Ripple Effects: Where does Iowa go next with water quality woes?

This is the final installment of a two-part series on 10 years of the Nutrient Reduction Strategy and its rippling impacts on Iowa’s water quality. Read part one here, and an explainer about the strategy here.

When Alex Linderwell was in high school, the pump for the private well in his family’s Manchester home had to be replaced. They decided to test the water they’d been drinking for years.

Linderwell remembers it coming back with nitrate levels higher than the safe drinking water limit — which wasn’t surprising, he said. Private wells in Delaware County, tucked in Northeast Iowa’s karst region, are prone to contamination due to the area’s porous geography and heavy agricultural presence. His family installed a reverse osmosis system to filter out the nutrient.

“I honestly didn't really give it much of a thought,” he said. “Little did I know I would end up being the person that comes out to test well water.”

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Linderwell, now 26, is the administrator of the Delaware County Water and Sanitation Department who is responsible for private well water testing. He has seen nitrate levels reach as high as 60 milligrams per liter — six times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s safe drinking water level of 10 milligrams per liter.

Around 27 percent of Delaware County’s nitrate tests come back above 10 milligrams per liter. That’s well above Iowa’s average of elevated nitrate test results between 2011 and 2020, which is 15 percent, according to state data.

Nitrate levels above the safe drinking water limit can cause deadly blue baby syndrome in infants. Long-term exposure to lower nitrate levels, even for adults, could lead to cancer and other negative health impacts, emerging research suggests.

It represents one of the many consequences of Iowa’s battle with nutrient pollution. Agrochemicals like fertilizer were responsible for 10 percent of the fish that died in Iowa fish kills since 1981, according to Investigate Midwest reporting. Those impacts multiply as nutrients from across the Mississippi River basin make their way down to the Gulf of Mexico Hypoxic — or dead — Zone. Nitrogen and phosphorous can also disrupt public water supplies, causing facilities like Des Moines Water Works to spend up to $10,000 a day operating nitrate removal technology

For the final installment of the Ripple Effects series, The Gazette interviewed water quality experts, government officials and advocacy groups to answer the question: After a decade of Iowa’s Nutrient Reduction Strategy — after some successes and several challenges — where do we go from here?

Nitrogen pollution at stalemate

While Iowa’s modeled phosphorous load has shown improvements, the state has made negligible progress over the last decade in decreasing its nitrogen pollution, according to Iowa State University’s Nutrient Reduction Strategy data dashboard.

Five-year flow-weighted averages — which help smooth out the influence of rainfall or drought — of nitrate loads in 2021 were actually higher than those in 2012, a year before the strategy was implemented.

“We're stable to a little bit behind our original starting point,” said Jamie Benning, ISU’s assistant director for agriculture and natural resources extension.

She partly attributes that to an increase in nitrogen fertilizer application. Fluctuating corn and soybean acreage within the past decade — largely influenced by policy changes — also contributes to nitrogen loads, especially when perennial land cover enrolled in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program shifts back to row crops.

Corn yields have seen an upward trajectory in the past decades, which may encourage farmers to use even more fertilizer on their fields to maintain profits, added Matt Helmers, director of ISU’s Nutrient Research Center. Many nitrogen-focused conservation practices, like saturated buffers and bioreactors, are also relatively new to the water quality scene. Practices that prevent soil loss, and thus the loss of sediment-bound phosphorous, have been around much longer.

“It's really only the last 10 years that we've focused on nitrogen reduction, certainly in the same way that we've historically focused on sediment and phosphorus reduction,” Helmers said. “There’s so much more to do.”

One potential avenue toward cutting Iowa’s nitrogen pollution could be ISU’s Iowa Nitrogen Initiative — a study of nitrogen fertilizer application in search of best management practices that boost corn productivity while avoiding runoff. The project aims to revise a long-standing fertilizer calculator used in seven corn-growing states.

This summer, the university and its partners completed 270 on-farm trials on 148 fields between 72 farm operators. The trial results will be available in early 2024. They may uncover site-specific recommendations for farmers to reduce their fertilizer usage and resulting nutrient runoff.

Investments overshadow progress

Any progress the Nutrient Reduction Strategy has made thus far has been slow-moving.

In a 2022 report, the Iowa Environmental Council calculated how long it would take Iowa to reach one of the strategy’s example scenarios for nonpoint source nutrient reduction. Based on progress through 2018, the report authors found it would take 85 years to reach 12.6 million acres of using cover crops; 942 years to reach 7.7 million acres treated by wetlands; and 22,325 years to reach 6 million acres treated by bioreactor and saturated buffers.

“Ultimately, a strategy has to be judged by the outcomes,” said the council’s water program director Alicia Vasto, “and the outcomes are just not there.”

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Reducing 45 percent of nutrient pollution from about 27 million acres of row cropland — the strategy’s goal — is a huge undertaking, one that will take time, said state geologist Keith Schilling.

“Anybody that sees this strategy and understands its background will never say that it was a one-shot deal,” he said. “This was always a process, and people can debate the time needed for this process to happen, but it is definitely a long time.”

With the amount of investment already funneled into the Nutrient Reduction Strategy, critics say the progress to date is not enough.

In 2021 alone, federal conservation funding granted to Iowa through USDA programs surpassed $467 million; the ag department’s Conservation Reserve Program for converting cropland to perennial cover represented the bulk, at $382.5 million. Farmer and landowner investments into conservation practices through public sector programs reached $38 million. Other public sector funding dedicated to the strategy’s water quality goals reached $195 million.

“I think the lag is reasonable, but you'd like to think that over this 10-year period, we'd have seen something beyond static,” said David Cwiertny, director of the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination at the University of Iowa. “We don't have the indicators that are necessary for folks to say, ‘OK, we feel like we're getting a return on the investment we're putting into those practices.’”

Researchers advocated for more water quality monitoring to track Iowa’s progress toward its water quality goals. Earlier this year, the Iowa Legislature cut funding allocated for the UI’s network of sensors that measure water quality across state waterways. ISU stepped in to offer needed but reduced financial support.

Several experts told The Gazette the lack of tangible benchmarks in the Nutrient Reduction Strategy makes it difficult to hold Iowa accountable for its water quality goals. In comparison, both Illinois and Minnesota have mapped timelines for their strategies.

“There's no teeth here at all. It's just one big suggestion with no real goals, timelines or deliverables,” Schilling said. “But it was written to be that. It was not written to be this mandated principle. … You’d be assigning modern or new ideas to something that was never part of that.”

Is more regulation the answer?

The Nutrient Reduction Strategy spelled out stricter regulations for point sources like wastewater treatment facilities. Those entities are slowly making their way toward nutrient load reductions.

But, regardless of reaching their goals under the strategy, they don’t account for even half of the nutrient pollution Iowa is facing. That comes from nonpoint sources — primarily agriculture and livestock — that face voluntary measures.

“We’ve wrung every last ounce of pollution reduction out of point source discharges like municipalities. They're permitted, and we can then enforce reductions,” Cwiertny said. “The challenge are the voluntary practices for nonpoint source pollution.”

One option is to regulate nonpoint sources.

For example, Iowa could put restrictions on what flood plains farmers can farm in. Some flood every two years on average. That means nutrients — and crops — are washing away every two years, damaging the farmer’s bottom line and the surrounding water quality. Marginal land that’s already not profitable could be taken out of production. The state could make certain conservation practices mandatory, like saturated buffers. It could also regulation when and how much fertilizer is applied to fields.

Just like for point sources, though, regulations for nonpoint sources would require enforcement. That demands more funding, time and resources for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources — the state’s regulatory body overseeing state and federal laws that protect air, land and water.

“When you make something mandatory, there's still the process of verifying that it's happening. … It's not an uncomplicated process either,” Benning said. “It’s not a magic wand and poof, everything gets better. There's different complications.”

There’s very little, if any, political will to pursue regulations for nonpoint sources because of potential blowback from political funders. Major agricultural companies donated about $500,000 to political candidates ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, and the Iowa Farm Bureau donated more than $330,000, according to Investigate Midwest reporting.

“I've viewed a lot of the strategy as a big rope-a-dope strategy for agricultural interests,” Schilling said. “We've delayed any sort of conversation here probably by a generation.”

Systemic challenges within agriculture

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In November, Dan Voss geared up to plant camelina — a cover crop — across some of his 600-acre farm near Palo. It’s a conservation practice he has dutifully adhered to since the 1980s, along with no-till. He already has one saturated buffer and one bioreactor on his land. By the end of 2024, he’s hoping for two more bioreactors and three more saturated buffers.

It’s those conservation actions that led to his accolade as the Iowa Farm Bureau’s 2023 Iowa Conservation Farmer of the Year.

“It's a win-win for farmers. Shoot, it doesn't cost them anything,” Voss said about conservation practices, like his own, that were completed within strategic patchworks of conservation practices called “batch and build” initiatives that aim to improve water quality in bulk. “We really can make progress, and we can reduce the dead zone. … The agriculture community, we need to get with it.”

Within the current structure of the Nutrient Reduction Strategy, the only way to make it more successful is to accelerate the rate of voluntary adoption for conservation practices. Doing that within the confines of Iowa’s agricultural industry is difficult, said J. Arbuckle, an ISU rural sociologist who runs the Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll.

Today’s farmers are exceedingly dependent on purchased inputs, he said, a growing trend over the last few decades as farming practices advance and grant larger yields than ever before. The Gazette previously reported that Iowa farmers bought 4.94 million metric tons of fertilizer from July 1, 2022, through June 30 — down 6 percent from the previous year, but 10 percent higher than the 10-year average.

Not only do these increased inputs lead to outsized impacts on water quality, but their costs also deplete farmers’ bottom lines: Even if their yields are up, their overall profit decreases with every pound of fertilizer purchased.

“It's really systemic, and it's really hard to just jump out of it,” Arbuckle said. He recommended farmers shift their mindsets from chasing higher yields to chasing higher profits, which conservation practices can help with. “If everybody were chasing profits, and trying to reduce the amount that they're spending on external inputs, everybody would be better off.”

More than three-fourths of farmers responding to his 2014 Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll said they were concerned about agriculture’s impact on Iowa’s water quality, and 84 percent agreed that farmers should do more to reduce nutrient and sediment runoff into waterways. Yet almost half of the farmers reported they were only slightly or not at all knowledgeable about the Nutrient Reduction Strategy at that time.

In the 2023 Farm Poll, 64 percent of rental farmer respondents indicated that their landlord had not spent any money on conservation practices for their largest parcel of land over the previous 10 years. Fifty-seven percent of renters reported spending some amount of their own money on such practices in the same time frame, and most agreed it was their responsibility to address conservation needs on the land they rent.

“We're moving in the right direction in terms of awareness, knowledge and then adoption of practices,” Arbuckle said. “It's just that we're going much more slowly than that we would like (in order) to actually make the types of progress that we would like.”

Brittney J. Miller is the Energy & Environment Reporter for The Gazette and a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.

Comments: (319) 398-8370; brittney.miller@thegazette.