Iowa’s Tough Stand Against Runoff From Agriculture Is Gaining Support

After the summer of green ice cubes, folks here were fed up.

The lovely lake at the center of this resort town in the cornfields had been growing murkier for years. In the summer of 1977, it turned green--neon green--and smelled putrid. “If you lived on the lake, you were a block too close,” one resident recalled. Another scowled at the memory of ice made from tap water drawn from the lake. “It adversely affected the scotch,” he grumbled.

Locals began demanding answers. It took 25 years to get them--as the water turned ever more cloudy--but they know now why Clear Lake does not live up to its name.

The problem is agricultural pollution. And it’s not Clear Lake’s alone.

Across the nation, excess fertilizer and animal manure are washing off fields and pastures, poisoning fish, upending the ecology in lakes and rivers and forcing cities that draw drinking water from suspect sources to spend heavily on treatment.

There are occasional attention-grabbing disasters, such as a pipeline rupture that spewed liquid ammonia fertilizer into the northern Iowa countryside in December, poisoning 49 miles of prairie streams and killing nearly 1.3 million fish.

The more insidious culprit, however, is the quiet, chronic erosion that sweeps soil, manure and fertilizer into watersheds to be carried downstream.

Farms aren’t the only, or even the primary, source of water pollution. Just last week, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that traces of birth control hormones, cough suppressant, insect repellent and other chemicals used or excreted by humans were found in rivers across the nation. Industrial waste is a huge problem as well.

But there is growing recognition that the fields that roll, lush and bountiful, across the heartland can cause as much ecological harm as a factory belching fumes.

That recognition is embodied in the federal farm bill being debated in Congress. Runoff can be reduced by restoring wetlands, creating buffers between farms and rivers and keeping crop residue on the fields after harvests to anchor the soil and prevent erosion. The farm bill would step up incentives for farmers to take those measures.

A more controversial proposal would cap farm subsidies to try to prevent the consolidation that has created ever-larger agricultural operations; some environmentalists believe the biggest problems come from the biggest farms.

In Iowa--where 92% of the land is in agriculture--lawmakers also are going after pollution more aggressively than environmentalists have ever seen. The state Legislature has appointed a 12-member task force to draft bills that will better “balance the needs of agriculture and the livestock industry with the needs of the rest of the people,” Republican state Sen. Stewart Iverson said.

Iverson calls that balance “decent” now. There are many, however, who would disagree.

Traces of the antibiotics fed to livestock and excreted in their manure have been found in streams. Iowa’s lakes contain more fertilizer pollutants than most any in the world, according to John Downing, a professor of aquatic ecology at Iowa State University. The rivers that provide tap water to Des Moines are so loaded with farm runoff that the city installed the world’s biggest nitrate filter a decade ago. They use it only when the nitrate load gets so high that it could endanger public health. Some years, that averages twice a week.

The effects extend far beyond Iowa’s borders. Agricultural runoff flushed down the Mississippi River from this state and Illinois is the biggest source of the enormous “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico--an expanse of water the size of Massachusetts that’s too polluted to support aquatic life.

“Because Iowa is so green, it’s hard to understand that [its landscape] is really the most changed of all 50 states,” said Barbara MacGregor, director of the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, a land preservation group. “Nearly all the wetland, the prairie, the natural parts of the state have been turned into cropland.” The cropland is then scraped and churned, sprayed with herbicides and liquid hog manure.

That turns it into some of the most productive acreage in the nation. It also loosens the topsoil until it’s easily blown away--and with it, all the excess nutrients and chemicals that the crops have not absorbed.

Mitigating that impact will be delicate. Farm lobbying groups warn that too much regulation will send agricultural production--and jobs and taxes--to other states, or to South America. And if Big Agriculture goes, “what’s the alternative” for Iowa? asks Kevin Vinchattle, executive director of the Iowa Poultry Assn.

Many Iowans insist they don’t want an alternative. They are proud to be among the nation’s top producers of eggs, hogs, corn and soybeans. They just don’t want dirty water because of it. “The excuse has always been that this is what you put up with in a farm state,” the Des Moines Register wrote in an editorial last fall. “That excuse isn’t good enough anymore.”

Public outrage has coalesced around the huge livestock feedlots that have come to dominate animal agriculture in the last decade.

Industry officials say market forces make such consolidation vital. And they maintain that good management can control the flies, dust and odor that come when thousands of pigs or millions of chickens are confined in one lot. Neighbors, though, complain of stenches so unbearable they have to plug the keyholes in their doors. They also are concerned about the effect on water quality.

Most feedlots store their manure in huge open lagoons, easily two or three times the size of a football field. From time to time, they drain some of the manure and sell it to farmers, who spray it on their fields as fertilizer.

Iowa requires every feedlot to develop a “manure management plan,” detailing how the waste will be handled. That gives the state a chance to make sure farmers are not spreading too much manure on any one field.

And that, in turn, should limit runoff of excess manure, which can be deadly to aquatic life.

But the state officials who review the manure-disposal plans are so far behind that there’s a backlog of at least 900 plans--and no timetable for catching up. The state is also hard-pressed to carry out mandatory annual inspections of the manure pits. There are just eight inspectors to check 850 lagoons. In the last three years, there have been at least 40 manure spills from Iowa feedlots, according to the Izaak Walton League, a national conservation group.

Increasingly alarmed, citizens are fighting back.

One of the biggest battles took place here in northern Iowa last month, when an egg company proposed putting 2.4 million hens near a wetland a few miles south of Clear Lake. Furious locals protested--and won. The company withdrew.

Even before that dispute, Clear Lake had become a potent symbol of the environment under siege.

The lake draws tourists from all over Iowa; over the years, the degradation has been obvious. Older fishermen remember the lake as so clear they could watch bass take their bait 10 feet below the surface. Swimmers today are lucky if they can make out their toes while they’re standing ankle-deep.

Last year, Iowa State University researchers finally pinpointed the culprit: phosphorus pollution.

Phosphorus is a key plant nutrient. But when too much is applied to crops or lawns--in the form of manure or fertilizer--the excess drains into the watershed. Around here, it ends up in Clear Lake.

Phosphorus is not a human health hazard. (And in any case, the town no longer gets its drinking water from the lake.) But the nutrient sets off a chain reaction that has devastated the aquatic ecology here.

Algae feed on the phosphorus, growing like mad. That turns the lake green and murky. It also chokes off the oxygen that aquatic plants need to survive. When the vegetation dies, so do the fish that rely on it for habitat. (Hence, the foul odor of decay that was especially bad in the summer of 1977 and has returned, on and off, ever since.)

A few numbers from state biologist James Wahl tell the story. Half a century ago, there were more than 50 species of plants in Clear Lake. By the 1980s, there were 20. A survey last year found just 12.

In the new ecosystem, bottom-feeding species such as carp and bullhead have thrived. But the fish most valued by anglers--bass, walleye and bluegill--have been hit hard by the shrinking habitat. To maintain Clear Lake as a top fishing spot, the state has stocked it with 17 million walleye a year, as well as thousands of other sport fish.

There is a plan to fix all this. But it will cost $16 million--and require local farmers to change the way they work.

“We’re fighting a lot of social attitudes, a lot of, ‘This is the way my dad did it and my granddad did it,’ ” said Kevin Baskins, a state spokesman.

The idea is to set up an incentive program that will pay farmers to use less phosphorus and to stop tilling their fields after each crop, a practice that leaves the soil vulnerable to erosion. The state hopes to send out experts who can determine exactly how much fertilizer each acre needs, so less excess runs into the watersheds.

Farmer Dave Hansen is all for it. He already refrains from tilling, and says his harvests are as good as ever. He has joined a federal conservation program that pays him to return some of his most erosion-prone land to wild prairie. But he says “it’s like pulling hen’s teeth” to get his neighbors to try such practices.

“No one wants to pollute, but you have to make a living,” fellow farmer Matt Knutson explained. He said the plan will work only if the incentives are generous: “If you can show people how they can make money doing it a new way, they will.”

Inspired in part by the Clear Lake saga, state lawmakers are considering setting limits on how much phosphorus farmers can apply on their fields. They also are weighing restrictions on big feedlots. And across the state, citizens are demanding that their local lakes and rivers be analyzed with an eye toward restoration.

“This is an agricultural state and it’s always going to be an agricultural state,” said Charles MacNider, a local businessman. “But we are going to have to figure out how to have agriculture here without profound negative impacts on the environment. It’s going to be a struggle. But at least the debate has been joined.”