We are three farmers who raise corn, soybeans and oats on the Des Moines Lobe. We’ve been utilizing cover crops, strip-till/no-till, and in-season nitrogen successfully on our own operations for more than a decade. We have a direct interest in Iowa getting water quality right. That’s why what happens in July matters to every Iowan.
The Iowa Water Quality Information System, IWQIS, is a network of real-time sensors that measure nitrate and other indicators in streams across Iowa every 15 minutes. It’s run out of the University of Iowa. For years it was supported by a roughly $500,000 state appropriation, channeled through Iowa State’s Nutrient Research Center to fund the sensor work.
In 2023, the Iowa Legislature passed Senate File 558, the agriculture and natural resources budget, and diverted that funding away from the Nutrient Research Center. The Walton Family Foundation stepped in with a bridge grant. That bridge ends in July. Unless new funding comes through, the sensors go dark.
This is not an obscure line item. The Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, the state’s own plan for cleaning up our water, depends on measurable, public data to know whether anything is working. Turning IWQIS off doesn’t make our water cleaner. It makes the problem harder to see.
The senator who sponsored Senate File 558 in the Senate was Dan Zumbach of Ryan. Iowans deserve to know one specific fact about that bill. Zumbach’s son-in-law, Jared Walz, is a co-owner of Supreme Beef, an 11,600-head cattle feeding operation at the headwaters of Bloody Run Creek in Clayton County, a designated Outstanding Iowa Water. On April 4, after 3 to 4 inches of rain in the local area, the IWQIS sensor downstream of that operation registered a nitrate reading of 49.3 milligrams per liter. The federal drinking water standard is 10.
The senator who sponsored the bill that pulled the plug on Iowa’s water sensors has immediate family with a direct ownership stake in one of the operations those sensors were measuring. That’s a fact Iowans can look up.
We want to be clear, because we’re farmers talking to our neighbors and to the people drinking the water downstream of us. Funding IWQIS is the right thing to do. The sensors should be fully funded, permanently, by the state not by county governments and private donors filling a gap a multi-billion-dollar reserve fund could close tomorrow.
But we’d be lying if we said turning the sensors back on will fix our water. The sensors are a thermometer. Iowa has a fever.
The Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy calls for roughly 12.5 million acres of cover crops to hit its nitrogen reduction goal. Iowa has about 4 million. On our stretch of the Des Moines Lobe, less than 5% of farmed acres use the bundled conservation tactics the strategy actually calls for. After more than a decade of the voluntary approach, Iowa State University’s own modeling shows nitrogen leaving Iowa has gone up, not down.
Fund the sensors. Then have the harder conversation about why the numbers aren’t moving in the right direction, and what accountability-based state policies it will take to change that.
The Lobe Rangers consist of James Hepp of Rockwell City, Matt Bormann of Algona, and Zack Smith of Lake Mills. They are a nonpartisan group (two registered Republicans and an Independent) of Iowa farmers advocating for accountability-based water quality policy. Contact: theloberangers@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa has a fever. We’re about to throw out the thermometer. | Opinion
Reporting by James Hepp, Matt Bormann and Zack Smith, Guest columnists / Des Moines Register
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