Richard Manning doesn't think much is. This is largely due to the role of industrial agriculture and its ability to bypass federal regulations. In the past decade or two nitrogen fertilizers from industrial agriculture rendered that water undrinkable. The fertilizers traveling from the Corn Belt down the Mississippi River have killed a Connecticut-size stretch of the Gulf of Mexico that is now called the Dead Zone. Iowa occupies less than 5 percent of the land in the Mississippi basin, but it contributes 25 percent of the nitrate pollution responsible for the Dead Zone, almost all of which is attributable to farming.
Farming includes raising hogs and chickens.There are about 21 million hogs in Iowa, and almost all of them live in hog factories. Each hog produces the waste of about 2.5 people, meaning Iowa bears the shit equivalent, from hogs alone, of about 45 million people, some fifteen times its human population. Iowa has 52 million laying chickens, 50 million of which are in concentrated animal-feeding operations (CAFOs) that hold more than 100,000 birds. These birds likewise produce more manure than all the people in the state. Almost none of it passes through a sewage-treatment plant or even a septic tank before making its way through drainage pipes to the public waterways and drinking water.
Despite all this, the federal government subsidizes the growing of corn by about $7 billion a year. Not all of the subsidy goes to corn as food; 40^% of corn goes to gas tanks. In Iowa, corn and soybeans cover 23 million of the state’s 24 million acres of cropland.
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