Environmentalists: Moratorium on livestock confinement operations should remain

FAIRFIELD - Farming - once considered the soul of Iowa - has, through its continued industrialization, evolved into that soul's gravest threat, environmental activists said last week at the annual meeting of the Jefferson County Farmers & Neighbors.

'Factory farms corrupt the very soul of Iowa,” said John Ikerd of Fairfield, a retired University of Missouri professor and expert on sustainable farming.

'Together we can reclaim our soul,” Ikerd told the more than 400 people attending the meeting, which at times resembled a pep rally for the movement to secure a moratorium on the construction or expansion of livestock confinement operations.

Diane Rosenberg, president and executive director of the Farmers & Neighbors group, said the moratorium should remain in effect until the state's list of impaired waters, currently at 754, is reduced to 100.

'We need a moratorium. We have no idea how to handle the public health issues we have already created,” added keynote speaker Bill Stowe, CEO of the Des Moines Water Works, which has sued three Northern Iowa counties over excessive nitrate discharges from agricultural tile drainage districts.

'Iowa's natural hydrology and biome have been changed to a substrate for industrial agriculture,” said Stowe, adding there is 'nothing natural” about the industrial scale agricultural tile drainage that 'is mainlining nitrates into our water.”

A substantial portion of the 22 billion gallons of untreated liquid manure applied each year to Iowa farm fields escapes into the state's waterways, according to the speakers, all members of the Iowa Alliance for Responsible Agriculture, which urged the moratorium last month at a Des Moines news conference.

A spokesman for the governor called the moratorium an extreme proposal that would harm agriculture and the Iowa economy.

Ikerd, a board member of the Jefferson County group, said Iowa's problem is a failure of governance to protect the rights of Iowans to clean water and air and to a healthy environment.

'We've reached a pivotal moment, when what's possible has changed,” said Jess Mazour, a community organizer for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a steadfast opponent of factory farms.

Mazour said Iowa laws governing livestock confinements need to be rewritten to provide more protection for the environment and for the health of people living near them.

Among the grievances cited by Mazour are loopholes in Iowa law that allow corporations to build in environmentally sensitive areas and to avoid restrictions and oversight by concentrating multiple smaller buildings or buildings with different owners in the same area.

Control over siting confinements, she said, should reside with local residents rather than with the master matrix system, under which the Department of Natural Resources must issue a construction permit as long as the applicant achieves a passing score.

Chris Petersen of Clear Lake, an Iowa Farmers Union member who raises hogs with pre-confinement methods, called the master matrix a sham.

During a recent drive in northwest Iowa, Mazour said she traveled 'a solid hour” in which fumes from hog confinements 'made it uncomfortable to breathe.”

'People are now surrounded by the more than 9,000 factory farms in Iowa. Everyone in the state has been impacted by their proliferation. This is the time to go big or go home,” she said.

Iowans 'have every reason to promote such a moratorium. The industry has failed to police itself. We have bad actors across the state,” State Sen. David Johnson of Ocheyedan, a former Republican who switched to independent earlier this year, said Friday.

'Whether a moratorium proposal could get to the governor's desk in the upcoming session of the Legislature depends on the outcomes of this fall's elections, but in any case (Gov. Terry) Branstad would veto it,” he said.

Johnson said a movement to establish local control over the siting of livestock confinement facilities is not realistic in the coming General Assembly.

'We really need to revisit the laws governing the siting of confinements,” said Johnson, one of the lawmakers who drafted the 2002 legislation introducing the master matrix scoring system for siting confinements.

'The points requirement looks rather silly today,” Johnson said.

Stowe said passage of a 3/8-cent sales tax increase calculated to yield $180 million a year for a natural resources trust fund approved by voters in 2010 'will not solve the problem.”

For the state's nutrient reduction strategy to succeed, every acre of cultivated land in the state will require at least one conservation practice, and that will take regulation, he said.

'Four years ago we were debating whether our water is polluted,” Mazour said. 'We won that, and now the question is, will the cleanup be voluntary or mandatory and who pays?”

'The polluter has to pay,” she said.