Solving Iowa’s water pollution problem

This guest column is part of our 2016 editorial focus, Building blocks: Working together to make our communities great places to live. Share your thoughts and ideas with us: editorial@thegazette.com; (319) 398-8469.

Iowa's water pollution problem is really three problems. We can no longer avoid addressing them.

The first is a continual flood of nitrates into Iowa's waters. Industrial agriculture groups either pretend the cause is 'a mystery” or blame Mother Nature. It is neither. A key contributing cause can be traced directly to when our farmers schedule the majority of the fertilizer applications - in the fall - over extensively tilled fields. This farm management practice guarantees that a third of the nitrate leaches into our water supply before the crop even sprouts.

The answer to the toxic nitrate leaching is straightforward: Apply fertilizer (and manure) as the crop needs it but sparingly, plant cover crops when the cash crops are dormant, and monitor and filter nitrate discharges from farms. Cover crops are needed because corn and soybeans are annual crops, which only have live roots about five months of the year. In addition to better farming practices, we have to keep unfiltered farm drain tile discharges from flowing directly into our rivers and streams. This can be done through settling ponds, restored wetlands, and bioreactors. Farm drain tile lines are the factory sewer pipe today. Buffer strips also need to part of the mix. Minimizing the fertilizer leaching and waste at the source is like confining feathers inside a bag. It is easier to keep the bag closed and take out a few feathers at a time, rather than dumping the whole bag of feathers out and then trying to gather them back up as the wind scatters them far and wide.

The second problem toxifying Iowa's waters is excessive soil erosion. What happens when soil erodes is that nutrients, like phosphorous, are carried into Iowa's waters with the soil. In Iowa for every gallon of corn ethanol we produce, we lose two gallons of soil. That amounts to an average of 5.7 tons per acre per year. But natural processes only create a half of ton of new soil per acre per year. Losing eleven times as much soil every year as is created is flat-out unsustainable. We need to return the most fragile land to perennial grasses. Period!

The answer to the erosion and related water pollution problem is to enforce existing conservation rules under the Farm Bill. We must put teeth and money into enforcement. Currently, Congress - bowing to big AG interests - has stripped all funding for conservation enforcement out of the Federal Budget. It's a mistake and Iowa's waters are paying a heavy price. We also need to put a water quality requirement in the next Farm Bill.

Federal taxpayers have spent $2 billion on soil conservation under Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack's watch, only to have some farmers remove terraces and waterways so that they can turn around with their 24 row planters. Our soil loss and water pollution have gotten worse at the expense of Iowa's water quality and Iowan's health.

The third problem with our water - the one that nobody wants to talk about - is the domestic version of Agent Orange which poisoned so many Vietnam veterans, and now their children and grandchildren. Modern agriculture has a chemical addiction problem with Roundup, 2-4D, atrazine, and now a more even toxic herbicide cocktail, Enlist Duo. Last year we applied 300 million pounds of Roundup alone in this country. National Geographic documented in April 2015 that 90 percent of the soybeans they tested contained Roundup. The World Health Organization concluded in March 2015 based upon a review of over 900 studies that Roundup causes non-Hodgkins lymphoma. According to the Iowa College of Public Health we had 17,000 new cancer cases in Iowa in 2015, and they joined 130,000 Iowans already battling cancer. Despite 40 years of amazing advances in cancer treatment, we lost an additional 1,100 people to cancer in 2015, the equivalent of my hometown of Clarence, as compared to 1975. We farmed for thousands of years without these poisons, but now they are regarded as vital to the commodities we grow as water. But are they really? How many farmers and family members are we willing to lose early to cancer because of poisons we drench our land with? Sadly, a retired farmer is hard to find in Iowa today because of cancer. We must face the human and medical costs of policies that toxify Iowa's waters.

The politicians who call for taxpayers to foot the bill with a regressive sales tax are handing the cleanup bill to the taxpayers instead of the polluters. I disagree. My answer: you break it, you fix it. We can pay for a fix either through a tax on fertilizer or through a requirement that all federal farm payments are conditioned on compliance with soil conservation and water quality compliance plans set up under the Farm Bill.

Good conservation practices will not cost careful farmers any money. They are already doing the right thing. A minority of farms are doing the vast majority of the polluting.

There is always a reason not to do the right thing. There is an even greater reason to do the right thing. The purity of our beautiful Iowa waters and the health of present and future generations. Iowa belongs to all of us, not just a few industrial agricultural interests.

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