THIS 61st IOWA WATER blog is the 13th post involving anonymous Des Moines Register public (“2 Cents Worth”) rants regarding the degradation of Iowa’s environmental quality by Iowa Agriculture.
While the actions of all Iowans negatively impact the Iowa landscape to some degree, the greatest pollution source by far is Iowa agriculture in the form of grain and meat production. And it is not only landscape pollution “out there,” but also an issue of public health on farms and in towns and cities.
With perhaps 25 million acres in cropland and 45-50 million pigs annually brought to market in Iowa [ 3.1 million Iowa residents in 2016], efforts for decades to decrease the impact of agricultural pollution have largely failed. And environmental degradation can be anticipated to increase, even with effort to add a statewide tax to be applied to mitigate ag pollution that is a consequence of massive chemical application on cropland [fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides] and animal waste [manure an ammonia]. The agricultural infrastructure is not your Centennial farmer-model. It is an industrial model of drainage tiles that have eradicated natural wetlands and factory animal plants and massive chemical application on rather monolithic crops. Against this industrial model that is also geographically massive, dollars spent on mitigation efforts are minute window-dressings. Further complicating efforts to improve land and water quality, efforts to diversify crop rotation or use cover crops and address drainage tiles rapid release of chemical and animal waste and create enough wetlands that would take land out of production are met with resistance. Efforts to monitor and regulate and tax pollution practices are legislatively resisted at a state level to protect agricultural interests as well as even limit the rights of local communities to regulate activities. And yet, water treatment is heavily regulated and, therefore, costly to communities with no shared cost responsibility for Iowa ag polluters.
Why such support for Iowa Ag over public interest? Industrial Iowa ag is unsustainable without government $$$ and legislative protection. It must be bolstered up and not monitored so that it can be changed and not expected to pay for its pollution.
The bottom line: effort to have even “slightly clean water” will have to be opposed if Iowa ag as it currently is practiced is to exist.
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Iowa’s new state symbol should be a sick oak tree with serious leaf damage next to a farm chemical CEO saying “No one has proven our herbicide caused this” and an ISU researcher nodding very nervously.
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Hooray, modst new restrictions on Dicamba herbicide at last. Maybe the foliage on my box elders and oaks won’t be blasted by chemical drift next year.
--Not to mention my lungs
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A visiting East Coast friend was interested in cover crops, so as we drove to an Iowa town, we looked for cornfields that had them so she could see them. We drove fifty-two miles before finally passing a cover-crop field. Wow.
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Iowa is not doing well in respect to mental health, water quality , child and elder welfare, and some other things. And our once-top-rated K-12 system is lower ranked now. But cheer up Iowans! We are No. 1 for numbers of pigs and egg-laying hens in factory farms.
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I’ll care about helping Iowa farmers when they care enough about water pollution to plant half their rowcrop acres with cover crops. I’ll be dead before that happens.
--Taxpayers already pay more than half of their crop insurance
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And so it goes....on and on and on.
And what about the impact of Iowa Ag beyond Iowa--the Gulf Dead Zone, concentrated chemical production and pre-production of chemical components?
And then there is the population loss and rather rapid dissolution of small town Iowa in the transition from family farms (nationally producing 1% of food in 2007 and earning more money from government payments than from crop sales) to corporate-style and corporate farming (with 5% of these larger farms producing 74% of food) and turning to urbanization to survive where business/industry now dominate the Iowa economy.
