Reg Morton’s home in rural Franklin County in north central Iowa is filled with treasured memories.
“We made our own park in the grove. We cut little trees, drilled three holes and made a double swing,” he said.
Morton and his wife Jane raised their three daughters in an old house on 5 acres of land surrounded by cornfields. For him, it’s paradise. The Mortons planted a garden with tomatoes, onions and radishes.
He loves making things out of old farm scrap metal and things he can find around town.
“There's an art into making something out of nothing, and that's what I learned 40 years ago,” he said. “And I never would have dreamt I could have had such a good life.”
That good life lately has been disrupted. Morton was diagnosed with a rare type of lymphoma, a blood cancer, two years ago after he noticed a strange blister on his finger.
While undergoing chemotherapy, he started thinking about all the potential chemicals he’s been exposed to through work, the farms around his house — and the generous amount of Roundup herbicide he’s used on his own garden.
“I used to spray this whole ground, you know, spot spray, and you'd run around,” he said.
Morton’s cancer is under control. It's dropped to non-detectable levels. He’s one of the lucky ones.
He doesn’t know for sure if the environment around his home had anything to do with it, but he does know he's not the only one in his rural farming community who has gotten cancer.
“Well, one week we come back, Cheryl had died from it,” he said. “Two friends, you know, they died a week apart from lymphoma. It just goes on and on and on.”
Cancer is complicated
Many Iowans like Morton are concerned that Iowa’s high cancer rates are tied to the state’s large agricultural industry and all the chemicals farmers use to grow crops and kill weeds.
Iowa is second to just Kentucky for the highest rate of new cancer diagnoses in the country.
Unlike Kentucky, which can attribute its high cancer rates to smoking, researchers don’t know why cancer is so prevalent in Iowa.
Mary Charlton, the director of the Iowa Cancer Registry, which collects and analyzes state cancer data, said Iowa is high across many factors that can increase cancer risk.
“We have over a quarter of Iowans report zero physical activity outside of their job. We also have one of the highest binge drinking rates in the country. We still have almost 15% of our population who smoke cigarettes,” she said.
But Charlton said she hears a lot of concerns from Iowans about environmental exposures.
“To which I say, ‘yeah, probably is a very big contributor, [but it’s] very hard to measure,’” she said.
Understanding why people get cancer in general is really complicated, Charlton said.
“It's just a really complex interplay of risk factors, and it happens over decades,” she said. “It has to do with people's genes, their family history, their lifestyle, what they're exposed to in the environment, and all that comes together to form your cancer risk.”
When you try picking apart how farm chemicals fit into this mix, she said it can be like finding needles in a haystack.
“It's literally thousands of chemicals,” Charlton said. “Also, the pesticides that our farmers use change constantly. They're constantly evolving and adding new chemicals and removing old chemicals.”
Modest associations
Researchers like Laura Beane Freeman are looking into these connections. Beane Freeman is a senior investigator with the National Cancer Institute. She studies cancer risk associated with the agricultural industry.
She’s part of a study that the federal government has been running for the last 30 years, following about 90,000 farmers and their spouses in Iowa and North Carolina to understand their cancer risks.
“We really have a wealth of data on these mostly farm families and their exposures and also their cancer incidents over that entire period of time,” she said.
The study so far has found some associations between certain farm chemicals and certain cancers, but she said figuring out if they’re actually carcinogens requires more in-depth studies.
“We need information on specific pesticides or specific exposures to link to specific cancer sites, and it really takes a long time to do that, and it takes a long time of follow up to accrue enough cancer cases so that you actually can make meaningful evaluations,” she said.
Others are looking into these possible connections, too.
The Iowa Environmental Council and the Harkin Institute at Drake University in Des Moines announced this spring they are launching an initiative to look at environmental and agricultural factors and cancer rates in Iowa.
“Iowa has the most factory farm waste of any other state in the country. Iowa has more concentrated animal feeding operations than any other state in the country. Iowa is among the top five states with the highest industrial pesticide use,” Sarah Green, the executive director of the Iowa Environmental Council, said in April. “What role do these factors play in Iowa's cancer rates? What else might be at play?”
Slow to act
Some worry health authorities can be slow to reassess farm products or recommendations even when research starts to point to stronger cancer connections.
David Cwiertny, the director of the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination at the University of Iowa, said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has long put off a health assessment of nitrate in drinking water, which comes from fertilizer runoff.
Recent research has linked it to a potential increased risk of colorectal cancer and other health issues at levels lower than what the EPA currently deems safe to drink.
“It's not just a few scientists out here saying this is something that needs to be looked at. The EPA has acknowledged the need to weigh this new science on nitrate, and it just isn't getting done,” Cwiertny said.
Central Iowa Water Works, the regional utility that provides water for around 600,000 people in the Des Moines area, issued its first-ever ban on lawn watering this month due to high levels of nitrate in the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers.
Cwiertny said he’s concerned if officials aren’t more proactive about these assessments, more Iowans could be unknowingly increasing their cancer risk.
