Des Moines City Council member Josh Mandelbaum discusses Iowa’s water quality crisis.
Dear Friends,
CLICK HERE FOR THIS WEEK’S PROGRAM, FEATURING:
(01:39) Iowa’s water quality is a major crisis, with Josh Mandelbaum;
(17:26) Meet Cal Woods: Retire. Sell home. Travel the world;
(35:42) Envisioning AI as a compassionate mom, with Mark Clipsham;
(53:11) Urban farming could feed a billion people, with Kathy Byrnes.
Iowa’s water is so bad it should be the top issue in the next election. We’ve known about the crisis for years, but state and federal officials have done nothing. As a result, Iowa’s water quality is now worse than ever.
That fact is evidenced by a comprehensive report just released by Polk County government, Currents of Change.
What’s contaminating our water? Fertilizer and manure runoff are the primary culprits. High levels of nitrates and other toxins are making people sick, and literally killing some of us.
Iowa has the second highest rate of cancer in the nation.
Des Moines operates one of the most expensive nitrate removal systems in the world, at a cost to residents of $10,000 per day. Beyond the cost, people are rightfully concerned about the system’s capacity to bring nitrate concentrations down to the federal level — a level some experts feel is too high.
Across the state, we’ve seen more and more beach closures this summer due to dangerous fecal bacteria levels.
And there’s Iowa’s significant contribution to creating the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. I’m still baffled why Louisiana hasn’t sued us.
Governor Reynolds insists on “voluntary” compliance, even as irrefutable evidence of the problem mounts.
A few years ago, then-director of the Des Moines Water Works, Bill Stowe (since deceased), sued three upstream counties for polluting our drinking water. The lawsuit elevated the scope of the problem, but lost in court.
With the lawsuit’s failure and the sick joke of “voluntary” compliance merely a tactic to maintain the status quo, clean water advocates are demanding the state enact strong regulations — an effort that everyone who drinks for a living should support, at a minimum.
Ideally, we need an overhaul of how we farm. That’s best summed up by these recent words from former US Senator Tom Harkin: “We’re so locked into mono agriculture — corn and beans, corn and beans, corn and beans — and quite frankly, it’s hurting us in water quality and I think health, too.”
That’s a quote from an Axios story by Jason Clayworth during the Harkin Institute’s inaugural episode of its new podcast series about food and farming policies, “Canary in a Cornfield.”
If we’re serious about water quality, we need a radically different approach to agriculture, one focused on crop diversification, soil conservation, smaller farms, and better water management.
I don’t blame farmers for our water quality problem. Iowa farmers raise corn and beans because that’s what federal farm policy dictates. I know one farmer who wanted to try something different, so they planted a couple acres of beets for the local market. That farmer’s corn subsidy got docked because they had the audacity to try to take away market share from California beet farmers.
What a dumb system!
We can do better, not only for our water and land, but for our farmers. Iowa has some of the best farmers in the world, and with the right signals from federal policy, I’m confident they’ll innovate agriculture to a better place.
It’ll be a tough transition, given the power of Big Ag’s lobby. Not only are we up against American agricultural tycoons, but more and more agribusiness corporations are owned by foreign interests.
China owns Smithfield, the largest US pork processor.
China owns Syngenta, seeds and chemicals.
Brazil owns JBS, the largest beef processor.
Bayer, formerly Monsanto, is now a German company.
On top of that, the percentage of farmland owned by foreign interests grew 12.2% between 2021 and 2023, with foreign entities owning over 45 million acres of US farmland. Some states, including Iowa, have limits on foreign or corporate ownership of farmland. That’s an example more states oughta consider.
So no, I don’t blame farmers for Iowa’s water quality crisis. Sure, many could do a better job at reducing fertilizer and manure runoff. But again, the federal farm system demands that they produce, produce, produce. What if, instead of rewarding production, we rewarded conservation?
It’s been done on a small scale, and with some success. Buffer strips. Grass waterways. Riparian strips. Terracing. They’ve all had a positive impact. But Iowa will never see consistent, substantial, and permanent improvements in our water quality and soil health unless we take Harkin’s advice and shift away from the current fencerow-to-fencerow monoculture of corn and beans.
Thank you for reading, listening, and speaking out.
Ed Fallon
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