“I keep asking, why is it we’re living in a shithole?” Art Cullen says in What’s Eating Iowa?, his new documentary series launched Tuesday. The first episode, “Water,” is now available on YouTube. It’s the damaged state of Iowa’s water, and the damage that water is doing, that prompts Cullen’s question.
Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Storm Lake Times-Pilot and an icon of Iowa journalism, has been writing about the degradation caused by the state’s embrace of industrial-style agriculture since he and his brother John started their newspaper in 1990. The issue is at the heart of his recent book, Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World.
The degradation caused by the system that’s come to rule rural Iowa over the last 50 years goes beyond the immediate environmental problems it causes. It impacts every part of life in the state, from politics and economy to public health and Iowa’s brain drain, as young people continue to leave in large numbers, looking for better opportunities elsewhere.
What’s Eating Iowa? is a project of Iowans for Stronger Communities, a union-affiliated nonprofit founded last year to address some of the state’s bigger structural problems. The series is a collaboration between Cullen, who narrates with his signature combination of wry wit and tough-mindedness, and Jerry Risius, an award-winning documentary director and cinematographer.
Risius is based in Brooklyn (New York, not Brooklyn, Iowa) but grew up in western Iowa and attended the University of Iowa. He’s known for his work on Anthony Bourdain’s travel series No Reservations, and as the director and cinematographer of Storm Lake, the 2021 documentary about the Storm Lake Times.
“Jerry was brought up in a hoghouse near Buffalo Center,” Cullen wrote in a June column. “He knows the game.”
Standing in an almost empty parking lot at the Iowa State Capitol (“the most beautiful building in the US of A — the reason it’s so beautiful today is because the legislature is not in session doing any damage and dragging Iowa back into the Stone Age”), Cullen explains at the beginning of the episode that the series is an attempt to create “an honest conversation” about the big issues facing Iowa as the 2026 election approaches.
“[I]t’s about good roads, clean air, clean water and a balanced way of life in rural Iowa that we used to enjoy before we sold our system to the highest bidder — and that’s corporate America and Big Ag,” he says.
Much of the episode is focused on nitrate pollution caused by ag runoff from over application of fertilizer — both industrially-produced chemical fertilizer and manure from CAFOs — which is the biggest ongoing source of water pollution in Iowa. Nitrate loads in the Raccoon and Des Moines River were so high this summer that the Central Iowa Water Works had to issue its first ever ban on lawn watering to try to ease the pressure on its filtering system, as it struggled to achieve nitrate levels considered safe for use.
Federal law mandates that nitrate levels in drinking water not exceed 10 mg per liter. But that standard was set in 1962 and has never been changed even though most researchers believe it should be lowered to 5 mg per liter, and some advocate for 3 mg. Drinking water with elevated nitrate levels is associated with higher risks of colorectal cancer and thyroid cancer, as well as bladder cancer in women. Blue-green algae blooms caused by elevated nitrate levels in waterways produce cyanotoxins which researchers have linked to degenerative nerve disorders in people who live near waterways with blooms.
Summer in Iowa usually sees high nitrate levels in rivers, and those levels typically decline in the fall. But not this year, Cami Koons reports at Iowa Capital Dispatch.
“The past several years, nitrates have dropped to near-zero concentrations in late summer through early winter,” Koons wrote. “But this year, concentrations in rivers and in central Iowa’s drinking water have remained high.”
While nitrate levels are always highest in rivers with tributaries in western Iowa watershed, where the most intensive industrial-style farming occurs, levels were also elevated in eastern Iowa.
“The differences in the Cedar River and also in the Iowa River, at a sensor located in Iowa City, are less drastic than those observed in Des Moines along the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, but still show elevated levels through fall 2025,” according to Koons.
The elevation is being attributed to rainfall in the fall washing nitrogen- and phosphorus-heavy fertilizer off farm fields into waterways. But Larry Weber, director of hydroscience and engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of Iowa, pointed out to Koons that this year’s fall weather is in keeping with the state’s average weather when it has not experienced an extended drought. Weber also warned that focusing on comparing nitrate levels to just the previous year risks missing the bigger picture.
“This long-term, continually evolving trend towards higher levels … this is just the status and trend of where the state is going,” he said.
“What we can convincingly say is that if we go back 75 years ago, it was one milligram per liter [in Iowa rivers],” he further explained. “Fifty years ago, it was two to three milligrams per liter and now we’re consistently in the six to eight milligrams per liter — with many times above 15 to 20 — and that’s simply high compared to where we were 50 years ago.”
The damage caused by elevated nitrate levels in Iowa rivers goes well beyond the state’s borders. It flows into the Mississippi, where, combined with ag runoff from other states, it forms the annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, in which the oxygen level is so depleted nothing can survive.
But the Mississippi shows signs of damage from nitrates well before it leaves Iowa behind, Chris Jones tells Cullen in What’s Eating Iowa?
“The river really changes character when you get kind of south of Clinton,” Jones says. “Species diversity is much lower.”
Jones, author of The Swine Republic and one of Iowa’s leading water quality advocates, is an analytical chemist by training. Jones retired in 2023 after a career working on water quality issues in Iowa, in private industry, at public utilities and most recently as a research engineer at the Iowa Flood Center, part of the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research (IIHR), the University of Iowa’s Hydroscience and Engineering center. (Last month, Jones created an exploratory committee for a possible run for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture, but the episode was filmed months before that.)
Jones serves as Cullen’s main guide on the issue of industrial ag and nitrate pollution in the 17-minute video, but Cullen also interviews Dr. James Merchant about another how other ag chemicals, particularly herbicides and pesticides linked to cancer, pollute sources of drinking water in rural areas.
Earlier this year, the issue of ag chemicals and cancer led to large protests at the State Capitol, as the Iowa Legislature considered a bill to provide greater legal protection to chemical companies against lawsuits over cancers allegedly caused by their product. Bayer, the chemical conglomerate that owns Monsanto, manufacturer of RoundUp, lobbied hard for the bill.
Bayer denies that glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp, causes cancer. The EPA has not listed glyphosate as a cancer risk, even though the International Agency for Research on Cancer determined the chemical to be “probably carcinogenic to humans.” And despite its insistence that glyphosate is safe when used as directed, Bayer paid over $10 billion in 2019 to settle more than 95,000 lawsuits filed over RoundUp’s label not warning users about the risk of cancer.
In 2024 and 2025, Bayer spent more than $200,000 on lobbying in Des Moines for the bill, but it died amid strong public opposition. The Bayer bill is expected to be reintroduced this year.
Most of the discussion around the bill focused on the cancer risks to those directly exposed to herbicides and pesticides in farm settings, but Dr. Merchant highlighted a less well-known problem: dangerous chemicals used in herbicides and pesticides that are linked to cancer, polluting the water Iowans in small communities rely on for home use.
“What is not appreciated is that low levels of this chemical get into ground water,” Merchant, the founding dean of the University of Iowa College of Public Health, tells Cullen. “It gets into wellwater, shallow wells that are predominant in rural Iowa, from runoff. So people are drinking low levels of this carcinogen.”
It’s a subject likely to come up in the next episode of What’s Eating Iowa?, which is titled “Cancer.”
Cullen’s question about “why is it we’re living in a shithole?” was directed to Chris Jones, while they were discussing the state’s failure to protect waterways.
Jones replied with a shrug and one word: “Greed.”
