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MAHA has arrived in Iowa — and Big Ag is reeling

One way or another, Iowa is about to elect a governor who faults industrial agriculture for the state’s high cancer rates.

By Ellie Borst

There’s something in the water in Iowa. And Republican Zach Lahn has centered his gubernatorial campaign around it.

Lahn is taking aim at fertilizers, pesticides and other farm chemicals seeping into drinking water supplies — and the agrochemical giants that make them. He believes Big Ag and Big Chemical are to blame for the state’s high cancer rates, a top issue for voters here.

Once unimaginable for a politician of either party in Iowa, Lahn’s campaign is putting the state’s Republicans in the same bind that has bedeviled the Trump administration during its second term: stuck between the demands of Make America Healthy Again activists and the interests of agricultural and chemical companies that hold deep sway with the party.

“Many people in the primary said, ‘You can’t win an election in the Republican primary talking about the big agricultural conglomerates that are extorting our farmers, talking about clean water, and how we need to lower our cancer rates,’” Lahn said in a stump speech earlier this month at the Iowa State Fair, where the farm industry’s influence loomed large, in the form of corporate sponsorships, expansive exhibits and free swag.

“We did talk about it, and we won,” Lahn said.

It’s not the campaign the Republican establishment wanted in a state with some of this fall’s fiercest battleground elections, including an open Senate seat and three competitive House races. Lahn pulled off an upset in the June primary, besting President Donald Trump’s pick, conservative Rep. Randy Feenstra. Lahn won Trump’s endorsement a month after the primary election.

Now, rank-and-file Republicans are left with little choice but to support a candidate running on ideas most don’t agree with, in a year where Democrats believe they have their best shot in two decades to reclaim the governor’s mansion.

Democratic candidate Rob Sand, the state’s auditor, has already raised more money than any other gubernatorial candidate in the state’s history and is performing well in the polls. He has also made water pollution a central part of his campaign, running on the slogan, “Costs, corruption and cancer.”

“Even within our own caucus, there are some Republicans that are still skeptical of Zach and think that he’s adopted leftist talking points on various things,” said Rep. Jeff Shipley, a Republican who represents a southeastern district in the Iowa statehouse and has backed Lahn.

A political operative and investment firm owner married to the ex-wife of billionaire Charles Koch’s son, Lahn had almost entirely funded his own campaign up until his primary win in June, when the Republican Governor Association’s Right Direction PAC became his biggest donor. As of late July, he hadn’t accepted any corporate donations, including from the agribusiness sector that’s a major financer of campaigns in the state, according to his campaign contribution reports.

Instead, he has the backing of powerful MAHA figures. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the architect and figurehead of the grassroots coalition, traveled to Iowa earlier this month to campaign for Lahn. Kennedy has been meddling in other Iowa races, too — pressuring libertarian candidate Marco Battaglia to drop out of the race for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District so as to not split the Republican vote.

It’s all left the state’s powerful agricultural industry back on its heels.

“Farmers are uncertain at this point,” said Kirk Leeds, CEO of the Iowa Soybean Association, which lists Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta among its top-tier partners.

“You’ve got some that are probably still in denial,” he said. “And then you get others like me who’d say, ‘You know, in agriculture, we have no credibility if we don’t share in our responsibility to improve water quality in this state.’”

Vows to ‘take on the Big Ag cartels’

It’s impossible to ignore the presence of farm chemicals in Iowa.

More than 83 percent of the state’s land is used for farm operations, with 77 percent of farmlands growing corn or soybeans, according to 2025 U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

Driving through rural Iowa, countless farms display signs advertising the brand and product number of the seeds planted there: hybrid corn seeds from Wyffels Hybrids, DEKALB’s specialty corn blends, soybean varieties from Pioneer Hi-Bred.

Pioneer, a giant in the global crop genetics industry, dominates. Owned by Corteva Agriscience, the agribusiness spinoff of corporate chemical giants Dow and DuPont, the company’s headquarters are located 20 minutes outside of downtown Des Moines on a sprawling campus where roughly 2,000 scientists develop chemicals to fend off weeds, fungi and insects, along with crop seeds designed to resist toxic effects from the pesticides.

The brands were ubiquitous at the Iowa State Fair. School children walked the fairway sporting Pioneer shirts. Pioneer sponsored the Livestock Pavilion, and Corteva sponsored the farmer’s market and garden exhibit. Pioneer’s logo was plastered on signs deeming the company “Best of Show,” a title given to sponsors that spend more than $250,000. Either Pioneer or Corteva has held the distinction for the past seven years.

Lahn wants to sue them.

He has targeted the “big three” — Corteva, Bayer and Syngenta — and vowed in his primary victory speech to “take on the Big Ag cartels” and “break up their monopolies.”

“I think it’s going to be a battle, no doubt about it,” Lahn told POLITICO on the sidelines of the fair. “I know it’ll take a lot of effort, but it’s the right thing to do, and we’ve been asleep at the wheel for a very long time, both on the state and the federal level.”

He has also opposed efforts to shield pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits alleging their products caused health harms, and slammed Trump’s executive order expanding domestic production of the herbicide glyphosate.

Corteva and Syngenta did not reply to multiple requests for comment for this story. A spokesperson for Bayer declined to comment.

Instead, Lahn wants to incentivize more farmers to adopt “regenerative” practices that reduce reliance on pesticides, as he has done on his own farm.

The farm lobby is still figuring out how to respond.

“It’ll be interesting to watch what some of these farm organizations that have PACs do and how they articulate why,” said Leeds, with the Iowa Soybean Association, which doesn’t have a PAC and doesn’t endorse or fund candidates.

Agricultural industry donors have typically played a large role in funding political campaigns here. In 2022, current GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds raised $7.4 million for her reelection campaign, largely from a handful of wealthy individual donors who made their fortunes in agricultural businesses. She also raked in more than $50,000 from the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation.

This cycle, the state Farm Bureau has yet to issue an endorsement. The employee PACs for Corteva and Bayer that have given to other candidates this cycle have thus far sat out the governor’s race.

‘A lot of people’s No. 1 thing’

Iowa’s cancer rates and the health risks posed by agricultural pollution are not new concerns here.

Iowa has the second-fastest growing cancer rate in the country. A University of Iowa analysis estimates 21,700 Iowans will receive new diagnoses of invasive cancers in 2026.

Among the most common diagnoses are colon cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which researchers have linked to high levels of nitrates — a byproduct of commercial fertilizer runoff — and glyphosate, the main ingredient in the country’s most popular weedkiller, Roundup, respectively.

But this year “conversations you’re hearing within communities have really bubbled up to grab the attention of policymakers statewide,” said Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union.

Some attribute it to the MAHA movement, which has galvanized grassroots activists concerned about issues ranging from vaccines to food dyes to children’s screen time and pesticides.

As the movement has garnered traction in this Cornbelt state, Republicans have focused on the priorities that avoid a head-on collision with the agricultural industry — the same tack the Trump administration has tried at the national level.

Republicans in the Legislature passed a MAHA bill this spring, which revived the presidential fitness test, banned certain food dyes in school lunches and eased access to controversial Covid-19 treatments.

The movement’s political arm, MAHA Action, has endorsed only a dozen candidates. Lahn was the first in December.

“He’s really just the poster child for MAHA,” said MAHA Action founder and CEO Tony Lyons.

Joe Mitchell, the GOP candidate running for the open House seat in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, also won the group’s backing.

Unlike Lahn, Mitchell is not running a campaign centered on MAHA or agricultural health. The 29-year-old is part of a brand of populist, anti-establishment MAGA Republicans who eschew corporate PAC donations while simultaneously waging war against woke-ism.

But Mitchell told POLITICO he “absolutely” supports Lahn’s pledge to break up agricultural conglomerates.

“You can’t just trust the corporations that put a lot of stuff into our food supply, into our pharmaceuticals,” Mitchell said in a brief interview. “I think for a long time we got complacent. We just believed anything that big business said, and now you have a skepticism in the Republican Party, as we should.”

But when it comes to the link between agriculture and cancer, Mitchell said “none of it has been studied nearly enough.”

Calls for more research are a common refrain among Republicans seeking to navigate the tensions between MAHA and the GOP’s agricultural and chemical powerbrokers.

Take Ashley Hinson, the two-term House Republican running for Iowa’s open Senate seat. She has accepted tens of thousands of dollars from agribusiness donors, including $5,000 each from the employee PACs for Corteva and Bayer.

“Iowa’s growing cancer rate is unacceptable, and we have to work together to fix it. That means more funding for cancer research, early detection and prevention efforts — especially in rural areas — and innovative treatments that can save lives,” Hinson said in a statement. She did not acknowledge questions about Lahn’s position or industrial agriculture playing a contributing role to rising cancer rates.

Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig, running for reelection, has criticized Lahn’s messaging tying cancer rates to farms.

“You’ve got some who have decided to make it a political issue, and I think that can be very dangerous, when we start to go down this path of just automatically blaming somebody or blaming farmers when we really need to address the root causes and then go address those,” Naig told reporters at the state fair.

His Democratic opponent, retired water engineer Chris Jones, has gained momentum for taking on the state’s pollution problem and its link to big farms.

Now, the question is whether cancer rates will be the issue to sway the one-third of Iowan independent voters — the slice of the electorate that typically decides close races.

Voters like Tricia Busch, a 36-year-old mom and two-time cancer survivor, who calls herself a “political orphan.” She stumbled upon Kennedy while researching potential causes of her non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But Trump’s executive order on glyphosate production, and Kennedy’s reluctant support of it, have left her with little hope for MAHA.

“People are not happy with Trump,” said Busch, a registered Republican. “Even though Iowa was Trump country, people have woken up.”

But she believes Lahn is different; she’s become an advocate for him.

“Whoever gets elected, their feet are going to be held to the fire,” Busch said. “Because it’s a lot of people’s No. 1 thing. We need to have access to clean water.”