Amid increasing scrutiny of a potential link between Iowa farm chemicals and cancer, a new report is generating controversy as it blames rising cancer rates not on the toxins used widely throughout the state, but on something else entirely: binge alcohol consumption.

“Is alcohol responsible for the increase in cancer incidence here since 2014? I personally doubt that,” “What needs to be looked at are things that are probable or possible carcinogens that have increased beginning about 1990, because of the well-recognized latency of environmental cancers,” Merchant said. “Those carcinogens associated with industrial agriculture are the ones that really need to be looked at very closely.”

Iowa farms use more weed killers (237 million pounds) and apply more commercial fertilizer (11.6 billion pounds) every year than any other state.

Researchers have long suspected that exposure to a number of the most popular pesticides, particularly glyphosate (the active ingredient in the Roundup brand of herbicide), may cause human cancers. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic” to humans. Other studies have found that exposure to other common pesticides are associated with cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia, brain, and prostate cancer.