Is Iowa's water quality still going south?

Chuck Isenhart | Iowa View contributor

The five-year anniversary of the state nutrient pollution reduction “strategy” was marked with little fanfare aside from a farm tour by Gov. Kim Reynolds. Meanwhile, sponsors and promoters of the plan struggle to show how the disconnected “demonstration projects” it has spawned are the salvation of clean water in Iowa.

University of Iowa research shows that Iowa continues to be a major source of fertilizer-related pollution in the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, despite good-faith nutrient management efforts by most Iowa farmers. In some years it exceeds the losses of all other states draining to the Gulf of Mexico combined.

According to the study: Iowa’s 4.5 percent of the land area in the Mississippi basin delivers 5.9 percent of the water to the Gulf of Mexico and carries 29 percent of the nitrate-nitrogen pollution. Iowa’s part appears to be increasing faster than “non-Iowa portions” of the watershed, despite Iowa’s cropped acres growing more slowly than other states.

In extolling their “historic” water quality bills, Republican lawmakers resisted these facts, as well as proposals from Democrats to step up our game with more robust funding and public policy.

SF 512 lacked meaningful new dollars beyond sales tax money scooped from the general fund. The bill provided no accountability through in-stream monitoring, measurement or public data reporting. Taxpayers will not know if we are getting cleaner water for our money.

Lawmakers never discussed substantive questions, such as how or where to focus spending or the role of soil loss and soil health.

Led by their floor leaders, Rep. John Wills and Rep. Norlin Mommsen, House Republicans spurned common sense amendments. Among them:

Offering the state’s 23 watershed management authorities access to $8.2 million in water quality funds for projects where local stakeholders are working together , bringing their own resources to the table with demonstrable results ;

; Upgrading the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship (IDALS) water quality initiative from a “demonstration” to an “implementation” program to bolster wide-scale adoption of proven practices in priority watersheds, in addition to educating farmers;

Requiring IDALS to include water quality data in its evaluation and public reporting on watershed projects, in addition to counting the number of water quality practices.

Targeting outreach and education to farm renters, who manage 54 percent of Iowa’s farmland, 41 percent of which is owned by people not engaged in farming (IDALS reports that less than 15 percent of conservation cost-share applications come from renters).

Rejection of these and other proposals was rooted in two falsehoods perpetuated by Rep. Wills in debate:

Most rivers and streams in Iowa are being monitored;

In-stream measurement shows Iowa water quality is already improving. Public reports by state agencies tell a different story.

Rep. Wills claimed that 83 percent of Iowa rivers and streams are monitored. In fact, 34 monitoring sites in very large watersheds near our borders provide statewide estimates of nitrogen export, and 88 percent of Iowa’s land drains to these locations. Thus, we can tell how much pollution we are sending to the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, but we know less about where problems originate upstream, because most waterways are not monitored.

Rep. Wills also asserted that water quality improved 1.5 percent over five years due to practices adopted by farmers since 2011. (Do the math: At 0.3 percent per year, 150 years would pass before Iowa achieved the goal of reducing nitrogen pollution by 45 percent.) So what are the “true” facts?

Fact one: The number is not real, because it is based on a “logic model” – that is, what the new practices should “logically” achieve IF they produced the same results found in previous research on other farms. Little actual data is gathered, and much less is publicly reported.

Fact two: The number is contradicted by the actual data from the 34 monitoring stations. Evidence collected from 2011 to 2016 shows that “nitrate loading” (pollution) in water from Iowa destined to the big rivers increased by 77 percent, from 297,246 tons per year to 525,654, from 16.6 pounds per acre to 29.4.

Reaching consensus on decisions involving ambitious goals is not easy when limited natural resources, the livelihoods of people and the common good are all at stake. Unless we expect Mother Nature to solve the problem, as Rep. Mommsen publicly suggested, using wishful and misleading data casts doubt on the sincerity of lawmakers responsible for protecting our soil and water wealth.

Sometimes, we labor like elephants to give birth to peanuts. Sadly, after five years of gestation, that is the offspring we are producing with this “nutrient reduction strategy.”

State Rep. Chuck Isenhart, a Democrat from Dubuque, is ranking member on the House Environmental Protection Committee and liaison to the state Watershed Planning Advisory Council.



