opinion

Iowa's water quality strategy is not working. Here's what should be done instead.

In 2019, Iowa streams carried away a billion pounds of nitrogen and 50 million pounds of phosphorus, constituting an enormous financial loss to farmers, a serious degradation of drinking water and recreation, and a threat to human health and fisheries.

More than 90% of the nitrogen and 75% of the phosphorus in Iowa waters come from farm fields and livestock operations. Since the 2013 adoption of the Nutrient Reduction Strategy, Iowa’s water quality has not improved.

How can substantial improvements in Iowa's water quality be achieved? As Iowans with a long involvement in agricultural science and policy, we believe there are three components for rapidly catalyzing water quality improvements: 1) Iowa should reconfigure its livestock industry; 2) regulation must play a parallel role with voluntary adoption of conservation practices; and 3) policies should be tailored to respond to changing climate and production systems.

While the number of Iowa farms and farmers continues to decline, since 1997 the population of hogs has grown from 14 million to 25 million and that of laying chickens from 29 million to more than 80 million now. The area cropped to corn and soybeans has increased by 2 million acres since 1982. This more intensive agricultural system requires more conservation just to maintain the water quality we have now. We believe Iowa’s existing crop and livestock production framework is not, and will not ever be, consistent with our state's water quality objectives.

RELATED: Iowa could need hundreds of years to reach nutrient goals

Animals are so overpopulated in some areas that manure-borne nutrients far exceed crop needs. The current system, which decouples animal and crop production, prevents efficient nutrient recycling. Balancing the absorptive and productive capacity of the land with even mediocre water quality is impossible for water bodies from the Floyd River of northwest Iowa to Lake Darling of southeast Iowa, especially when commercial fertilizer sales continue unabated in watersheds with dense livestock populations.

Iowa's livestock industry has grown far beyond our agencies’ capacity to enforce the weak regulations that we have. And our counties’ citizens and elected officials have no power to guide continued expansion.

It’s time to admit the obvious and regroup.

Iowa’s Nutrient Reduction Strategy has a solid scientific foundation, but it relies on farmer altruism. It’s clear this approach will require generations to produce measurable improvements. We think Iowans deserve better from an industry indemnified by the taxpayer through billions of dollars spent on trade mitigation payments, crop insurance subsidies, and disaster relief.

Poor water quality is not the result of callous, poorly informed or rogue farmers; rather it is the predictable result of land use policies, vulnerabilities of the corn-soybean-animal confinement scheme, and an economic system tyrannically ruling farmer decisions. If the public is to get the environmental outcomes they deserve, the system must change to support diversified and integrated crop and livestock production. This would benefit Iowa’s water, help revitalize rural Iowa and breathe life into hundreds of our small towns.

Without such change, and as long as the taxpayer is expected to prop up the system, then we say the public has a right to expectations for how the present system is operated. These expectations should include taxation of purchased fertilizer and animal feed, regulations that restrict or ban practices that degrade water quality, and requirements for practices that improve it, such as:

Restrict cropping on frequently flooded land and planting up to the stream edge.

Align fertilizer and manure inputs with Iowa State University recommendations by requiring farmers to implement nutrient management plans.

Digitize land records for manure management plans so that fields aren’t used too frequently for manure disposal.

Replace the current livestock Master Matrix regulations with a system that allows governments to manage manure nutrients at the watershed scale.

Ban manure application to snow-covered and frozen ground.

State leaders also need to recognize that economic and environmental resilience is intimately connected to weather, and that climate change is blowing Iowa into uncharted waters. As our weather gets warmer, wetter and more extreme, our current production systems will increasingly rely on expensive engineering solutions, just to maintain the status quo.

Who’s going to pay for this? We think public dollars would be better used by reconfiguring the system in resilient ways that benefit all Iowans. New and existing funding should not be allocated to water quality measures without adequate monitoring and other mechanisms to assess effectiveness.

The challenge presented by our degraded water is enormous. We know of no problems approaching this magnitude that have been solved through individual actions. Iowans deserve more than meaningless platitudes and dogmatic devotion to voluntary approaches. Now is the time to act if we are to avoid another century of degraded water.

Neil Hamilton is emeritus professor of law at Drake University and former director of the Agricultural Law Center. Matt Liebman is professor of agronomy and H.A. Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. Silvia Secchi is an associate professor in the Department of Geographical and Sustainability Sciences and Public Policy Center at the University of Iowa. Chris Jones is a research engineer with IIHR Hydroscience and Engineering at the University of Iowa.