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Editor Art Cullen |
"We hoped, and still hope, that something could be done at the federal level to clean up Iowa’s surface water. There are promising small steps: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack authorized a pilot project to expand cover crops in Buena Vista County. Even with that, about 1% of our county’s acreage will be covered over winter. Vilsack says he wants to double the amount of Iowa cover crops in the next decade. So that might get BV County to 2%? Cover crops, along with buffers and grass strips, can almost wipe out surface water pollution. It can pay off if the government would take swift and bold action. But it doesn’t. Doubling nothing doesn’t get you something."
Des Moines' water boss, the late Bill Stowe, "started a conversation in Iowa about how we approach our gentle land," Cullen writes. "It helped steer people’s attention toward more sustainable ag practices that help farmers. The Practical Farmers of Iowa are showing us a different way forward to growing legions of land stewards. Yet it’s not nearly enough. . . . Industrial ag interests have a grip on our politics and minds. . . . The Iowa Department of Natural Resources is fine with 11,000 steers laid in next to one of Iowa’s rare trout streams. Meanwhile, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico persists, killing the fishing industry at the mouth of the Mississippi. It’s hard to say that farmers or rural communities have benefitted much from this chemical paradigm over the past half-century. Nitrogen and methane from agriculture are feeding extreme weather that lead to epic drought and winter tornadoes. Those editorials reminded me how much work we have to do in Iowa, if we actually intend to 'feed the world'."
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