We Do Not Save The Earth; The Earth Saves Us

Great Blue Heron / Raccoon River, Iowa, [Paige Andreas photo, Nov 2016]

The Your 2 Cents’ Worth excerpts, Part 5 [various readers submissions/ Des Moines Register]:

NOTE: “2 Cent” folks are published anonymously in the DM Register.  With anonymity, you can say damn near anything, but that doesn’t guarantee you make the paper.   This “secrecy” brings out the cranky curmudgeon, sour, grip aspect of folks that is typically not our best side.  But, goddammit, sometimes something needs to be said, and when it comes to water quality--or lack thereof in Iowa water--these comments are often spot-on in fact.  

We could simply bow to the river or go there with quasi-shamanic drums and good intentions and, likely, and perhaps more realistically than trying to do something politically, we might eventually psycho-spiritually really clean the waters (in sort of the way of our Maharishi friends in Fairfield, Iowa try to do, by “just getting that right quantity of  meditative participants to tweak the universe in the right direction.”) 

I think the admonition that “We do not save the Earth, the Earth saves us,” is likely the real way things work.  When it comes to water quality, it is not really about saving the Earth, but rather about improving human life.

And yet, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to alter our approach, given the fact that our drinking water, cleansed of nitrates, smells like chemical.  Rather than hope in Iowa that our eternal governor Branstad will clean our water, we need to wake up and top being abused by total lies.  Go back, year by year if you must, and find his actions for clean water instead of legislation and support for degradation of water.  This is not just a Branstad-thing; it is the American way that needs tob e confronted.  The American “dust bowl” is the not the result of drought.  It is the result of exploitation and, literally, lies by money-makers that ruined folks lives.  We live in a time where science is a wondrous strategy that has literally made more people, but that is often disregarded as a fact when the facts do not support the reality.  In Iowa, the 2016 push is for a 3/8th penny sale tax to support physical changes in the farm landscape that would improve water quality.

We likely need to do much more than pay a tax that will not alter the industrial ag system.  We need to call them out for their deception.  Why? because it is harmful right now.  It would barely touch the problem, and has no expectations.  

While it can sound esoteric, we might begin to listen to the voice of water as if it is trying to tell us something important--not just for better smelling water or even for health.  Perhaps water is holy and sacred in a way that holy and sacred are practical and economically rich.  We have water in Iowa that is cloud-given, and fairly dependable, for which folks across the globe would give their eye-teeth.  The clatter or everyday life seems to overwhelm us.  It is a time to slow, listen, and see what appears.  It’s not for certain and “certain” is what we like.  Sorry, no certain, not ever.

*****

Tim Urban, “Farmers are protected; what about other Iowans?,” Letters To Editor, Des Moines Register, 10/25/16:

A report on KCRG TV in Cedar Rapids revealed that “nearly all Iowa farms, about 154,000 enrolled in safety-net programs, are going to get financial assistance for the 2015 crop year.”  The programs are designed to protect against drops in crop prices due to market downturns.  The Iowa Farm Service Agency said corn prices are 32 percent below the benchmark price for the Agricultural Risk Coverage program, and soybeans are 27 percent below the benchmark price.

It seems the height of hypocrisy for farm interests to lambaste Democrats for too many government subsidies while they are protected from the vagaries of the market place.  It is even more remarkable that during times when farm interests were making large profits, they resisted conservation set-asides or other policies to mitigate against nitrate pollution.  I am in favor of price supports but I would like to see the farm lobby start to favor government spending on pollution mitigation, including the 3/8 percent sales tax increase approved by Iowa voters and taxation of fertilizer to pay for nitrate mitigation.

If Iowa farmers are protected from low prices, Iowa residents should be protected from farm pollution.

[bold, Kinseth]

*****

Why do self-described futurists focus so much on technology?  It would be just as helpful to talk about what we’re going to do as global aquifers steeply drop and global topsoil washes away in massive amounts.  Not as much fun as driverless cars, of course, so maybe that’s why.

*****

I have a three-year-old wetland on the edge of my land that cleans water from neighboring cornfields.  It gets too much pollution, and now two neighbors are adding drainage tile that will increase the pollution.  Iowa is not serious about clean water.

*****

Terry Branstad saying he’ll lead the cleanup of Iowa’s polluted water is like Donad Trump saying he respects women.

*****

Indians were the first Americans.  The white man drove them from their land onto reservations.  Again they are trying to protect the land given to them from the white man!  Water is, to them, the source of life and a pipeline is going to be built under the Missouri River.  Who is that callous and stupid?

*****

A major Iowa farm group claims their recent poll shows most Iowans trust farmers to take care of the environment.  If so, I guess we're back to blaming the  Water Pollution Fairy and her evil magic wand.

*****

Farm Chemotherapy: Exploitation vs. Stewardship Model

THE IOWA SOIL FERTILITY is some of the best and rarest in Earth’ biosphere.

And yet, Iowa agriculture now has to push chemical use to spur plant growth.  It is no longer enough to rely on the soil fertility.  Crop seeds that favor more bushels per acre are, of course favored.  It seems to make sense to produce as much as one can.  And having set the wheels in motion for highest production, crop production now requires the high production to economically sustain.  

Now unable to really claim any sense of land stewardship, modern Iowa agriculture is exploiting the landscape much like commercial ocean fishing does.  And in this exploitation, just as commercial fishing is depleting fish stock and shrinking the size of fish, Iowa agriculture is depleting soil fertility.  This exploitation [i.e., maximum out-take] while obvious is, paradoxically, so common as to be oblivious--not unlike the perception of fishing communities who oppose limits as impacting negatively economically.

Chemotherapy: This is now how farming is done.

Corn and soy production now require chemical additives such as nitrogen, phosphate, potash, lime, herbicide, pesticide and, increasingly, fungicide.

Data: How much Iowa chemo is being laid down?

In 2004, [Iowa Geological Survey, Technological Information Series 47, 2004] 

4 million tons (8 billion pounds) of nitrogen were applied, averaging perhaps 216 pounds/acre; and

240,000 tons (480 billion pounds) of phosphorus, averaging perhaps 13 pounds/acre.

And this rate has continued now for decades.

[other sources related to pesticides]: In 2014, Iowa farms applied herbicides on 95% of corn-planted acres, totaling 30 million pounds of material.  In addition, fungicide was applied to 19% of corn acres, insecticides on 13%.  

In 2015, Iowa farms applied herbicide on 93% of soy-planted acres, and insecticides on 25% and fungicides on 18%.

These chemicals have an impact on the bioregion itself from the micro-organisms on up the chain of life to human life.  The impact of this chemical usage is exacerbated by farming practices that wash the chemical into the watershed and leach it into the groundwater (aquifers) and “unglue” the soil structure in autumn with no cover crops to expedite release into the watershed.

Pesticides are present in untreated rural water wells and urban water treatment plants.  Lab research connects pesticides to medical disorders such as cancer, parkinson’s disease, thyroid disease, reproductive toxins.  In everyday life, when examining, for example, cancer in a farmer, it is difficult to link it to a pesticide.  Long-range impacts of persistent chemicals is also difficult to determine.

Nitrates and phosphates and pesticides are present in water treated for potable water.

Random pesticide/human data as examples: One water treatment plant in NE Missouri may spend $130,000 to remove atrazine [pesticide].  In 1988/1989, rural water wells were tested form 27 different pesticide.  Eleven were detected as well as 5 other chemical that result from pesticide breakdown.  One or more pesticides were detected in nearly 14% of wells tested.  The effect on health is unclear.

There are other chemical also present in the water such as antibiotics and hormones.

Farm chemotherapy is now consistently present every year, and it is accepted practice that costs farmers.  In Ag Mag, June 9, 2015, Anne Weir Schechinger sketches the conclusion of a 2/17/2015 article in the journal Environmental Research Letters which argues that environmental health problems caused just bey nitrogen pollution cost the public 2 times the value of the $76.7 billion total value of corn produced for grain in the Untied States in 2011 when prices for corn were high ($157 billion in nitrogen pollution damage to human health).  There is some concern that these figures are low because, for example, they do not figure in higher discharges in autumn when nitrogen is not used by plants and with no cover crops is subject to more release.  I would speculate that it is difficult to directly measure impact on health in accurate health dollars.  However, what is important here is that there is a huge economic cost to the United States in public health costs from the voluminous use of nitrogen, not to mention, other fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and animal waste.  And Iowa agriculture contributes disproportionately higher in ag chemical release.  For example the nitrogen stream load from Iowa is estimated to be equivalent to 20% of the long-term nitrogen load carried by the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.

Iowa agriculture gripes about a lawsuit by the Des Moines Water Works.  In the future, Iowa agriculture or the state of Iowa could be presented with lawsuits from Gulf states.

Iowa chemotherapy does remarkable COSTLY damage to the Iowa environment and Iowa public health and contributes to downstream issues all the way into the Gulf of Mexico.  

Interestingly, Iowa’s 4 million annual tons of nitrogen that is applied to Iowa farmland is a small part of the 131 million tons of ammonia produced globally annually.  The United States produces 6%, with China producing 32%, India 8.9%, Russia 7.9%, etc., with 80% of this global production used to fertilize crops.

Special Interests, Not Public Interests, Control the Laws Affecting The Environment

WE ALL WANT clean water--urban dwellers, farmers, small towns and general landowners.

Why don’t we have clean water?

Clean water requires laws.  With regard to environmental issues, laws are regulations or controls on activity.  The game is to stymie regulations because regulations cost $$$.  Regulations tend to be politically linked with loss of freedom to do what special interests want, and they are enacted in the public interest.  When there is a regulation, the public might feel that they won, but it is typically a loss that is touted as a win for the public.  Special interests PR their “gift” to the public interest by supporting some regulations, but backroom deal well ahead of actual laws to avoid regulations.  It is never a priority such as “clean water first” or “landscape improvement first” that wins out.

Almost all laws today favor special interests rather than public interests.  And when it comes to environmental regulations, special interests generally aspire to oppose and defeat environmental regulations.  While public comments on proposed changes can be 90% clear that environmental concerns demand strengthening regulations, special interest groups essentially determine approved changes on a local, state and federal level. 

Legislation that suggests direction encourages non-compliance.  For example, EPA required all states bordering the Mississippi River to submit a Nutrient Reduction Strategy.  Iowa submitted an NRS  involving the development of 7,000 wetlands (now have 70?), 120,000 saturated buffers and bio-reactors (now have 60?),  and 12 to 17 million acres of cover crops (now have 500,000 acres?) with almost no focus on livestock pollution that has grown rapidly to perhaps 8,000 factory farms.  And the Iowa NRS, if completely actualized is speculated to attempt to meet a 45% reduction in pollution, not clean water.  If everyone complied and even if they were freely funded, it will take decades to meet these goals.  And there would be resistance to permanently taking land out of production.  Putting every square foot in to production is how we got into this problem.  As an aspect of much of mid-to northern Iowa being a prairie pothole ecosystem, Iowa once had myriad wetlands on farmland for free that tiling fields eliminated astonishingly within just a few years to put more land into crop production.

Federal and state laws that affect water quality in Iowa clearly favor special interests.  Federal EPA requirements are restricted by special interests.  The Iowa Department of Natural Resources is more regulated (by limitations on the restrictions that it can impose) than landowners and factory farms.  Opposition to actions by landowners and factory farms have little effect, and can even be subject to fines for whistle-blowing. 

Local governments are both regulated by state and federal laws as well as regulate on their own how far they can go restricting development that negatively affect water quality.  And they have real issue with old infrastructure that requires extensive repair and modern re-design to reduce, not prevent, water pollution.

Environment is secondary to nearly all projects’ economic costs.  The environmental outcome of human activity is clearly a loss of existing environmental quality at every turn.  And when there are environmental goals, there are more in the form of partial repair  and never really an effort that begins with the priority of improving existing quality first, with all other priorities secondary to that.

The simplest regulations do have a financial cost, or even a fine for violations.  WE do have regulations impose financial liabilities.  But such liabilities are often supplemented with much more significant tax money to repair the damage [e.g., animal confinement problems and manure spills] so that the violator gets a land improvement reward for damaging the land.

To get “clean water,” [clean water is not going to happen in your lifetime] federal, state and local legal decisions would need to require improvement of the landscape’s quality as their first priority.  And that is not really going to occur because of the power of special interests in these governmental bodies.

Well-meaning landowners face shifting tides of weather and price fluctuation and essentially, overproduce crops to try and break even, with very good years and lean years.  This is what guides water becoming potentially  clean or not.  And laws that are consistent year in and year out don’t fit this model.  And so they cannot steward the land in terms of even maintaining current quality, let alone improve the land quality.  And so there is next to no authentic land stewardship.  More chemicals are poured in to supplement both soil fertility loss and the increased density of planting and minimal crop rotation.

How laws really work: For example, the Bakkan pipeline approval illustrates the absence of improving the landscape as the first priority.  While damage to the landscape was considered, it would never be enough to preempt project approval.  If improving the quality of the landscape might have been the first priority that needed to be met, approval would be unlikely.  Why?  This would be viewed as stopping progress, both by lessening industrial infrastructure and employment opportunity.  These are the first priorities, and they seem obvious to most.  It is difficult to imagine how the pipeline could have been constructed in a way that would improve the landscape.  And show us attempts to offset the damage caused by the pipeline by improving some other landscape.  Nothing like that was required or even imagined.

Another example of the battle put forth by special interests against public interests (source, Des Moines Register, but I don’t have specific citation and date):

One textbook example:  In December 2000, the Clinton 

administration enacted a rule cutting the arsenic levels allowed in

water supplies by one-fifth.  President George W. Bush tried to 

reverse that regulation, but Clinton had already redefined the status

quo.  Bush was perceived as trying to increase the level of arsenic 

by five times.

After an outcry, the Bush administration relented to the Clinton 

standard.

Standards of “clean water” and activities that ‘improve the quality of the the landscape” are not really tree-hugger agendas.  They are neutral economic objectives for Iowa where we are rapidly decreasing water and soil fertility that cost us all--farmers and urban dwellers.  To mitigate the conflict stirred up primarily by the DMWW lawsuit, there is an agricultural industry response to, of course, tax all Iowans, and to suggest that business and farmers cooperate with no regulation on landowners and businesses cooperating out the the goodness of their heart because they, too, love the environment.  Proposals begin as weak responses that will not be fully implemented and clearly not consistently for the decades of intervention required.  Meanwhile, the quality of water an land fertility is dramatically degraded, and the intensity of chemical usage, dense planting, and factory farming anticipated to increase.   The only reason, damagers get away with land degradation is the blessed, rare quality of Iowa land in the world that has made it less obvious.  The land quality that forgives damage took ten thousand years to bank it in such volume, and we are rapidly depleting it.

Flowing Wisdom--More Than Water

ALL IS A RIVER--time, self, place--flowing moment by moment, day 

after liquid day.  I am inside the pesent, a wavecrest in river eternal, 

rising from the past and cascading into the future.  There is still a 

magnitude of wilderness, a great diversity of endurance threatened, 

a multiplicity of utterance,and an opportunity for responsive action.  

I hear my mother tongue in the purl of the river, in my respiration, 

in the wind, and in the patient silence.  It is far more than 

I ever expected to discover.  It is a view that can live forever.

Lance Kinseth, River Eternal

When “Cooperation” As A Water Quality Strategy Masks A “Reality Of Doing Nothing”

Commentary on Ron Corbett, Iowa View: "The ‘Iowa Way’: A clean water solution for all," Des Moines Register: 

COOPERATION THROUGH partnerships involving landowners, business and taxpayers to produce clean water sound good, but can be as meaningless as saying, like the college logo in the movie Animal House, “Knowledge is good.”

Of, course, cooperation is good and knowledge is good.  But what real cooperation will require water quality as THE priority, and the knowledge needed for water quality recommends actions that are either being ignored or ignorantly unseen.  As it stands, the cooperation described in the commentary protects economic interests rather than water and is hyperbole that leads us away from a real solution.

Three components are described By Corbett as the “Iowa Way” for a clean water solution:

Farmer/landowner be held accountable.  This is interpreted as the current voluntary Nutrient Reduction Strategy vs. excessive regulations.  How to get compliance, give farmers $$$ help vs. carry 100% of burden.

Funding by taxpayer with dedicated, protected and consistent 3/8 penny sales tax to fill the Natural Resources and Recreational Trust Fund to protect water resources.

Corporate and company and “conservation entities” funding, with a corporate match to the 3/8 penny sales tax.

In this case “cooperation” translates as “taxpayer being duped,” and landowners and businesses if they believe this.

No requirements except for the Iowa sales tax payer.  

No specific $$ percentage for installing mitigation for farmer landowners; no specific regulation of compliance with chemical release and no regulation of soil depletion, no regulation of chemical application, just build mitigation without specific cost share by farmer/landowner.  Mitigation will require land, and land removed from production across time will not happen consistently across farmland.  Myriad absorbance strips next to streams and fields and myriad wetlands needed would permanently take land out of production. Promising strategies such as 3- and 4-year crop rotation that might assist in improved water quality will not be applied with any uniformity due again to profit loss.   

What is needed will not be a one-and-done deal.  This is an enduring need for decades to even approach (with total landowner compliance, which is impossible) an EPA goal of a 45% pollution reduction to reduce Gulf hypoxia.  Cost is tremendous to only partially improve water quality as is the very general goal of the Nutrient Reduction Strategy.

Corbett suggests that “Companies will want to be associated with efforts to protect Iowa’s water quality.”  Who doesn’t?  Consistently, year after year, “matching 3/8 penny sales tax”? Not going to happen.

Bottom line: No one makes water quality the first priority, so the capability of not only coming up with the $$$ but also really changing the eco-infrastructure of Iowa agriculture so that it doesn’t keep costing us will simply never happen.  That fact is crystal clear.  Currently, farmers feel as if they must mega-produce to get by to be able to continue to farm.  Economically sustaining the farm will practically outweigh sustaining water quality and even the long-term declining soil quality that makes Iowa unique and that is rare in the world.

There once was an Iowa agriculture without tiling, less chemical, less production and wetlands all over the terrain that did less damage to both soil and water.  There were abuses back then as well but on a lesser scale.  There will be no return to this early agriculture as it has become impractical and completely estranged from the running industrialized models that are only increasing.  Now there are more than 8,000 factory farms with politically protected state and federal soft regulations.  

Without a primary prioritization of real water quality, the three “solutions” suggested above will be impractical.  In heaven, maybe all components would give over the money and reduce the pollution, but this is Iowa, not heaven.

It is really dangerous to suggest that we have a good strategy in what is described above, or that landowners are truly stewards or that Iowa feeds the world.  We do have answers and good ideas but we are unwilling to use them primarily because they will cost us a lot if we really do it.  And so without regulation that entities such as water treatment face, we will get far below even a hoped for 45% reduction in water pollution.

Where is 

comprehensive funding for water treatment for the decades ahead that we will not have even partially clean water at best (i.e., 65% polluted still?; or

water as priority that economic factors will not override?

Gulf Hypoxia & Iowa

THE TERM “GULF HYPOXIA” references

Hypoxia, or low oxygen, is an environmental phenomenon where the concentration of dissolved oxygen in the water column decreases to a level that can no longer support living aquatic organisms. Hypoxic areas, or "Dead Zones," have increased in duration and frequency across our planet's oceans since first being noted in the 1970s.

The largest hypoxic zone currently affecting the United States, and the second largest hypoxic zone worldwide, is the northern Gulf of Mexico adjacent to the Mississippi River.

Hypoxia in the northern Gulf of Mexico is defined as a concentration of dissolved oxygen less than 2 mg/L (2 ppm). This figure is based on observational data that fish and shrimp species normally present on the sea floor are not captured in bottom-dragging trawls at oxygen levels < 2mg/L. In other oceans of the world, the upper limit for hypoxia may be as high as 3-5 mg/L.

The average size of the hypoxic zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico over the past 30 years (1985-2014) is about 13,650 square kilometers (or 5,300 square miles.

gulfhypoxia.net, Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium

IOWA

In Iowa, nitrates in water has increased through the years with, for example, measures of nitrates annual median milligrams per liter across time being: 1905: 1-2; 1940: 4; today: 9   Corn and soybeans involves perhaps 23 million acres in Iowa and, of course, across these years, the addition of artificial fertilizers to cropland was initiated and has increased.

The Iowa Environmental Council suggests that “Concentrations of nitrate in Iowa’s streams and groundwater have been found to rank among the highest in the U.S., even higher than elsewhere in the Corn Belt and Northern Great Plains.” [from Donnelle Eller, “Concerns voiced about nitrate levels,” Des Moines Register, 9/30/16, (bold, Kinseth)]

While the drainage basin of the Mississippi River includes a vast landmass, the concentration or “density” of intensive agricultural production that requires chemical applications to produce the volume of grain that is taken annually in Iowa makes Iowa agriculture a big polluter.

30% of U.S seafood comes from the Gulf.

While hypoxia occurs on the seafloor.  It is the consequence of nutrients in the upper water strata, so that water is highly modified vs. natural.  In addition, there are myriad chemicals that are toxic and flowing into the Gulf Of Mexico.

BEYOND THE GULF 

Coastal hypoxia zones are not limited to the Gulf.

The occurrence of hypoxia in shallow coastal and estuarine areas is human-caused vs. hypoxia in deep oceans, and it appears to be increasing.  

Iowa: Not The Breadbasket Of The World, Part Two

See earlier post: Iowa: Not The Breadbasket Of The World, Part One, 10/10/16

IN A VERY REAL WAY, Iowa may be one of the richest and rarest  breadbaskets in the world, but it is not the breadbasket FOR the world.  ‘For the world’ and “Feeding The World’: BOGUS, Bogus, bogus...

Why Part Two?

Craig Lang, “Iowa View: Agriculture Is A Global Market, Des Moines Register, 10.20/16, responds to a DSM Register editorial “Don’t expect Iowa farmers to ‘feed the world,’ 10/10/1, that suggested that Iowa does not feed the world.  He suggests that this might leave farmers with a sense that that they are not doing things “for the greater good.”  

This is confusing hyperbole: Accurately, Iowa does not feed the world but that does not imply that Iowa agriculture is not for the greater good.  Iowa agriculture is not out to destroy the world or keep the ag products from the world.  Agricultural interests come from around the world to explore the technological advances that are operant in Iowa and ag products go out across the world but primary to markets that can afford them.

The bias is not with the Register but with the this Iowa Ag view.

This blog, Iowa Water, focuses primarily on the water quality issues rather than on the global reach of Iowa agriculture.  However, the nobility of feeding the world can contribute to an idea that, morally, Iowa should do all it can to mass produce agricultural products in order to feed the world.  Accordingly, agriculture should be even more industrialized to serve a moral obligation to the world.  Related to water quality, this makes water quality a very secondary priority to feeding the world, and this misses the moral responsibility to enhance rather than deplete the water and soil quality to the point of degrading the ten thousand year old soil fertility and public health.   If Iowa agriculture truly did feed the world, then this might be more of a moral imperative that would outweigh degrading the landscape and public health.  But Iowa feeding the world is a myth vs. a reality, and more chemicals and soil loss and rapid crop recycling and seed design to increase plant density and seed production cannot keep increasing without damaging even the quality of the “breadbasket” that allows for intense exploitation.

*****

Agreed, farming is modern and not an age-old system, and that fact makes it both positive and negative.  It is new tech with an old myth.  The idea of Iowa feeding the world is a myth and that myth is dangerous.  It keeps us from doing exactly what we say we are doing which is “feeding the world.”  What we are doing is outsourcing all we can to a global market, but it is really not feeding the human world.  It goes to ethanol and to animal feed and base products such as fructose.

The argument is offered that Iowa feeds the world in two ways: (1) In underdeveloped nations, the production of more generic products and lower prices in good seasons allow the local populations to focus their farming on local nutritional needs; and (2) in developed countries, generic products, such as soy meal for pigs in China basically upgraded food options.  This latter Chinese example might insult and mask the impact of a much vaster and very rapid improvement of the Chinese economy.  Guess what.  The Chinese would have been enjoying pork with no big problem due to these vster changes.  

Correctly, Iowa agriculture does affect/impact the global ag price market.  And when we produce more, we (to our economic disadvantage lower prices) increase access to these commodities.

Applying high technology to poor fertility landscapes around Earth may damage rather than improve sustainability.  

The ag research that is oriented best toward various global landscapes/bioregions tends to be university- and governmental-based.  This type of research often challenges ag industry research as well as farming practices even in Iowa.  For example, three- or four-year seasonal crop rotation does not fit well with corn-soy-corn-soy in Iowa, but it has much to do with sustainability of soil fertility and water quality in Iowa.  This type of research is not for profit, and it can focus on authentic world hunger in places like Somalia that are not a market for mass purchasing of Iowa commodities.  And this type of research that is modern might come best from nations such as Israel  that have related soil fertility issues.

Overall, Iowa is a global market.  But Iowa is not feeding the globe.  And the type of agriculture practiced in Iowa is not in a unique position to feed the world or even design for various technologies to feed the various, often poorer soil fertility conditions that are present throughout most of the world.  

To great credit, Iowa agriculture has appropriately moved from age-old local systems of farming that were the only options to improved agricultural methods that can deal much more effectively with farming risks such as weather and pests to assure for more stability year in and year out.  And this has influenced more ag research and allowed for more stability in carrying forward agriculture in all of its forms.

To its discredit, Iowa agriculture clings to myths that can allow it to become exploitive.  It has taken an industrialized turn so that the idea of an “Iowa farmer” is no longer one of a steward of the land as the first priority.  It is high-volume competition as the priority if the farmer is to sustain, but it is a blow to the sustainability of the landscape.  Modern Iowa farming would not be possible without the ten-thousand year soil bank and water conditions.  Modern Iowa farming is shooting itself in the foot and it is affecting public health.

It is interesting that to fix water quality issues, the hot new focus is on taxation to fix the farm (with very low targets of change that will not fix the water, even if all the farmers were committed) and no mention of funding for water treatment that users of those services will have to also fund, and increasingly fund things like mitigating the nitrates and phosphates that are removed.  The treatment plants are REQUIRED to meet specific standards, but the farmers have no requirements, either in release of chemicals and soil or in initial amount of chemical input into fields.   And there are water treatment services in Iowa that simply cannot afford to meet standards now. 

The myth of Iowa ‘feeding the world’ “mitigates” the almost total absence of the other myth of ‘stewardship‘ that is largely impossible and meaningless in the face of the farmer’s dilemma of making enough profit to “sustain” farming another season.  It becomes much more ‘take‘ than ‘put back.‘   Modern Iowa agriculture is exploitation of the landscape vs. stewardship of the landscape.  If you use the term “sustainability,” which implies stability across the long run, exploitation is clear and indisputable.