For at least 20 years, the burgeoning poultry industry has been spreading the waste litter from their barns across one particular watershed in Oklahoma. Journalist Ben Felder dug into the origins of the lawsuit brought by a long gone state attorney general seeking to bring some accountability to the industry over damage to the local waterways. 20 years later, negotiations on how to manage this by product have broken down, and now new legislation threatens to give industry even wider latitude to pollute at will. Why is industry more important than clean water?Photo Courtesy of Investigate Midwest. Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Pushing Back on the Poultry Industry Is Not for the Faint of Heart.

Accross the farm belt, cancer cases are spiking, and states are getting serious about tracking and providing guidelines for exposure to agro-chem. Journalist Keith Schneider has been digging into this for months and reports.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Farm Belt States Are Getting Serious About Agro-Chem and Cancer

Straight outta the NY Times, a groundbreaking article by journalists Christopher Flavelle and Somini Sengupta shows the highway between mcNuggets and our diminishing supply of fresh clean water for human consumption. Flavelle joins the show to describe what he and his colleague uncovered as part of an ongoing and important series in the NYT.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

How the American Diet is Feeding The Groundwater Crisis, redux!

John Rumpler, Clean Water DIrector and lead attorney for Environment America, joins to talk about the long overdue revision of regulations governing wastewater from slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. Decades overdue, public hearings on the subject are being held January 24th and 31st 2024. Learn more about how much toxic waste could be captured if these revised regulations are allowed to pass. Aside from reducing contamination of our drinking water, these revisions would also have an impact on wildlife, recreation, human health, and the ecology of rivers and streams currently unprotected.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

The EPA Finally Re-Considers Its Regulations on Effluent From Meat Processing.

Chris Jones, author of The Swine Republic, featured here in June, is back to talk about the remarkable series of conversations he is now having around Iowa and his region about big ag and water pollution. We will also talk about heavily funded mitigation tools that are not mitigating, but are lining some peoples pockets with taxpayer money.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Is One Man Going to Finally Going to Change the Way Iowa Deals With Its Waterways?

Big Ag and Big Oil are getting in bed together to promote the buildout of bio-digesters to manage animal waste. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing masquerading as a good thing? Reporter Keith Schneider gives some context on this long overdue attention to pollution from the animal agriculture segment.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Bio-Digesters: The Race Is On!

Professor Sylvia Secchi from University of Iowa joins to talk about how ethanol is a giant giveaway to the ag industry, purporting to be a partial solution to fossil fuel impacts. Instead, the excessive cultivation of corn is having disastrous impacts on soil and water... and guess what? It's anything but fuel efficient. How did we get here???Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

The Ethanol Scam

Journalist Keith Schneider examines a spate of cancer diagnoses in farm country in Minnesota. On one short stretch of a road in Berne Minnesota, shared by four farming families, 12 people developed cancer, and seven of them died. What linked these people in disease is the contamination of their drinking water with excess nitrates, the chemicals used to encourage bumper crops of corn, soy, and other crops. It has yet to be definitively proven, but the science shows excessive nitrate in drinking water is increasingly connected to cancer clusters such as this one in Minnesota.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Cancer Road in Minnesota

Organic food purchasers buy organic and pay the extra for a reason. New regulations being proposed by some members of congress would make it much easier for corporate food businesses to use that premium label to sell product that doesn't actually meet the real benchmarks of organic. Tom Chapman, CEO of the Organic Trade Association, and others have introduced the new Continuous Improvement and Accountability in Organic Standards to counteract these efforts to dilute the organic label.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Watering Down Organic Standards

The National Family Farm Coalition is advocating for the Farmland For Farmers Act introduced by Senator Cory Booker in July of this year. Agricultural land needs to stay accessible to actual farmers, rather than offer an opportunity to corporate entities to capitalize on high land prices, at the same time driving those prices into a stratosphere no mere mortal can possibly attain. Our food security depends on measures like this. Tune in to see how this fits into the Farm Bill, and its chances at passage.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Farmland for Farmers, Not Farmland for Hedge Funds

Western states are home to herds of grazing beasts, and to keep them in the right place, thousands of miles of fencing is required. Conservation Northwest Associate Director Jay Kehne advocates a different path: shock collars for cattle. The cattle stay put, but other wildlife (think deer, elk, and other ruminants) can run free instead of fouling the fence. A big win for wildlife, and for a rancher's bottom line.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Electric Dog Collars on Cattle? This Rancher Has Ditched the Fence.

Award winning journalist and author, and favorite guest, Tom Philpott returns to talk all things Farm Bill. What will change, what is new, and what is, sigh, same old, same old?Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Farm Bill 2023: Get the Skinny

Every day a new article describes the prevalence of PFAS in our water, land, food, and bodies. David Cwiertny, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and in Chemistry at the University of Iowa, takes us through the impacts, the options for remediation, and what to expect from regulatory bodies in the wake of increased knowledge on the ubiquity of "forever" chemicals.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

PFAS! What Are They? Why Are They in Everything Including Us?

Iowa State University Water Quality expert Chris Jones, @riverraccoon, just published a damning indictment of the governing officials of Iowa and Big Ag in overseeing the disastrous consequences of our profit over people driven agricultural model. Learn how the Department of Natural Resources and a host of other agencies collude in allowing agriculture to extract maximum payment from taxpayers, even as they flush ever increasing quantities of pollutants into the water system.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

The Swine Republic: Read It and Weep, but You Will Be Laughing Your Head off Too...

Tom Philpott, author of Perilous Bounty, was prescient in his 2020 book in a lengthy description of the 1862 floods that inundated Central Valley in a once in a century flood. Now Central Valley is facing an even more catastropic scenario as climate disruption adds fuel to an already volatile area now packed with dairy farms, oil wells, and massive swaths of land planted to almonds, pistachios, tomatoes, and cotton. What will ensue with the predicted flooding caused by potential rapid snowmelt is a desperate scenario indeed.Read Tom's latest piece here.Read an excerpt from his book here.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

California Central Valley Braces for Catastrophic Floods... We Should Be Bracing as Well

Vermont farmer Erik Andrus is practicing an ancient form of agro-ecology from Japan. Learn how the old informs the new as Erik describes his approach and how it works.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Ducks and Rice; A Beautiful Synergy

Bryce Oates, a regular contributor to Civil Eats, Daily Yonder and other pubs has launched a newsletter that comes from a rural perspective. In this episode we talk about the new WOTUS controversy, and all the bluster and drama that plays out in a rule that essentially regulates nothing, but some would like us to believe our food supply is at risk from protecting water supplies.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

The Cocklebur, a New Newsletter From Longtime Ag Reporter Bryce Oates

Science writer and author Maryn McKenna is back to talk about her newest piece for Wired where she considers the implications of Avian flu moving to new territory and infecting new mammals, though not yet infecting people to any great degree. What does this say about our methods for raising animals in confinement, and how do we check the spread of this pathogen and others like it?Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Avian Flu, Zoonotic Disease, and How Close Are We to a New Pandemic?

Sherri Dugger, Executive Director of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, joins What Doesn't Kill You to discuss a recent meeting in Washington with advocacy groups urging the USDA and Congress to fund actual farms, rather than subsidizing commodities for animal feed and ethanol. Learn how SRAP helps communities organize against CAFO's, and how they transition farmers from the CAFO model of pork production.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Farms Not Feed

Vicky Bond, President of the Humane League, joins to discuss their campaign to transition the egg industry to cage free. Who is walking the walk and who talks the talk but doesn't walk?Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

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