(Photo: Iowa Soybean Association / Joclyn Kuboushek)
Executive Insights: The most important check before harvest
September 1, 2026 | Kirk Leeds
September brings a noticeable shift across rural Iowa. Soybean fields are trading their deep summer greens for harvest gold, shops are filled with the smell of grease as combines get their final look-over, and there’s a brief window of quiet before the harvest rush completely takes over.
In this in-between, I’ve been thinking about a piece of risk management that has absolutely nothing to do with soybean prices or trade policy — and everything to do with protecting our families from a disease hitting rural communities hard: cancer.
This is deeply personal to me. If you read in my December column, you know that my wife has fought cancer twice — the first time, a colorectal diagnosis years ago that was caught in time. The second, a breast cancer diagnosis last year that we are still walking through.
What I want to emphasize is why we are still walking through this together: The first battle we won because someone convinced her to get screened. The second, because she’d learned not to wait.
Screening didn’t spare us the fight, but it gave us the fight on our terms.
Early detection is the difference between the two outcomes I have watched my own family live through. Survival rates for the most common cancers can be as high as 90% or more when caught at stage one. Caught later, those drop into single digits.
Yet, Iowa has a problem most don’t want to admit. Our state has the second-highest cancer incidence rate per capita in the United States, and the fastest-growing rate overall. Our rural counties are being hit hard, and even younger Iowans in their 30s and 40s are being diagnosed at levels our parents never saw. The Washington Post ran a piece on it earlier this year that put the Farm Belt on the front page for the wrong reasons. We don’t need another article; we need Iowans to act.
When a farmer, an ag retailer or a rural neighbor goes down due to cancer, it impacts everyone. A family loses income, a co-op loses a shift and a community loses productivity that no farm budget was built to absorb. Your health is not separate from the work you do for our state.
That’s why I’m using this space to share a resource I trust: Cancer Screen Iowa. Their mission is simple: use your birthday as your screening checkpoint. One day a year, you already remember. Use it to ask a quick, two-minute question: Am I current on the screenings recommended for someone my age?
My own birthday is coming up next month, on Oct. 27. Even though I’m not in the combine, the harvest season is a busy time of year for our organization. It would be easy to look past when you’re focused on supporting the industry. But this year, I’m using my birthday to check my own baseline.
Before the harvest season begins, please take two minutes to visit cancerscreeniowa.com to see what is recommended for you this year, and then send the link to someone you love.
God bless and stay safe this harvest season.
Written by Kirk Leeds.
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