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Experts commend Iowa’s new water quality initiative, but say buffer strips alone won’t fix the state’s problems
Iowa Department of Ag allocates $3 million for farmers and landowners to plant perennial buffers along waterways upstream from the Cedar Rapids and Des Moines metro areas

Aug. 30, 2025 5:30 am, Updated: Sep. 2, 2025 9:33 am
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After a summer of news about high nitrate levels in rivers that provide drinking water for hundreds of thousands of Iowans, the state has announced a new program that will allocate $3 million for initiatives intended to improve water quality in several watersheds.
Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig announced this week a pilot project called the Streamside Buffer Initiative. It aims to encourage farmers and landowners in the watersheds upstream from the Des Moines and Cedar Rapids metropolitan areas to add perennial buffers to fields along streams to help prevent nutrients from entering the watersheds.
“I am excited to introduce this new pilot project to accelerate the adoption of streamside buffers in fields and watersheds where they can support downstream water users,” Naig said in a statement.
In the statement, Naig said that he and Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship “recognize there’s still a tremendous amount of work to do” to address Iowa’s water quality, especially in the state’s metropolitan areas.
“The Streamside Buffer Initiative is yet another example of my commitment to empowering farmers and landowners to adopt the conservation practices that are right for their fields in a way that has meaningful impact on soil health and water quality,” Naig stated.
The Streamside Buffer Initiative will offer cost-share payments for landowners who add perennial vegetation along streams in the North Raccoon, Boone, Middle Cedar and Turkey River watersheds, as well as in Dubuque County.
The program is designed to reduce nutrient runoff into rivers and strengthen source water protections for Iowa’s two largest metropolitan areas: the Des Moines and Cedar Rapids areas.
The state-funded cost-share initiative is intended to be more flexible than existing federal cost-share programs to encourage more farmers and landowners to incorporate saturated buffers and bioreactors for more water quality benefits, along with soil health benefits and to aid wildlife.
Local impact
Cara Matteson, Linn County’s sustainability director, said the county is actively looking for additional conservation practices to implement around Linn County in addition to the streamside buffer strips. She said the new state program will provide “stacked benefits for a higher return on investment.”
“This streamside buffer pilot is a wonderful way to provide multiple benefits that include water quality, flood prevention, soil health, and habitat improvement,” Matteson said. “We hope to see a lot of interest with this program locally.”
Mary Beth Stevenson, watershed and source water program manager for the City of Cedar Rapids said Naig’s program is “absolutely a step in the right direction.”
Pointing to a 2015 study by the environmental research nonprofit Environmental Working Group, Stevenson said by implementing stream buffer strips ranging between 35 to 75 feet in width in row cropped areas, Iowa could get two-thirds of the way to the state’s goal for reducing phosphorus pollution and one-fifth of the way to the nitrogen pollution target.
Stevenson said protecting the Cedar River’s alluvial aquifer — which is an aquifer with an underground layer of sand and gravel deposited by a river that holds and transmits groundwater — from nitrate contamination is critically important for Cedar Rapids.
“Stream buffers are a natural infrastructure practice that help to restore and protect the resilience of the Middle Cedar Watershed. The Stream Buffer Initiative could be very meaningful to Cedar Rapids, especially on farms where stream buffers are integrated into a whole-farm conservation strategy with in-field management practices and tile drainage treatment solutions,” Stevenson said. “I hope that farmers in the Middle Cedar Watershed take advantage of this opportunity to set aside areas of their farms that have lower productivity in order to protect streams and rebuild watershed health.”
To be eligible for the cost-share payments to add perennials, the buffers must be between 30 and 100 feet wide on at least one side of the stream. The streamside buffers also must be maintained for at least 10 years.
Strips of land running alongside creeks, drainage ditches, lakes, rivers and streams are eligible for this cost-share program.
Harvested buffers — which are strips of the perennial vegetation — will receive a one-time payment of $250 per acre for establishment costs and $1,500 per acre for foregone income, totaling $1,750 per acre.
Eligible non-harvested buffers, which could include more permanent vegetation like trees, shrubs and grasses, will include a one-time payment of $500 per acre for establishment costs and up to $3,500 per acre for foregone income.
Payments through the program will only be allocated for new buffers established on land currently in row crop production. Farmers and landowners in the program are not allowed to use the strips for livestock grazing purposes.
The state also is encouraging landowners and farmers to incorporate additional conservation practices to complement the streamside buffers. Those could include saturated buffers and bioreactors to provide added water quality measures.
According to the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, landowners and farmers interested in enrolling in the program should contact their local USDA office.
Some experts say it’s not enough
The investment from the state comes weeks after a group of environmental scientists and water quality experts gathered in Des Moines to discuss their findings from a Central Iowa Source Water Resource Assessment (CISWRA), commissioned by Polk County.
Through more than 4,000 hours of research, the 16 science advisers found that about 80 percent of the total contribution of nitrogen in the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers’ watersheds comes from agricultural land.
When the report was presented to hundreds of Iowans in early August, Jerald Schnoor, a professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa, said 40 percent of the nitrogen comes from the fertilizers applied directly to the land; 20 percent is from emissions from soybeans and legumes, and 20 percent is from manure applied to the land.
Schnoor said other sources of nitrate — although less significant than agricultural activities — are from “atmospheric deposition,” like rain and snow, which makes up about 18 percent of nitrate.
He said wastewater from developed land contributes only about 2 percent of nitrate in the watersheds.
Colleen Fowle serves as the water program director with the Iowa Environmental Council. Fowle said she studied how water flows through buffer strips as part of her graduate thesis at Iowa State University 20 years ago.
Fowle said while Iowa “certainly needs” more investments from the state and more landowner buy-in for basic conservation practices, it is “past time for pilot projects.”
“We need large-scale implementation if we are serious about providing safe water to Iowans,” Fowle said.
She said the real measure of success comes from the investment’s results, like if the buffer strips will result in cleaner water throughout the state.
“When it comes to access to safe, clean water, we can’t just celebrate the dollars. We have to remain laser-focused on outcomes,” Fowle said. “Our health depends on it."
Stevenson, in Cedar Rapids, said the pilot program is a good step, but no single conservation practice will help Iowa reach its long-term nutrient reduction goals.
“For example, tile drainage underlying stream buffers will still carry nitrate directly to a stream,” Stevenson said. “The most effective way to address nitrate runoff from farm fields is by stacking stream buffers with any number of additional practices (like) cover crops, no-till, wetlands, oxbows, bioreactors, saturated buffers, and saturated grassed waterways.
“By combining methodologies, farmers maximize their ability to capture and treat as much nitrate runoff as possible in a whole-farm conservation strategy,” she said.
Elliot Anderson, a research scientist at the University of Iowa who works with the College of Engineering and the Iowa Geological Survey, said he is generally supportive of conservation efforts like the Streamside Buffer Initiative, as the stream buffers are effective at both “reducing pollutant transport and improving aquatic ecological health.”
“Anytime agricultural land adjacent to rivers can be taken out of production and replaced with perennial vegetation, that's a positive step for water quality,” Anderson said.
But he said it’s important to keep in mind the scale of these projects and Iowa’s water quality issues.
“While buffers can have a big impact on the local waterbodies just downstream of their locations, this project is unlikely to improve water quality along the main stems of the Des Moines and Cedar Rivers in a meaningful way,” Anderson said. “Based on the project's proposed details, these buffers will likely be installed along less than 1 percent of Iowa's perennial stream network.
“The size of the Des Moines and Cedar River watersheds is too large for us to expect that this project will have an appreciable improvement on their source water quality,” he said.
Although they do have many benefits, Anderson said initiatives like this could be improved by incorporating a water quality monitoring component.
“Although our calculations suggest that this project won't have a significant impact on water quality in Des Moines, we cannot be certain without having some tangible water quality measurements designed to assess the project's effectiveness,” Anderson said. “It's always useful to link the installation of conservation practices to observed changes in downstream water quality, because this allows us to determine how well projects are working and use this information to improve conservation efforts.”
Anderson spoke at the Polk County water quality assessment presentation in early August, along with Schnoor and several other Iowa researchers.
In that presentation, Anderson said the state funded one of the “most extensive, world renowned nitrate monitoring networks that's ever been in existence” about a decade ago. The network included about 80 sensors tracking nitrate throughout waterways.
He said these sensors helped researchers understand how contaminates — like nitrate — travel through and circulate in Iowa’s riverways, their concentration in certain areas, identifying areas that are at risk and for identifying which management practices and conservation strategies are most efficient in curbing pollutants in waterbodies.
However, he said the funding for the program by the State Legislature is set to be cut, bringing the number of sensors down to 20.
Claire Hruby, an assistant professor of environmental science and sustainability at Drake University, said the buffer program is “absolutely a step in the right direction.”
“Ideally, there would be some strings attached to ensure that these practices become permanent, fertilizers and pesticides are well managed on adjacent crop fields and that they come with publicly available monitoring data,” Hruby said.
However, she said water from crop fields can sometimes pass under the buffers through tiles, sand or gravel deposits, so it will be “important for these to be designed and managed properly if they are going to be effective for nitrate reduction.”
“I am encouraged by these announcements,” Hruby said. “But I hope everyone understands that this, alone, is not going to solve our water challenges.”
Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. She is also a contributing writer for the Ag and Water Desk, an independent journalism collaborative focusing on the Mississippi River Basin.
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Comments: olivia.cohen@thegazette.com