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This nonprofit has ideas about how to clean up Iowa’s water. What do they include?
Food & Water Watch is proposing new policies that it says would mandate best management practices, increase transparency and ‘hold corporate polluters accountable’
Dec. 18, 2025 5:30 am
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At the end of a year in which some Iowa rivers and streams were plagued by high nitrate levels, an environmental nonprofit has proposed a legislative approach to clean up Iowa’s water and curb contamination of the state’s waterways.
The national nonprofit organization Food & Water Watch — which has a presence in Iowa — has released a report highlighting nearly two dozen ways the state can take actionable steps to curb nitrate contamination.
Iowa is at a “turning point” for water, says Dani Replogle, staff attorney for Food & Water Watch. She said the goal of the organization’s “Blueprint for Clean Water” is to respond to Iowans who are asking the nonprofit what they can do to help clean up the state’s water and secure stronger policies going forward.
Replogle said she hopes the policies laid out in the blueprint will “turn the tide of public opinion.”
The report breaks Food & Water Watch’s policy proposals into three categories: mandating best management practices, increasing transparency and holding corporate polluters accountable in Iowa.
Within those three categories, the nonprofit outlines a total of 20 ways the goals can be accomplished.
Download: Food and Water Watch Iowa Blueprint
Mandating ‘Best Management Practices’
Currently, Iowa largely relies on voluntary conservation practices to reduce pollution from agricultural land.
To help curb pollution further, the nonprofit is calling for a prohibition on factory farms being built in areas designated as vulnerable.
The report says these areas include regions that have “karst” terrain, which is soluble rock near the surface that can create sinkholes, caves and springs. They also could include areas with coarse soil or areas that drain to groundwater sources with nitrate levels that exceed 3 milligrams per liter.
The blueprint also calls for stricter construction standards that would require manure lagoons to have double synthetic liners and sensors to make sure the lagoons do not leak.
Under current Iowa law, lagoons are required to have one synthetic liner and have inspections conducted once per year.
The organization is recommending that a policy for manure application to be revisited to prohibit the application of manure on frozen ground, on saturated soils, on soils above 50 degrees Fahrenheit and “to require incorporation of spray-applied waste within 24 hours of application.”
Replogle said these strategies for factory farms and row crop operations in Iowa are “just really common sense policies.”
These policies “are already in place in other Midwest agricultural states and are part of the reason that we don't see this level of water pollution in our neighboring states,” she said.
Replogle said neighboring states that have stronger policies in place include Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin, and that the organization modeled the proposal after the other states’ existing policies.
For example, she said Wisconsin requires universal permitting for all medium and large concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
“Minnesota also has its excellent, vulnerable groundwater area prohibitions and protections for those spaces, and that's the kind of stuff that we think Iowans deserve as well,” she said.
Other best management practices the organization proposes include:
- Mandating perennial buffer strips around lakes, rivers and streams that would be at minimum of 50 feet, along with a minimum of 20 feet of buffer strips along ditches with fencing to prevent livestock from accessing the water;
- Requiring maintenance of on-field vegetation like cover crops;
- Removing the legal provision that prohibits the Iowa Department of Natural Resources from adopting tighter rules for water regulations;
- Amending the Iowa statute that grants watershed management partnerships across the state the authority to regulate water quality;
- And mandating and funding a public mapping system to oversee nutrient management plans.
Working to increase transparency
Key to the organization’s proposal to increase transparency throughout the state is reinstatement of funding for Iowa’s Water Quality Information System — IWQIS. The program had been funded by the state, but the Iowa Legislature shifted that funding in 2023, and IWQIS is now facing a July 2026 funding cliff.
The system, which provides public, real-time data about the quality of Iowa’s rivers and streams, is run out of the University of Iowa. Its leaders have been asking for funding help to keep it operating. Polk County has pledged $200,000, and Linn and Johnson counties are considering similar funding requests.
The Food & Water Watch report states that “blocking access to water quality data will not make the problem go away; rather, it will only guarantee that the public is at higher risk.”
Replogle said funding the water quality system permanently is key to increasing transparency. It currently costs about $600,000 per year to operate the system at full capacity.
“We want permanent funding for IWQIS, because if you don't know what the problem is, then it makes it really difficult to address it,” she said.
Food & Water Watch is also calling for the creation of six additional Iowa DNR staff positions to review water quality reports and to make unannounced farm inspections to impose fines for discharge or water quality infractions.
The report also urges the DNR to inspect one-fifth of all permitted animal operations in the state annually.
Hold corporate polluters accountable
Food & Water Watch proposes that the state “hold corporate polluters accountable” by requiring that factory farms operate with NPDES — National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System — permits. NPDES permits control water pollution by regulating the amount of pollution that is being discharged into waterways.
The report proposes that NPDES permits should be in place “by presuming that all large factory farms discharge into state waters.”
The report’s other recommendations include:
- Amending state law to require facilities with manure management plans to submit data to a publicly available database on a consistent basis to “demonstrate compliance”;
- Requiring farms to monitor for manure runoff during application and to post the results to a public website every month;
- Mandating public reporting of manure spills with written details within seven days of the spill and filing a full lab analysis within 30 days of the occurrence;
- Lowering the threshold for permitting to less than 1,000 animal units;
- And broadening the definitions of "owner" and "common management” of facilities to include anyone with a financial stake in two or more facilities.
Replogle said the organization hopes the blueprint will be introduced to the Iowa Legislature during the 2026 session, which starts next month, as a single omnibus bill.
She acknowledged that it may be difficult to get the “whole plate of policies” passed at once, but the organization is hopeful that this year’s water quality headlines will provide momentum.
“We have picked out the ones that we think are top priority, and those ones are going to be introduced as more stand-alone bills,” she said, pointing to closing an LLC factory farms loophole, designating certain land as vulnerable areas, and policies for manure application as top priorities.
She pointed to the organization’s successful work earlier this year opposing legislation that would have shielded agricultural chemical companies from lawsuits over their products’ warning labels.
“We had great success last year when fighting back the Cancer Gag Act … that was a huge win in Iowa,” Replogle said. “I think it's really energized people and let them see that it is actually possible to move legislators on these issues around clean water and pollution.”
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
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