early to North Dakota soybean elevators — facilities that store the beans — which then found domestic processors in Nebraska and Kansas to sell to. But those domestic markets were also absorbing the supply that would typically be exported to China, so prices — around $8.65 per bushel — dropped significantly below Sherlock’s cost of production. He said he will lose “several hundred thousands of dollars” this year, on top of similar losses last year. 

“We just have to find a way to hopefully make it to next year,” he said. “That’s the struggle right now for a lot of producers.” 

Especially for young or beginning producers, said Sherlock, farmers will likely be having “tough financial discussions with their bankers and lenders.” Or, worst case scenario, these losses could mean losing their farms.

“You cannot have a successful agriculture industry in North Dakota without trade,” he said. “It’s so important that we fix these trade relationships and get back to doing business with other countries.” 

Trade uncertainty was keenly felt by soybean farmers in several Mississippi River Basin states, many of which lead the nation in soybean production and exports. 

Illinois accounts for 16% of the country’s total soybean exports, followed by Iowa with 13%, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. North Dakota comprises 5% of national exports.

Even in states that aren’t among the country’s top producers, soybeans can make up a significant portion of the state farm economy. Tennessee ranks 16th in the nation for soybean exports, for example, but soybeans were the highest-ranked agricultural commodity produced in the state in 2023, bringing in more than $990 million in cash receipts. In 2025, soybeans covered nearly 1.5 million acres of Tennessee farmland – the most of any crop in the state – according to the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture.

The USDA’s Economic Research Service reported in July that more soybeans are being processed domestically. Most of the soybeans that stay in the U.S. are crushed into oil and meal, and a majority of that meal goes toward feeding livestock. The oil is used in biofuels, for industrial uses, and in food. New crush facilities that separate the beans into oil and meal are under construction in North Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas and Ohio — states that previously shipped soybeans to other countries to be processed. Biofuel has increased domestic demand for soybeans — and crush facilities — since around 2010, providing an alternative for farmers facing lower demand from traditional export partners.

April Hemmes, a fourth-generation farmer in north-central Iowa, said in September that she is fortunate to have nearby options for her beans: There is an ethanol plant and a crush facility that makes soybean meal, biodiesel and food-grade oil, about 10 miles away from her farm. Farmers who don’t have those options will have a harder time adapting to changing export markets, she wrote in an email.

The lack of money in farmers’ pockets is trickling down to other sectors in farming communities, too, said John Bartman, a regenerative farmer working about 850 acres in northern Illinois. He pointed to farm equipment dealers and factories in Illinois and Iowa that are shuttering well-paying jobs because business has been so slow. 

“So it’s more than just farmers who have been affected by this,” Bartman said. 

What comes next? 

In October, China and the U.S. hammered out a trade agreement. China agreed to purchase at least 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans by the end of the year, according to the White House, and will purchase at least 25 million metric tons each year through 2028. USDA export sales data from Oct. 2 through Dec. 8 shows China made soybean purchases from the U.S. totaling about 2.8 million metric tons.

For comparison, China purchased an annual average of 29 million metric tons of soybeans from the United States between 2020 and 2024, according to The Center for Strategic and International Studies, an international public policy think tank.

The deal “really isn’t much of a trade deal at all,” Bartman said.

“We’ve just gone through this tariff war, which we’re still going through right now, and what did we get out of it? China agreed to buy less soybeans than what we had last year, and we as farmers have suffered the collateral damage from this,” Bartman said.

With low trade prices and higher input costs, he warned, “we have not improved our economic situation for next year.”

Bartman is among farmers who are promoting investment in domestic uses for soybeans, including biofuels and plastics, though he acknowledges that a market the size of China’s will be “very difficult” to replace.

Muhammad said the turbulence in the soybean exports market shows that disruption of stable trade policy has consequences, which can hurt some sectors more than others.

The U.S. agriculture sector is often a political target in trade disputes, he said, because other countries understand the agricultural community’s significance in U.S. politics.

“It’s not a major export in the context of all exports, but it’s a politically viable community, and it carries a lot of heft in the context of trade agreements and trade policy because of the national security nature of food,” Muhammad said.

Farmers who are eligible for the Trump administration’s $12 billion Farmer Bridge Assistance program should expect the USDA to announce payment rates for crops the week of Dec. 22, according to the department. Payments are limited to up to $155,000 per person or legal entity.

The program appears similar to a $10 billion aid package offered to farmers impacted by trade retaliation in 2018. Those subsidies did not cover all of farmers’ losses. 

For many farmers like Sherlock, these subsidies are a necessity for short-term survival. He said any farming subsidies he receives go straight to paying his bills and paying off loans.

“There will be a lot of producers, especially young, beginning producers, who won’t be able to make it and farm next year if we don’t do something to help them pay their bills from this year,” he said.

Even established producers are worried. Stafslien works land that’s been in his family since 1912, but the tough years are piling up. 

“This is my future. This is my retirement. I don’t have a 401k plan. I have a farm,” said Stafslien, who lives on the farm with his wife, Shannon, and their two kids. “If I have to keep burning through this equity, that’s very, very scary for my future and my family’s future.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Soybeans have been a top US ag export for decades. What happens when the top buyer stops buying? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

When Levi Lyle was just six years old, his father was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.

With treatment, his father survived his diagnosis. The ordeal changed how he farmed. 

“It created an openness in his approach to farming to start doing things differently,” Lyle said.

His father started no-till farming when the practice was still rare in Iowa. A decade ago, when Lyle, now 47, moved back to the family farm, he and his father jumped into organic farming.

“My experiences seeing my father overcome cancer, along with the Agricultural Health Survey’s Midwest cancer statistics, which point to a rural health crisis, inspire me to farm differently,” he said.

Today, Lyle grows corn and soybeans in Keokuk County, in southeast Iowa. Lyle farms about 250 acres, with 40 acres of that organic-certified. His father farms an additional 250 acres. 

Lyle said introducing cover crops into his practice was a “no-brainer.” 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, cover crops are usually grasses or legumes that are planted between cash crop seasons to provide soil cover and improve soil health. Cover crops can reduce erosion and compaction, improve soil’s ability to hold water, reduce nutrient runoff, suppress weeds, as well as provide other services.

Despite being an advocate for cover crops, Lyle said the practice does present challenges.

“The initial challenge is that there is more labor involved,” Lyle said. Cover crops “do not pay for themselves in the short run.” 

In the U.S. more than 153,000 farms had land planted in cover crops in 2022.

In Iowa specifically, the use of cover crops has expanded significantly in recent years, growing from 1.3 million acres in 2022 to 3.8 million acres in 2024. 

The conservation practice is promoted by the state through cost share incentives. It’s an effort by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship to reduce the nutrients that go into local waters, make their way into the Mississippi River and ultimately contribute to the Gulf Dead Zone, an annually reoccurring area of reduced oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico.

According to the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, an initiative aimed at reducing nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into Iowa’s waterways, to achieve 45% nutrient reduction will require about 14 million additional acres of cover crops to be planted.

But a study published in July 2025 in the Society & Natural Resources Journal found that while the number of acres being planted with cover crops has grown, many farmers abandon the practice after one year.

“This study shows that adoption is not a one-time decision — it’s a dynamic process influenced by a range of factors,” co-author Suraj Upadhaya, assistant professor of sustainable systems at Kentucky State University, said in a news release about the study. 

Why do farmers abandon cover crops? 

Chris Morris, a postdoctoral research associate at Iowa State University, was part of a research team that interviewed more than 3,000 Iowa farmers between 2015 and 2019.

The survey showed that nearly 20% of the farmers who reported planting cover crops on their land the first year had ceased using them the following year.

However, the survey found that most of those farmers (15%) would be open to resuming the practice in the future.

Only about 4% of the farmers who participated in the survey said they have no intention of using cover crops again.

“What we found was a whole lot more shifting back and forth than we anticipated,” J. Arbuckle, professor of rural sociology at ISU, said.

Nationwide, in 2022, nearly 18 million acres, or 4.7% of total U.S. cropland, had cover crops, up 17% from 2017.

Cover crop use is most common in the eastern U.S. In states along the Mississippi River, Iowa had the most acreage with cover crops in 2022, but Wisconsin had the highest percentage of its cropland using cover crops, at nearly 8%. All 10 states saw an increase in cover crop usage from 2012 to 2022, though some states, like Tennessee and Kentucky, saw a drop in cover crop use from 2017 to 2022.

Experts say cover crops present challenges to farmers that can act as barriers to permanent adoption.

Anna Morrow, senior program manager with the Midwest Cover Crops Council, said one hurdle is that cover crop planting overlaps with the busy harvest season.

“Cover crops are a practice where a lot of the labor is right at a peak labor time in our season, right? So obviously (farmers) have to prioritize the cash crop so that they get paid,” Morrow said.

“It’s complicated because a lot of farmers are doing the cover crops in the winter, so between getting the current crop harvested, planting the cover crop, getting that terminated before the next crop, if this cover crop is not going to work in that schedule, it’s going to be abandoned,” Morris said.

Morris said barriers beyond timing abound, too, like the cost of purchasing and planting cover crops, balancing the cover crops with other farm work, and challenges that come with farming on rented land.

“A lot of farmers are in really short-term leases, and a lot of farmers feel like landlords aren’t interested in investing in conservation practices on rented land because they may or may not be farming that land one or two or three years from now,” Arbuckle said.

In Lyle’s case, he owns the 40 acres he uses for organic farming, but he and his father lease the rest of their land. They plant cover crops on both the land they own and rent.

Lyle said for him it’s “economically justifiable” to plant cover crops on his leased land because he expects a “reduction in number of field passes, reduced herbicides and reduced fertilizer use due to the nutrient scavenging capacity of cover crops.”

To address cost barriers and encourage the use of cover crops, various federal and state programs offer cost-share incentives. Lyle said this year he has been awarded cover crop funding for 150 acres, getting paid $10 per acre. On average, it costs producers about $60 per acre to pay for cover crops.

Morris said these programs are helpful, but farmers told him they often don’t pay enough, require complicated, time-sucking paperwork and only last one to three years. 

But cover crops are a long game, Morris said. While use of cover crops can reduce the need for fertilizer, increase soil health and lead to better productivity, he said those benefits can be difficult to measure and can take years to materialize.

“It’s hard for farmers to justify that high economic cost of cover crops in any given year if there’s not going to be an immediate payoff. Most of these farmers are making marginal profits in any given year, if any, and some are at a net loss. So, there’s a huge weight on farmers’ shoulders of trying to keep the farm going, especially if it’s a farm that’s been in their families for generations,” Morris said. “Anything that could potentially put them out of business is going to seem like a threat.” 

Finding new solutions 

Cover crops are generally not harvested; rather, their benefits come from simply being on the land. At the end of their life they’re terminated using herbicides or manual methods, like mowing, and tilled into the soil or left atop it as mulch.

But the Forever Green Initiative, which is housed at the University of Minnesota, works to increase cover crop adoption in Minnesota by developing varieties that can improve soil health and also be harvested for sale. 

“Agricultural science has not focused on this until very recently, so there are very few options for farmers to do that,” said Mitch Hunter, co-director of the Forever Green Initiative. “We’re working on over 15 different species, and they’re all aimed at filling that niche of a harvestable over winter crop that is winter hardy in the Upper Midwest that can fit into existing crop rotations or become part of a more diverse rotation and as a market.” 

He said some commercial and harvestable cover crops have included winter camelina and the perennial grain Kernza, a cousin to annual wheat. He said those crops are “on the cusp of being commercial.” Commercialized cover crops also include alfalfa, winter barley and winter durum.

“The whole point is to fill that gap,” Hunter said.

Pivoting to cover crops that can be harvested and sold is a “natural progression” for many farmers, Morrow said.

“If they start to try cover crops, and they say, ‘Hey, this is working, and I’m seeing benefits.’ And then they’ll say, ‘Well, why can’t I do a winter annual crop and get some cash from this?’” Morrow said. “The Midwest (is) pretty focused on corn and soybeans, but I think there’s some growing interest in winter, annual cash crops.” 

Meanwhile, the overall number of acres invested in cover crop practices has been increasing in recent years, even with some disadoption.  

“This study really reflects that farming is a year-to-year business,” said Sean Stokes, research director at the Rodale Institute Midwest Organic Center in Marion, Iowa. “A farmer might only plant a cover crop, like cereal rye, before soybeans, and then when they go to corn the next year, they might not plant that again. But then when they go back to soybeans, they might use cover crops again.”

“Every farmer and every farm is unique, and they’re all going to have different motivations for what’s driving their cover crop adoption,” he said.

Stokes said these motivations could include concerns over water quality or improving soil health.

“For a lot of farmers, it’s a business decision,” Stokes said. “Are they going to see more money per acre in the following years when using cover crops or are they going to lose money? That’s where there is some risk.”

For Lyle, it’s a risk work taking. 

“Every acre in the Midwest would benefit from being cover cropped,” Lyle said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

As cover crop use grows, many farmers struggle to commit to the practice is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

After months of uncertainty over its future, an online resource for tracking the financial cost of weather and climate disasters throughout the United States has been revived.

The U.S. Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database was previously managed by a team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. Since 1980, the program has been responsible for analyzing wildfires, tornadoes, winter storms, and other disasters that cause at least $1 billion in damage. But it was retired in May, one among several NOAA products and services to get shuttered by President Donald Trump’s administration this year. 

Now, a nonprofit called Climate Central, which communicates climate change science and solutions, has hired the scientist who led the project at NOAA, Adam Smith, and has taken on the responsibility of compiling and releasing the latest data.

In the first six months of 2025, there were 14 disasters with damages costing just over $101 billion in total. Many of them occurred throughout the Mississippi River Basin — states like Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee were among the hardest hit by severe storms and tornadoes, which caused just over $40 billion in damage. 

Wisconsin saw $1.1 billion in severe storm damage in early 2025 — part of the more than $5 billion in such damage since 2021.  

The January wildfires in Los Angeles resulted in approximately $60 billion in damages, making it the most expensive wildfire on record. 

Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at Climate Central, said the Climate Central staff brought back the database because they “were hearing from every single sector how important this data is for decision-making and understanding areas that are increasingly at risk for billion-dollar disasters.” 

Among those who have typically relied on the database are policymakers, researchers and local communities. It’s especially important for planning disaster relief and emergency management efforts “because they can focus resources on areas that are seeing big trends in the number of billion-dollars disasters,” Labe said.

Bryan Koon, the president and chief executive officer of the consulting firm Innovative Emergency Management, said the analysis is helpful. His company works with government agencies and other organizations to help with disaster preparedness, response and recovery. 

“These kinds of data sets are very important in the broad scope, at least from my perspective, for trend analysis,” Koon said. 

In states like Missouri, for example, he said his company and other interest groups can analyze previous billion-dollar disaster data on tornadoes and their frequency over the past decade or two. That information can be used to inform how insurance companies write their policy, how buildings are designed and how notification systems are structured.

“I want to make sure that we, as a nation, wrap our arms around as much information about these things as we can so that we communicate the threat of future disasters for Americans,” Koon said. 

The Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative — a cooperative of more than 100 communities between Minnesota and Louisiana — pushed the Trump administration to keep the database open, according to the cooperative’s executive director, Colin Wellenkamp.

“It was a critical database that showed us where costs associated with disasters were most impactful. What sectors of the economy were hit the hardest by a disaster? Whether it be intense heat, flooding, drought, forest fire, named storm event, or otherwise,” Wellenkamp said.

From a cost-benefit analysis standpoint, said Wellenkamp, the database can tell cities, counties and states how to spend resources on mitigation to avoid incurring similar costs from future disasters. But industries like manufacturing, construction and agriculture also want to see the data, he said. That’s because the database’s financial impact analysis includes physical damage to commercial and residential property, losses associated with business interruption and crop destruction, damage to electrical infrastructure, and more.

Other stakeholders that see the value of the database are both the insurance and re-insurance industries.

Franklin Nutter is the president of the Reinsurance Association of America, one of the largest trade groups in the country. The goal of reinsurance is to provide insurance for the insurance companies, stabilizing the industry and playing a role in “the financial management of natural disaster losses,” according to the RAA’s website. 

“It’s like an iceberg: the public is made aware of the impact of extreme weather by seeing the graphics (the tip of the iceberg) but most commercial users value the underlying data (the body of the iceberg),” said Nutter by email.

While the billion-dollar disaster data is valuable to various financial stakeholders, Nutter said he believes its greatest value comes from providing “public awareness of the increasing extreme weather risk.”

There are many factors that come together to make a billion-dollar disaster — such as weather, infrastructure, population, and location. Labe said that the number of events has been increasing since 1980. 

“It’s very likely that 2025 will not be the costliest year on record when we look at the statistics, but it definitely falls into this long-term increasing trend,” he said.

Climate Central is not the only organization trying to pick up the pieces of a resource that was shut down by the federal government or is at risk. 

Last month, amid growing concerns over the future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, the MRCTI announced that it would be partnering with a nonprofit called Convoy of Hope to provide aid within 72 hours of disasters for communities along the Mississippi River. 

But Wellenkamp said that there aren’t many states that can afford the response and recovery efforts from a billion-dollar disaster.

“These (initiatives) are not meant to be permanent solutions,” Wellenkamp said. “These are not meant to replace federal capacity. They are meant to put our cities in a relatively secure position until the federal questions are answered. And the sooner that those answers come, the better.”

For many, the answers will require data. 

“Just because the federal government decided they’re not going to do it anymore doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing,” Koon said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch staff added Wisconsin data to this story.

A tool tracking billion-dollar disasters is back after the Trump administration retired it is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Lake Pepin, the largest naturally occurring lake on the Mississippi River, is a beloved resource and important economic engine for the Wisconsin and Minnesota towns that border it.

In the summer, its calm, expansive waters are popular for sailing and water skiing — the latter of which was invented on the lake in 1922. In the winter, it’s an ice fishing hub.

But it’s got a big problem: Massive amounts of sediment are eroding from stream banks, bluffs and agricultural fields upstream and settling in the lake. Parts of it have become so shallow that boat travel is impossible, leaving some communities cut off. The upper one-third of the lake could be unusable for recreation by the end of this century.

A new yearlong project aims to understand how to curb an overlooked source of that sediment.

The Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance, a nonprofit organization working to improve the health of the lake, has launched an investigation into how erosion can be controlled in ravines and gullies. Ravines act like fast-moving highways, delivering soil into the Mississippi River and then the lake, according to the alliance. The analysis will be led by Norman Senjem, who retired from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in 2011 and has deep knowledge of the lake’s challenges with sedimentation.

Senjem plans to work with county conservationists and watershed groups in south-central Minnesota, which delivers large sediment loads to Lake Pepin, to identify the best ways to stop erosion from ravines.

Michael Anderson, executive director of the Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance, said with results from Senjem in hand, landowners will be able to take action to stop sediment from ravines on their properties.

“We’re obviously not the people who will be the excavators,” he said. “We’ll help put the pieces together and start to push the snowball down the hill to get momentum going.”

‘Hidden’ ravines deliver massive sediment loads to Lake Pepin

Lake Pepin, which stretches 21 miles between Bay City and Nelson on Wisconsin’s western border, has always acted as a sort of settling pond for sediment. Once river water enters the top of the lake, its slower-moving waters allow silts and other particles to drop to the bottom, and the water that exits the lake and flows farther down the river is cleaner.

But sediment erosion has increased tenfold since before European settlement of the area. Each year, a sediment load as big as a 32-story building spanning a full city block enters the lake, according to the Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance. At this rate, the entire lake could be filled in less than 350 years.

A large majority of that sediment comes from the Minnesota River basin, which covers nearly 15,000 square miles, including many areas that are heavily farmed. There are thousands of ravines that cut through the slopes on the sides of the river, ushering sediment from the farmed landscape quickly downstream.

“But they’re kind of hidden away,” on the edges of farm fields or wooded areas, Senjem said. “I’m going to try to shed some light on them.”

Built structures called water and sediment control basins can intercept sediment from ravines, Senjem said. But increased rainfall across the Midwest due to climate change is rendering the basins less effective. The expanded use of agricultural drainage tile in the Minnesota River basin, an underground pipe network meant to more easily drain farm fields, also contributes to water flowing faster down ravines.

Senjem expects to find that more work will be necessary to control the problem, such as building multiple control basins in a row to slow the sediment or adding so-called “buffer strips,” made of grass or permanent vegetation, to help catch more of it. 

Over the next year, Senjem will study which options like these have been implemented across south-central Minnesota to limit sediment from ravines. Those might offer a road map to members of the Legacy Alliance as to which types are most effective. Since such projects can be costly, he’ll also include in his analysis what kinds of financial assistance are available to landowners to undertake them.

For landowners to want to take action to save a lake many miles away, there’s got to be local incentive, too, Senjem said — like if a restored ravine would protect a road or smooth out a farm field. He’ll prioritize potential solutions that do that as well.

The project is funded by a $15,000 grant from the Red Wing Area Fund, a community foundation on the north end of Lake Pepin.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Erosion from ravines threatens Lake Pepin — and Wisconsin communities that depend on it is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Mayors from cities and towns along the Mississippi River are taking action on natural disaster response. Last week they launched a new initiative to improve immediate disaster relief. They’re also lobbying lawmakers to reform the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, a cooperative of more than 100 river communities between Minnesota and Louisiana, held its annual meeting in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. The mayoral gathering came on the heels of the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and after months of threats from President Donald Trump’s administration to roll back FEMA’s role in natural disaster response.

“Emergencies and crises — they are indeed happening more often,” said Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis. “And so we all need to be prepared.”

This year, the Mississippi River corridor experienced flooding and drought. Tornadoes devastated communities in Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas. On May 16, the St. Louis region experienced a category EF3 tornado, which reached wind speeds of up to 152 miles per hour and resulted in five deaths and widespread destruction. 

Stacey Kinder, the mayor of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which also saw two tornadoes touch down this year, said her state has suffered.

“Yet, in the face of over $2 billion worth of losses since March, just for Missouri, the future of FEMA and the U.S. disaster mitigation and response apparatus remains in considerable flux,” Kinder said.

Earlier this year, Trump said that FEMA could be phased out in favor of individual states carrying the burden of natural disaster response. Although his administration has reversed course on outright abolishing the agency in recent months, Trump officials are still working on an overhaul. The FEMA Review Council, which was created by an executive order, is supposed to make recommendations to change the agency by mid-November. Meanwhile, an Associated Press analysis found major disaster declarations are taking longer under Trump than historical averages. 

In response to FEMA’s uncertain future, the MRCTI announced a new program to deliver assistance to its members “within 72 hours of a disaster event,” said Kinder. That aid could include food, water, hygiene supplies, and other immediate needs, according to Ethan Forhetz, a spokesperson from Convoy of Hope.

MRCTI’s executive director, Colin Wellenkamp, said in surveys mayors have consistently said they need help during the first 36 to 72 hours after a disaster, for which there’s rarely money in their budgets.   

The initiative is being done in partnership with Convoy of Hope, a Missouri-based nonprofit. The organization provided food and supplies after the May tornado in St. Louis. It helped respond to more than 50 U.S. disasters in 2024, according to its website.

“By working together before disasters strike, we can reduce response time, position resources where they’re most needed, and make sure families receive help quickly and with dignity,” said Stacy Lamb, the nonprofit’s vice president for disaster services. “This partnership isn’t just about responding, but it’s about building resilience.”

MRCTI did not disclose how the partnership will be financed.

The program is available immediately for partnering cities and towns and surrounding communities.

“Convoy is committed to working with any city along the Mississippi River, and beyond, during times of disaster,” Forhetz said.

Melisa Logan, the mayor of Blytheville, Arkansas, said the partnership is designed to “fill the largest gap in U. S. emergency response called capacity.”

The MRCTI is plugging other responsiveness holes, too. At this year’s meeting, mayors announced a new dashboard to more easily monitor water levels in the river and drought, to better predict and communicate the state of the basin. 

In addition, MRCTI announced that it is working with legislators on the Fixing Emergency Management for Americans Act of 2025, also known as the FEMA Act of 2025. The bill would make FEMA report directly to President Trump as an independent agency. The bill’s stated aims are to speed up aid delivery to both states and individuals and reward state preparedness.

MRCTI mayors also want to see a mitigation piece to the bill, including a grant program for projects that address regional disaster vulnerabilities.

“So there’s a lot of moving parts with FEMA right now,” Wellenkamp said. “Where all those moving parts are going to land? Don’t know, but as the mayors pointed out, we know what we have as our priorities and that is the systemic reduction of risk over large landscapes.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Mississippi River Basin communities launch new disaster relief effort is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The Mississippi River stretches for around 2,400 miles from central Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Every year, 30 to 50 paddlers attempt to travel its length.

Shawn Hamerlinck made the journey by kayak. A teacher had planted the idea for the trip in his mind years ago, as a way to see ecosystems along the length of the Mississippi River.

He started on May 24, 2025, and paddled, on average, 12 to 14 hours per day. 

For him, the undertaking was personal. 

Others who do it try to use it for advocacy. Five friends who took off on Sept. 1, 2025, are traveling under the banner of the Drift South Expedition and plan to do citizen science, education and fundraising along the way. 

Whatever the motivation, it’s sure to be an adventure. 

“The Mississippi is an iconic river. When anyone thinks of the United States, they think of the Mississippi because it has such a long, long history,” said John Sullivan, who paddled it in 2013 and runs a Facebook support group for other paddlers. “And it’s kind of a wilderness.” 

Connection to nature 

The river starts as a small stream flowing out of Lake Itasca in Minnesota. In those early stretches, Hamerlinck said, the water is pristine. 

 “You can see what you believe to be five feet down, and it’s actually 45 feet down. You can see giant fish — northern pike — and the water is so clear, so clean, and so beautiful that you could just take a cup and drink it,” said Hamerlinck.

As he went downstream and the river became more industrialized, things changed drastically.

He had to be careful to avoid barges, and he couldn’t drink the water anymore. There was trash in it and unappetizing white foam. Near St. Louis, Missouri, he says he was almost afraid to light a match because of what looked like gasoline floating on the river.

 “You see steel and iron still sitting on the side, rusting away, and you ask, ‘Why did we do that?’” said Hamerlinck. “It makes you look at the environment and say, ‘We should have taken better care of you. And I’m sorry. And we shall do better than what you see.’” 

Even so, he says he experienced plenty of wonder. Encounters with wildlife – at times very intimate – were a highlight of the trip.

A skunk sprayed him, nesting geese bit him, invasive carp hit him in the face, and he came across a black bear floating in the river.

His scariest encounters were with alligators.

“The big alligators will swim about 20 yards from you, parallel to you, and they’ll stay right next to you for about half a mile,” said Hamerlinck. “What they’re trying to do is figure out who’s bigger — you in the kayak, or them.” 

He slept in a tent or, when he could not find any dry land, on his kayak. In addition to animal encounters, he says storms, difficult conditions and the monotony of daily miles could wear on a paddler. 

“The biggest challenge, hands down, is not the animals or the storms or the distance. It’s the human mind,” said Hamerlinck.

Still, for him, disconnecting from electronics and the connection to nature made it all worth it.

 “The best part of it was the sandbars that you would sit in,” he said. “I would stop there about half an hour before sunset, because that’s when the bugs would show up, after sunset. And you just stop, and you just look around you, and see that there is nature right next to you. It’s not like you go to a zoo.”

Paddling with a purpose

The Drift South Expedition, which pushed off on Sept. 1, came together when five friends who’d all done the Appalachian Trail started thinking about another adventure to try. One of them had been wanting to paddle the Mississippi River since he was 13 years old, and the others quickly signed on. 

But they wanted to do more than paddle. 

“What can we do on this expedition to be able to help us but also help the community, the scientific community, the people who depend on the Mississippi River,” said Charles Lampman. 

Lampman says he’s lost opportunities to work in conservation due to recent budget cuts, but he didn’t want to stop that work entirely. 

“And that’s when we landed on this idea of, well, we can do scientific research and we can advocate for science and show people that citizen science is possible,” he said. 

Every 25 miles, they’ll test water quality, and every 50 miles, they’ll sample for microplastics. They are working with a couple of post-doctoral researchers at Saint Louis University to process this data, which will eventually be publicly available. 

Their journey is also an opportunity to fundraise and educate people about the river. When they pull through cities, they plan to set up educational materials on their canoes and try to engage curious passersby about how microplastics can move throughout the ecosystem and other issues. 

“Whenever we have this opportunity to slow down and engage with people, I think we’re all OK with taking a little bit more time if that means some more authentic connections,” Lampman said. 

Support leads to success

The five-person Drift South Expedition will travel with two canoes and a kayak, working together to log the necessary miles and meet their advocacy goals.  

On the eve of their departure, they were putting the finishing touches on their rigs, but they were also checking in with each other. 

“We’ve all sat down and been like, ‘OK, how is everyone feeling? What does everyone need from each other? How can we help?’” said Morgan Skinner. 

“That teamwork and the team aspect of it was something that initially really attracted me to the project,” David Collison said. 

Paddling thousands of miles can be daunting, even with a team. 

John Sullivan completed the full length of the Mississippi in 2013. “I had a goal of trying to paddle all the state-named rivers that flow to the Mississippi, and I’ve done them all except the Arkansas,” said Sullivan. “That one remains on my bucket list.” 

He founded the Facebook group Mississippi River Paddlers more than a decade ago as a way to support other paddlers’ journeys. 

“I saw a lot of value in being able to communicate and reach out to other people who’ve done the river and ask questions if I run into a problem,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan keeps an informal list of paddlers. He says that in the past 12 years, several hundred people have paddled segments of the river. Around 100 to 200 paddlers have completed the trip from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico. 

Hamerlinck finished his journey in Burns Point, Louisiana, on July 17, 55 days after launching.

He’d weathered broken paddles and cracks in his kayak and disembarked 33 pounds lighter than he started. Sometimes days passed without him seeing any people. When he did meet someone, he asked them to sign his kayak so they could accompany him for the rest of the journey.

“If you look at the boat, it’s got signatures from every person I met along the way, and it’s packed full,” said Hamerlinck.

He counted 119 signatures on his boat, and some of those people, he said, “tracked me all the way down and they’re still friends to this day. It was really neat.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

From Minnesota to the Gulf: Paddling all 2,400 miles of the Mississippi River is a grand adventure is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story included a photo of Queen Anne’s Lace that was incorrectly described as poison hemlock.

The toxic plant that killed Socrates thousands of years ago is becoming more prevalent in the Midwest. 

Poison hemlock is an invasive biennial plant that has tall, smooth stems with fern-like leaves and clustered small white flowers. It can grow up to eight feet tall. 

Meaghan Anderson, an Iowa State University Extension and Outreach field agronomist, said the plant is becoming more widespread due to several factors.

Those factors include unintentional movement of seeds from one place to another by floods, mowing equipment and animals. Hikers inadvertently transport seeds on their shoes or clothing.

Changing ecology could also be contributing to spread. For example, Anderson said tree loss in parts of eastern Iowa from the 2020 derecho made room for the plant. Cedar Rapids estimates it lost about 65% of the overall tree canopy that existed before the derecho flattened trees with hurricane-force winds.

“The loss of so many trees and opening of canopies has likely allowed for many weedy species to gain a foothold in areas they were not in the past,” Anderson said.

Since the plant was first introduced to the U.S. in the 1800s, hemlock has made its way into every state, except Hawaii. 

Scott Marsh, an agricultural weeds and seed specialist with the Kansas Department of Agriculture, said though the plant is widespread across the country, it’s generally more common in central parts of the United States. He said it is slightly less abundant in the southeast and northeast parts of the country.

Mark Leoschke, a botanist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ Wildlife Bureau, said poison hemlock likes moist soils and benefits from “disturbed areas,” like roadside ditches, flood plains, and creeks or rivers, where running water can carry seeds downstream.

“It just benefits from periodic disturbance, and it is the way it can grow and maintain itself,” Leoschke said.

Anderson said the plant also favors areas along fences and margins between fields and woodlands.

Generally, the plant isn’t a threat to lawns and residential yards, Leoschke said, because lawns are typically mowed regularly, which keeps the plant from maturing.

A ‘highly toxic’ plant

Poison hemlock — which is known by its scientific name conium maculatum and is native to Europe and Western Asia — starts growing in the springtime and is a dangerous plant. 

“The most serious risk with poison hemlock is ingesting it,” Anderson said. “The plant is highly toxic and could be fatal to humans and livestock if consumed.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, every part of the plant — from its stem to its leaves, as well as the fruit and root — is poisonous.

The leaves are especially potent in the spring, up to the time the plant flowers.

The toxic compounds found in the plant can cause respiratory failure and disrupt the body’s nervous and cardiovascular systems.

Anderson said it is possible for the toxins in poison hemlock to be absorbed through the skin, too.

“Some of the population could also experience dermatitis from coming in contact with the plant, so covering your skin and wearing eye protection when removing the plant is important,” she said.

Poison hemlock can also be fatal if consumed by livestock. 

According to USDA, cattle that eat between 300 and 500 grams or sheep that ingest between 100 and 500 grams of hemlock – less than a can of beans – can be poisoned. Though animals tend to stay away from poison hemlock, they may eat it if other forage is scarce or if it gets into hay. Animals that ingest it can die from respiratory paralysis in two to three hours. 

Jean Wiedenheft, director of land stewardship for the Indian Creek Nature Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said no one should eat anything from the wild unless they know exactly what they are ingesting.

The carrot family of plants, including poison hemlock, can be particularly treacherous. Water hemlock, a relative of the poison hemlock native to the U.S., is also toxic. Giant hogweed, another member of the carrot family, can grow up to 15 feet tall with leaves that span two to three feet. Marsh said that if humans get sap from the plant on their skin and then go into the sun, it can cause third-degree burns. Wild carrot, another invasive also known as Queen Anne’s Lace, is generally considered safe or mildly toxic.  

Managing the plant

Poison hemlock is a biennial plant, which means it takes two years to complete its life cycle. 

Removal strategies vary depending on where in the life cycle the plants are, where the plants are located, how abundant they are, what time of year it is and the ability of the person trying to manage the plant.

For example, Anderson said flowering plants generally need to be cut out and disposed of as trash. However, Anderson said that using herbicides on the hemlock when the plant is growing close to the ground in its first year is often more efficient and more effective in eradicating the plant.

In some situations, mowing can be an effective option to manage isolated infestations of poison hemlock as well, she said.

“Since (they’re) a biennial species, if we remove plants prior to producing seed, we can eliminate the possibility of new plants or increasing populations of these plants,” Anderson said. “Any location with poison hemlock will need to be monitored for several years.” 

Successful hemlock management comes back to prevention.

“We often talk about the species this time of year because the white flowers atop the tall stems are very obvious on the landscape, but the species exists for the rest of the year as a relatively unassuming rosette of leaves on the ground that people don’t think of until they see the flowers, when it is too late for most effective management strategies,” Anderson  said. “Every time a plant is allowed to produce seed, it adds to the soil seed bank and creates more future management challenges.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

‘Highly toxic’ hemlock widespread in Midwest — and spreading is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.