Candidates must address dirty water

Iowa politicians should tell us what they will do about all the pollution coming from this recently adopted corn and beans, confinements and feedlots, industrial model of agriculture.

There is an ammonia cloud always hanging over Iowa. The ammonia cloud is from the volatilization of anhydrous ammonia used as a fertilizer by industrial ag farmers, and, the 24/7 air pollution, including ammonia, coming out of hog, dairy, and poultry confinements. The Iowa Legislature made it impossible to regulate air emission pollution coming out of confinements by voting to “Repeal the Ambient Air Quality Standards” for ammonia and hydrogen-sulfide in 2003. Any Iowan that is outside when it rains or snows is being fertilized by ammonia.

The Iowa Plan was the forerunner of the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy (INRS). These plans were supposed to give us clean water again. The INRS was voluntary for farmers but not for wastewater treatment plants which were given lower discharge limits they have to meet. In the last 25 years or so, the tiling of Iowa’s farm fields has gone from some 880,000 miles of field tile to some 2 million miles of tile lines leading to our surface waters. And, according to the University of Iowa, industrial agriculture’s pollution has doubled in the last 20 years.

Prior to the adoption of these plans, the acknowledged percentage of pollution to our waters was 92% from agriculture, 4% from wastewater, and 4% from others. With the doubling of agricultural pollution during that time and the decrease in wastewater pollution due to lower discharge limits, the percentages are now approximately 96.5% agriculture, 1.5% wastewater, and 2% other.

Todd Dorman, and other journalists, should not be blown off and given no answers when asking politicians what they plan on doing about that “voluntary” and human health harming industrial ag pollution.

Bob Watson lives in Decorah.