Des Moines Register Letter

Insecurity driving bad behavior

This piece ran in the Des Moines Register on May 25, 2023. Iowa State Senator Dan Zumbach, along with his Republican colleague, Tom Shipley, decided my writing on the University of Iowa domain, which at times was less than flattering about Iowa agriculture, was too much for them to tolerate. Never mind that Hawkeye football coach Kirk Ferentz records promotional pieces for the Iowa Corn Growers’ Association. That these farmer-legislators are so thin-skinned that they’re threatened by a guy like me should tell you something about their insecurity when it comes to what they are doing to our shared natural resources.

Three weeks later after belly-aching about my blog, Zumbach sponsored a bill that would effectively end state support of the water quality monitoring network at the University of Iowa. This program was funded through the fertilizer tax (also known as the Groundwater Tax, or the Groundwater Protection Act Tax), about $1.5 million annually that goes to the Iowa Nutrient Research Center at Iowa State University; $375,000 of that had been going to the UI.

It’s been widely reported that Zumbach’s son-in-law operates the controversial 11,600 head cattle feedlot perched at the headwaters of Bloody Run Creek and just upstream of two of the UI water quality sensor sites. From my perspective, it’s hard not to see his actions as a brazen abuse of power and retributive.

I’ve always been fascinated by Orwell’s writing—not the prose but that it seems so prescient of the current day. This passage seems so accurately descriptive of many in modern American politics: "A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and 'the end justifies the means' often becomes, in effect, 'the means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough.’ "

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Iowa Republicans want to destroy a one-of-a-kind monitoring system and data platform that brings real time water quality information to your devices from 60 stream locations widely dispersed around the state. Iowans have invested approximately $2 million to purchase these water quality sensors and probably at least that much in human resources to operate and maintain the system and research the generated data.

Three sensors at two monitoring sites have also been deployed on the high-profile Bloody Run Creek in northeast Iowa, one of only 34 outstanding Iowa waters as designated by DNR and a self-sustaining trout stream. Recent rain brought the nitrate there to almost 26 ppm (water safe to drink should be less than 10), an overnight event that would have otherwise been uncaptured. These are downstream of the controversial Supreme Beef cattle feedlot, operated by the son-in-law of Iowa State Senator Dan Zumbach (R-Ryan). In the just completed legislative session, Senator Zumbach sponsored legislation (SF558) that reduced funding to the Iowa Nutrient Research Center at Iowa State University by $500,000, the recently agreed upon amount that would fund the monitoring sensor network going forward at the University of Iowa.

Sensor near Supreme Beef cattle feedlot showing jump in nitrate with mid-May rainstorm

A reasonable person might conclude that the worse our water is, the more we need a robust monitoring system. There are some in the legislature, however, that maintain there is nothing wrong with our water, despite what the truth actually is: thousands of private wells contaminated with nitrate and E. coli to unhealthy levels, 25% of the state’s population drinking water from community supplies where nitrate mitigation treatment is necessary, Iowa the largest contributor to the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, state beaches posted as off-limits due to pollution every summer, and only 15 stream stretches in 70,000 miles of perennial streams meeting all their designated uses defined under the Clean Water Act.

Agriculture is the main polluter, and the industry and their allies in the legislature (often one in the same), assisted by our complicit state agencies, endeavor to control the messaging on water quality and progress toward our water quality goals as outlined in the Nutrient Strategy. Actual water quality data gets in the way of their messaging. This is a travesty for the 98% of us that don’t farm.

Efforts are ongoing to fund the sensor network at lower level through the Iowa Nutrient Research Center and private sources, so the network may not be dead. Rest assured, however, that Republicans’ concern over clean water and the state’s overall environmental integrity is. While Democrats are hardly blameless for the state’s degraded condition, Republicans are only interested in looking at this issue insofar as how it degrades the public’s perception of Big Ag and the millionaires that run it, and not how it might degrade your quality of life. I’ve seen firsthand that the industry’s effort to ‘message’ water quality is not done in good faith and should only be seen as the farce that it is.

After a century of stream and lake degradation and overall bad water, Iowans should expect better than propaganda and obfuscation from the people that degraded the water and are more than happy to entrench the degraded status quo. Orwell saw that “until they (the public) become conscious they will never rebel.” Make no mistake, repression of data collection, science and research is an attempt to keep you from becoming conscious about your water and demanding change.

And demand change we must if we are to get the clean water, air and land that we deserve. Sure—contact your legislators and hold them accountable. But it must be more than that. Recognize that change must start at the local level. Many of our cities have been complicit if not outright collaborative in agriculture’s expropriation of the natural resources that belong to us as citizens. Attend your local city council and county supervisor meetings and agitate for clean water. Things will only improve at a glacial pace, and more than likely will get worse, if the issue is left in the claws of the three headed monster that is our legislature, agribusiness, and farmers.

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About my book: The Swine Republic is a collection of essays about the intersection of Iowa politics, agriculture and environment, and the struggle for truth about Iowa’s water quality. Longer chapters that examine ‘how we got here’ and ‘the path forward’ bookend the essays. Foreword was beautifully written by Tom Philpott, author of Perilous Bounty. Choice of free book copy or t-shirt for all paid subscribers to this Substack ($30 value).

Purchase The Swine Republic