Homers -- What’s going right

INVENTORS: Kudos to Randy Blakely, a head heavy equipment operator for the city of Cedar Rapids who has become a go-to guy for his inventing better tools for the workplace. His most recent contribution: a machine that greatly speeds up and reduces backbreaking labor for the task of filling sandbags. That's an especially big deal in a community that has dealt with more frequent severe flooding. Another recent inventor of note in the city ranks: Dennis Meyers, water distribution supervisor, came up with a device that has allowed repair rather than replacement of 50 fire hydrants in the last two years, saving $70,000.

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PROACTIVE FARMERS: A group of Buchanan County farmers - members of the Lime Creek Watershed Improvement Association - are trying to see how 10 different field management practices affect the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus runoff. The project, backed by a $74,000 grant from the state, is the first of its kind. Its findings should be important to helping meet the state's new goals for reducing the amount of fertilizer leakage from Iowa farmland that pollutes our state's waterways and also contributes to the Dead Zone at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico.

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