Des Moines Water Works lawsuit could be avoided

Is the Des Moines Water Works lawsuit really needed? Well no, not if we return our agriculture to crops that people actually eat, and crops that we could use to replace many of the petro-chemically derived manufactured products we use today.

Iowa imports 85 percent of its people food. So, how can an argument be made that farmers must be allowed to pollute our water, air, and soil because they need to feed the world? Iowa's farmers don't even feed us.

Iowa's corn and bean crops are not food for people, but instead are commodities used for industrial animal feed or other industrial processes including ethanol and biofuels. We do not need them to feed ourselves. And, we certainly do not need the nutrient pollution that must result from using this industrial model.

The Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy is needed only because this recent industrial model, the favorite of corporations, must pollute. But the strategy will not address, let alone clean up, many avenues of pollution that are inherent in this industrial corn and beans model of agriculture. Even if every farmer adopted every practice that the strategy promotes, we would still have pollution because some of those practices actually pollute themselves.

Corporations make money on commodities especially when you consider what economists call 'externalities”, the nutrient pollution that the public must pay to clean up and that corporations don't have to pay for. If we insist on this corporate-friendly production of commodities, we always will have pollution.

We should return farming to growing food for people to eat and crops for our manufacturing needs. That model is available today and if adopted today, would result in a clean, nonpolluting, soil building, flood decreasing, and habitat-enhancing agriculture.

Five pieces of that model are: growing perennial prairie grains for food; planting strips of perennial native prairie in all annual fields (10 percent of all annual fields in native prairie would stop 95 percent of the erosion); adopting intensive rotational grazing for animal farming; planting industrial hemp (which supplies nutrition and manufacturing needs); and producing small grains, fruits and vegetables that people eat.

Des Moines Water Works would not need to sue if we had a sane and clean agricultural system.

' Bob Watson is an environmental activist who works in the wastewater industry. Comments: bobandlinda@civandinc.net