Pew Oceans Commission, Final comments My apologies for the omissions of
names. I was not able to catch them all. If anyone can supply them for
me, I'll revise this and send it out again.
Peggy Murdock
George Naylor of ICCI spoke next. He identified ICCI as an organization at
the forefront of opposing hog confinements. He samples water in the
Raccoon watershed and many times has nitrate levels at 25ppm and above.
A lot of people travel around, see farm fields and don't realize that three
to four feet under the ground there are tiles draining the land. His
father fed ducks on his way to school. These wetlands are now gone. In
the 60s streams were straightened.
Many of the problems are the result of expected behavior; farm policy has
made it happen. Major agricultural firms have an undue influence on our
institutions, as have the freedom to farm bill and woefully inadequate
legislation.
Agribusiness is greedy; there is no grain reserve; our ability to produce
an abundance is a curse. Everyone has to enter the market immediately to
keep their farm solvent.
Giant animal plants have been a part of the problem. Cheap grain is
encouraged and low prices further encourage the production of grain, as
farmers produce even more in order to keep from going bankrupt. Cheap
grain means more and more livestock in giant CAFOs; the land is plowed up
and planted in corn and soybeans.
We need a responsible farm policy; a market floor, food security reserves
and conservation set-asides.
The next speaker was Jeff Vonk, Director of the Iowa DNR.
He pointed out that Iowans have similar concerns with the Pew Oceans
Commission and if we are successful we would have an impact on the Gulf
hypoxia.
Eighty-five percent of Iowa is devoted to agriculture. It is number one in
pork, eggs and soybeans. It has 157 impaired waterbodies. The primary
problem is dirty water. We have a leaky system. We need 50 ppm in the root
system to grow corn and soybeans and much of that is washed out of the soil.
In the Raccoon Watershed farmers are encouraged to apply nitrogen according
to the temperature of the soil. Constructing ponds and wetlands is being
created in the Bear Creek area. This reduces sediment and Atrazine.
Using GIS systems we can find good potential wetland sites.
We need a smart farm policy with sound conservation measures.
Mark spoke next about constructed wetlands, which have been shown to reduce
nitrate by 85%. He talked about the Raccoon watershed project with
farmers as well as city folks volunteering. They were able to focus on a
couple of streams that have been shown to be hot spots.
Teresa Opheim said we must change farm policy to give farmers the means to
implement sound practices.
The Conservation Security Act is one of the priorities of her group. It
would provide payments for three tiers of participation: tier one with
payment for a wide variety of practices, tier two building on that with the
addition of a land use change. Tier three is a whole-farm plan.
Vulnerable lands should be retired, farmers who have always done the right
thing should be rewarded as well as those who need to change what they do.
When farmers provide environmental benefits they should be paid and
encouraged to do more.
We have completely altered watersheds here. Water runoff has more than
doubled. There used to be systems that were fed by groundwater. In
addition to wetlands, land use should be considered as well. There is only
a 2% runoff from a prairie, much less than from other landscape alternatives.
The Nature Conservancy is interested in biological diversity. This speaker
thought sediment and water quantity have been overlooked.
The next speaker mentioned 6 research projects
Public drains are organized into drainage districts. Grained fields have a
great deal of drainage.
Research shows that the point source definition applies to drainage
districts. There is a disparity between rural and urban standards at EPA.
Ken Midkiff, Roger Wolf? And ???
Ken Midkiff, Sierra Club Staff in charge of Water Quality spoke next. He
submitted the same report with just a little alteration that he submitted
in 1999 because not much has changed. This is broader than just Iowa. The
primary pollutants are nitrogen and phosphorus. He mentioned a case in
which milk was spilled in Missouri and killed everything in the
river. Nitrogen and phosphorus are now doing the same, we just have too
much. There is over application. There have been efforts to get
additional funding for projects that would reduce this and more farmers
enrolled than there are monies available. More than a million acres are
backlogged.
Each discharge from a permitted waste facility is treated as a
free-standing system. The maximum allowable pollutant is allowed as though
there were no other such facilities on the same stream. This should be
looked at as an additive.
He mentioned De Coster as a company that is a problem from coast to
coast. There is no need for changes in existing laws, our current laws are
sufficient. What is needed is compliance review and enforcement
CAFOs need to be defined as industrial polluters.
Roger gave an update on the Raccoon River project. Farmers are concerned
about performance of nitrogen practices and coops recognize both.national
and local issues.
The role of local entities is to provide leadership in order to help
farmers become better managers.
From the Raccoon River study they have learned that certain landscape
areas produce more nitrate than others.
Tracy Blackburn of the Iowa Soybean Association and the Soybean Promotion
Board. There is testing going on out in the field, where a hundred growers
are stydygin whether what they are doing is right. These are farmers who
are already following the best management practices and this study will
tell whether what they are doing is working. It is getting people to
evaluate their performance with on-farm testing and evaluation of the
system. The system needs to fit the unique environment.
Note from the next to last commentator are missing because I was preparing
notes of my own. I repeated what Jeff Vonk had said in his address in
Webster City, that when new rules are made in Iowa, existing systems and
structures are grandfathered in so they do not need to conform to the new
standards; that Iowa allows lowering of the water table in order to site a
fecal waste lagoon with the required separation distance so that when
there is considerable rainfall the separation distance disappears; that
many septic systems, like those in Boone on the tile line leading into
College Creek are probably plumbed directly into tile drainage; that when
there is the likelihood of an overflow, human sewage lagoons are allowed to
open up and drain into waterways. I suggested that this, rather than the
theory of nitrogen stored in the soil, might account for the huge increase
in pollution when there is considerable rainfall. I also mentioned the
much higher concentration of water pollutants used in vanity sprayings in
urban areas as compared to those used on crops, and suggested that these
unnecessary applications be eliminated altogether.
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