A new bill presenting a solution about the water quality in Iowa will head to the governor’s desk after being approved by the Iowa Senate and House of Representatives. The idea of a new clean water initiative, or more specifically how to implement this initiative the right way, has been debated for decades, pitting Democrats against Republicans, Republicans against Republicans and now the House of Representatives against the Senate. Finally, the bill got past the two chambers and will head to the governor’s desk for approval.
Governor Kim Reynolds released a statement on January 23 talking about the unanimous support for cleaning up Iowa’s water.
“As I said in my Condition of the State address earlier this month, improving water quality is a shared goal of Iowans,” Reynolds said. “Many stakeholders — both rural and urban — played a key role in supporting this legislation and reaching a consensus.”
Iowa has always been a huge contributor to the “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico. Iowa contains some of the most fertile soil on the planet; because of this, much of the farming in the United States occurs in Iowa, and many of the chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides flow through creeks and streams into the Mississippi River. The excess nitrogen flows through the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico, causing algae and aquatic bacteria to rapidly multiply. These excess bacteria and algae quickly use up all of the oxygen, making certain regions in the Gulf of Mexico uninhabitable by wildlife. The excess nitrogen also makes the water unsafe for consumption.
Another issue caused by unsafe farm practices stems from CAFOs, or Confined Animal Feeding Operations. Lynne Lundberg, English teacher, explains what these are and the problems that they cause.
“CAFOs are when you have a big building that might have, say, 600 hogs in it. And because animals produce waste, the waste is in a pit. You have this pit of waste, and periodically you have to pump it out, otherwise everybody gets asphyxiated, animals and people alike. And so some of it can be spread on the land, but too much and you burn your crops, because it’s highly alkaline. So you end up with waterways that get polluted, because there is just this concentration of waste matter, and it’s going to get down into the water table,” says Lundberg.
Because of these problems, Iowans have nearly all agreed that change needs to happen. The question now arises: what is the best method to fix this problem? One option is this new bill that will put $284 million over the next 12 years towards cleaning up Iowa’s water. The money would stem from a current tax on drinking water, as well as from an existing gambling tax. Before this bill, the government revenue on those taxes went toward paying off bonds and into the state’s general fund.
Lundberg presents an alternative solution to the problem of water pollution from agricultural chemicals.
“There should be a water cleanup required by polluters,” Lundberg says. “Standards should be in post on the entire industry. But farm runoff is a waste of money for the farmer. If you have fertilizer in the waterways, that’s fertilizer that’s doing you no good. If you have pesticide in the waterway, that’s pesticide that’s doing you no good.”
She also talks about how the government spending on this issue is only a short term solution; in reality, the practice itself must change for real change to occur.
“It seems as though if we just devote some money to it it’ll solve the problem. It won’t. The problem will be solved when the people who caused the problem have a reason to change,” says Lundberg. “So if the money I spend, if that tax money goes to clean up water, there is no incentive for farmers to change. There is no incentive for the CAFOs to be safer. But if it benefits them to clean up the water, there would be incentive.”
These are just a few solutions that could potentially fix a significant ecological issue that has been affecting Iowa waterways for years.
