Agriculture is the source of Iowa’s water pollutants

In response to a guest column by Frank J. Zieser blaming homeowners for Iowa's water pollution crisis ('We must share the costs of water cleanup,” March 27):

Congratulations to Mr. Frank Zieser on planting and harvesting 46 crops. My parents raised 56 crops before retiring.

Mr. Zieser concedes that nitrogen follows water. What he does not acknowledge is that the fertilizer 'dumps” in the fall of the year by farmers leaves hundreds of pounds of nitrogen laying in the fields that rains carry into our drinking water. He also fails to acknowledge that back when he farmed, only low spots were tiled. Today, whole farms are 'pattern tiled” which turns them into giant toilet flush systems. Iowa State University research shows that the No. 1 thing we can do to reduce nitrates in our water is keep farm field drain tiles from flowing into our streams and rivers. We can do that through plugging the tiles, removing them, or having them empty into bioreactors, settling ponds or wetlands. Anything less, is like running a pipe directly from the farm field tile lines to our kitchen faucet.

I will gladly take Mr. Zieser on a driving tour of the 99 counties in Iowa like I did in 2015 and introduce him to neighbors and relatives that can point to farms that used to have conservation practices that were torn out by the big farmer that took over. The head of the FSA in Iowa, John Whitaker, acknowledges that his budget has no money to monitor or enforce soil conservation rules in Iowa.

Mr. Zieser is lucky. He is not one of the 16,600 Iowans who will be told they have cancer in 2016. He will not join the 130,000 Iowans battling cancer. The Iowa College of Public Health's 2016 Cancer Report (http://www.public-health.uiowa.edu/shri/pubs/pdf/Cancer_2016.pdf) lists the top 10 Cancers by new cases and deaths as thyroid and ovarian cancers, directly related to high nitrates in our water. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is also listed, which has been linked to Roundup herbicide by the World Health Organization.

One last point.

Mr. Zieser contends that our lawns and golf courses are as big a contributor to nitrates as corn and soybeans. That is an old Farm Bureau lie. The Science Assessment of the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy shows 93 percent of the nitrates in our water in Iowa comes from farm sources.

The math further disputes the lie. Iowa has 30,5000,000 tillable acres. Iowa cities and towns comprise 600,000 acres. To put on as much nitrogen as the average Iowa farmer a homeowner would have to put on 32 bags of lawn fertilizer. That's because farmers use anhydrous ammonia, which 82 percent nitrogen. Lawn fertilizer averages 10 percent nitrogen.

It's time for the farmers who are poisoning us to stop, and to pay the cost of removing and keeping their poisons out of our water. Iowa belongs to all 3,000,000 of us, not just a few big industrial farmers.

' Tom Fiegen is a farm bankruptcy lawyer in Clarence, and candidate for the U.S. Senate. Comments: communications@fiegenforussenate.com