Zach Lahn, the Republican candidate for governor, says he isn’t calling for a ban on certain farm chemicals, but he says the EPA is not telling the truth about the safety of some products.
“We need to have independent research on the state level,” Lahn said, “…just to make sure we have proper science so farmers and consumers — by the way, it’s not just farmers, it’s consumers — can know the real side effects from using something.”
Lahn has opposed efforts to provide legal immunity to Bayer, which markets glyphosate under the brand name Round Up if the company’s labels about proper usage follow EPA guidelines. “When you look at something like Paraquat (and) you get it on your skin, it’s actually a health risk immediately,” Lahn said. “Glyphosate is very different than that, but are there residual effects from how much we’re using? There probably are and I just think we need to make sure we’re taking the proper course of action to investigate that and research that so we can give farmers and consumers real science to base their decisions off of.”
In February, President Trump issued an executive order declaring glyphosate as a critical part of the food supply, a move that could provide a legal defense to Round Up’s manufacturer as it faces hundreds of lawsuits.
Lahn made a three-stop swing through southwest Iowa Tuesday, with stops in Sidney, Clarinda and a town hall last night in Silver City focused on ag issues. Lahn is an advocate of what’s called regenerative agriculture, which involves things like planting cover crops in the fall on harvested fields and adding oats and hay to the spring planting rotation so the same field isn’t used just for corn or soybeans. “Being mindful of how do we keep our topsoil here, sequester water,” Lahn said, “make sure we’re keeping the water that goes through our property as clean as possible.”
Lahn would repurpose state incentives currently targeted for row crop farming and make state economic development grants available to farmers who’d shift to raising livestock, other crops or food for human consumption. “We can start to incentivize diversification to allow farmers that may be just subject right now to one single commodities market to multiple sources of that revenue in,” Lahn said, “which I believe helps get people off the sideline, keeps young people onto family farms.”
Lahn suggests some state grants could be awarded to farmers for new fencing and GPS collars for cattle to manage rotating the animals around pastures.
(Additional reporting by Mike Peterson, KMA, Shenandoah)