How Safe Is It to Consume Fish from Iowa Waterways? The state of Iowa has a complicated relationship with fishing. On one hand, the state’s Department of Natural Resources encourages fishing, with weekly online reports of Iowa’s Fishing Hotspots, and…
This interactive table maps all 1321 PK-12 public school buildings, with a direct link to each building’s Google map, where one can clearly see the school’s proximity to croplands.
We conservatively used the distance of 2000 feet to calculate potentially harmful proximities of croplands to Iowa public school buildings…89.6 percent of Iowa PK-12 public school buildings (1183 of 1321) are within 2000 feet of cropland. This means 444,559 students and teachers in…
The Issue: Pesticide Spray Drift and Dicamba. UPDATE, June 4, 2020: “Court overturns EPA approval of popular herbicide made by Monsanto” UPDATE, Feb. 17, 2020: “Monsanto, BASF Will Pay $250 Million In Punitive Damages In First Dicamba Trial.” As we…
Good Neighbor Iowa is a statewide public education campaign to reduce children’s exposure to commonly-used lawn pesticides. It involves school districts, park managers, childcare centers and other community leaders who are demonstrating that it is possible and practical to manage…
By Elise Leasure, Sabine Martin and Katherine Mauss/IowaWatch and Cedar Falls Tiger Hi-Line Across the street and a few doors down from Meghan and Sean O’Neal’s Neola Street home in Cedar Falls, you can see a small, nondescript one-story brick…
Lead can sometimes enter drinking water in water systems with pipes that contain lead. Usually the insides of those pipes are coated with a protective layer, but corrosive water (such as in the tragic case of Flint, Michigan) can expose…
According to the EPA (2012 data), home and garden pesticides are a $3.33 billion market, and account for 24 percent of the pesticide expenditures in the United States. (The agriculture market accounts for 66 percent of the pesticide business in the U.S.;…