As public funding for university research has dried up, private industry money has poured in. And with industry money comes industry priorities.

Wing had promised the community members who had spoken to him that he’d protect their privacy. Revealing even a few basic details could have compromised their identities. “Because … if their occupation was a nurse, they lived in a household with three other people, they were age 35-39 … there’s only one person like that in a rural area,” Wing said in a 2015 interview .

Wing had been working on a study looking into the impacts of industrial-scale hog operations on health for the University of North Carolina. But the state’s Pork Council had caught wind of the research, and filed a Freedom of Information Act Request (FOIA) to gain access to his findings. “They went after Steve, asking him to turn over any documentation. They went directly to the university and got the lawyers to try and make him hand it over,” says Naeema Muhammad, one of Wing’s community partners.

The university warned Wing that if he failed to hand over the documents, he could be arrested for theft of state property and even sent to jail. The data didn’t belong to him, it belonged to the state. But handing over the identities put his subjects in jeopardy. It wasn’t unheard of for people to lose their jobs for taking a public stand against the politically powerful pork industry.

Wing’s lawyer negotiated heavy redactions in response to the FOIA request. “We did give over the records, and I actually to this day remain regretful that I didn’t resist more,” Wing said in the 2015 interview. In November of 2016 Wing died. “He went to his deathbed with them still harassing him to turn over his information,” says Muhammad.

Industry pressure

Work like Wing’s is exactly the kind research institutions are meant to carry out. And academia writ large is supposed to be independent. Scientists at public universities work for the taxpayers. Their research is supposed to advance the public interest.

But over the past 30 years, as public funding for university research has dried up, private industry money has poured in. And with industry dollars comes industry priorities. Agribusiness has funded research that has advanced its interests and suppressed research that undermines its ability to chase unfettered growth. The levers of power at play can seem anecdotal—a late-night phone call here, a missed professional opportunity there. But interviews with researchers across the U.S. revealed stories of industry pressure on individuals, university deans, and state legislatures to follow an agenda that prioritizes business over human health and the environment.

Take Iowa, a state that is, in both identity and capacity, American farm country. According to data released by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in October of 2018, the state produces more commodity corn and hogs—and in many years, soybeans—than any other U.S. state. In Iowa, pigs outnumber people by nearly eight to one.