The post Should We Be Farming in the Desert? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, California’s Imperial Valley is both a desert and an agricultural wonder. Bordered by sand dunes and barren mountains, the region receives less than three inches of rainfall per year, 27 inches less than the U.S. average. From June to September, high temperatures here often exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. By most measures, the Imperial Valley is not a great place to grow food. Yet carrots, cauliflower, sweet onions, honeydew, broccoli, and alfalfa all grow here, incongruous crops that spread across half a million acres of cultivated land.
Ronald Leimgruber farms 3,500 of those acres. Given the lack of rain in the region, Leimgruber says he has “about seven” different irrigation projects on his farm, where he grows an array of crops, including carrots, lettuce, watermelon, and hay. Leimgruber, a third-generation farmer whose grandparents helped build the All American Canal, estimates he has spent millions of dollars on various water conservation techniques over the years. Some of that spending was subsidized by the federal government; some came out of his own pocket. He’s not sure it was worth it, especially because the government does not fund the upkeep of new systems.
“The jury’s still out,” he says. “Short term, there’s no maintenance. Long term, these things don’t last. Technology changes. They get worn out. We get a government grant to get them put in, and they look good at first, and then all of a sudden, we have to operate them.”
“I use about 7,000 gallons of diesel per field per year. . . . And everybody says that’s real efficient. Well, it is efficient around water, but that’s the only thing it’s efficient on.”
Leimgruber has implemented a number of projects—including drip, linear, and solid set irrigation systems, plus more—all designed to improve efficiency. But many of these drought mitigation techniques are costing him tens of thousands of dollars each year to maintain. And they are less efficient than they seem.
“I use about 7,000 gallons of diesel per field per year,” he says. “The system itself has 1,000 plastic nozzles and regulators and hoses. It has 35 rubber tires on it. It has 15 electric motors on it, a 300-horsepower diesel engine blaring away, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. And everybody says that’s real efficient. Well, it is efficient around water, but that’s the only thing it’s efficient on.”
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols. Source: “Review and Synopsis of Natural and Human Controls on Fluvial Channel Processes in the Arid West,” by John J. Field and Robert W. Lichvar.
Leimgruber and countless farmers like him are the beneficiaries of massive government efforts to make the arid western United States more habitable.
This level of agriculture was not possible in the Imperial Valley until the construction of the Alamo Canal, also known as the Imperial Canal, in 1901, which diverted water from the Colorado River. Now, climate change is challenging these efforts, and forcing an unsettling question: On a warming planet, how much tech will it take to farm an increasingly hostile environment?
Water Adaptation
In the desert, getting water to crops often requires irrigation. The USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) provides both technical and financial assistance to farmers for conserving ground and surface water, reducing soil erosion, and mitigating drought through increased irrigation efficiency.
Critics, however, say these programs don’t address the bigger picture, and may not be of much help as the climate shifts weather patterns, precipitation, and temperature. In June, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) published a report admonishing the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a lack of programs to help farmers to make major changes.
Farmers received more than $6 billion from the USDA from 2017 to 2023, the report notes, including $521.7 million from EQIP (and $5.6 billion in payments from the agency’s crop insurance program). California and Colorado alone received more than $1 billion. The EWG estimates that only around 30 percent of EQIP funding goes toward helping farmers reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change.
“Conservation dollars spent to update irrigation systems are funds that aren’t spent helping Western farmers adapt and become more resilient to climate change,” EWG’s Midwest Director Anne Schechinger says in the report. Instead, she writes, EQIP funding needs to help farmers in the Colorado River region better adapt. “[Funding] should focus more on paying farmers to switch to more drought-tolerant crops, to incorporate conservation crop rotations and to adopt other conservation practices that make their operations more resilient to climate change.”
One tool for resiliency is the Water Adaptation Techniques Atlas (WATA), another USDA initiative, which provides an online resource for users to explore different techniques being applied in the Colorado River Basin. At the Yuma Agricultural Center at the University of Arizona, for example, a company called Desert Control is working to improve soil moisture retention by “spraying a mix of nano clay particles and water onto the soil surface.”
And along the Colorado River, the Cocopah Tribe is clearing out invasive, water-sucking plant species and replacing them with native trees. Users of the atlas can explore projects that might help them with their own water adaptation. That’s important, since the simple act of watering crops is, in much of the West, incredibly complex.
“Maybe somebody’s first thought is, well, what if we just converted to more efficient irrigation systems?” says Noah Silber-Coats, a research scientist at the USDA Southwest Climate Hub who helped create the WATA. “Well, now we’re potentially increasing the amount of water that a crop is taking up, right, and we’re reducing the return flow downstream.”
More efficient watering, in other words, could mean healthier crops and higher yields, but an increase in overall water use.
“So from the get-go, we’re kind of aware of all the tradeoffs involved in any sort of solution to water scarcity,” Silber-Coats says.
Silber-Coats acknowledges that some of the most popular crops in the West, like alfalfa, are driven by demand—not solely by subsidies—which means farmers are loath to leave them. Alfalfa is primarily used as an animal feed, and as demand for animal products increases worldwide, experts expect the alfalfa market to increase, too. And it grows well in the arid West, where there is a lot of sunshine. However, alfalfa is an incredibly thirsty crop, requiring 20 to 46 inches of water per season. In a region that receives less than three inches of rain per year, almost all of the water for alfalfa growth must come from irrigation.
“Farmers plant alfalfa because it’s the highest-margin crop they can plant,” says Ethan Orr, an agriculture and economics expert at the University of Arizona. “Say you move your alfalfa crops to somewhere like the Midwest, and you said, ‘OK, there’s a lot more water here.’ But you have less sunshine, so you’re going to get five to six cuttings, about half the productivity of [Arizona] alfalfa, and then you’re going to have to ship it here for the dairy farmers. So you’re going to create transportation costs and a large carbon footprint, because you didn’t count all of the inputs.”
Alfalfa farming in the Imperial Valley. (Photo credit: Timothy Hearsum, Getty Images)
Arizona, Nevada, and California—the lower Colorado River Basin states—have each committed to reducing their water usage by 3 million acre-feet (1 acre-foot is about 325,000 gallons) through 2026 as all the Colorado River states negotiate a new water plan amid ongoing drought. It isn’t yet clear exactly how these reductions will happen. Right now, farmers have little incentive to plant alternatives, while there are still programs, like the USDA’s, dedicated to propping up existing irrigation infrastructure.
In the Upper Colorado River Basin, the System Conservation Pilot Program pays farmers to fallow their land to conserve water. But that program is off to a rocky start, with farmers complaining of low offers for payment. Other agencies, like the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, are looking to potentially pay farmers in the Imperial Valley to fallow their land for a season.
“If you were to do anything to limit alfalfa use in Arizona, you’d probably have a farmer that would fallow one field and still plant alfalfa in the other, because the margins are so much better than some of these other crops,” Orr says.
The Limits of Tech
But Schechinger argues that no amount of technical changes can keep up with the depletion rates in the Colorado River Basin.
“We know that 75 percent of the Colorado River water withdrawals go to irrigate crops, and the crops are being grown in an area that’s running out of water,” she says. “So, really, in the not-too-distant future, it’s going to be very difficult for Colorado River state farmers to farm what and how they farm today.”
Schechinger calls for a more holistic approach to water management in the region—one that involves growing different crops each year and not just improving irrigation practices. This approach also involves turning away from planting on marginal acreage that is not ideal for crops.
“When you are growing in a floodplain and you get more rain or more frequent precipitation events because of climate change, then those floodplain acres are really more vulnerable to the increased precipitation,” she says.
“In the not-too-distant future, it’s going to be very difficult for Colorado River state farmers to farm what and how they farm today.”
Orr advocates for an overhaul of the one-size-fits-all system and tailoring practices to each farm. “We need grand ideas,” he says. “I don’t want to solve a one-time problem of using less water and then not take care of the soil and let the salinity go up and let crop productivity go down.”
Tech still has a role to play, he says, including broadband infrastructure in the fields. With expanded broadband, for example, farmers can use global positioning systems and live drone monitoring to measure how thirsty certain plants are. These highly specific monitoring techniques, which have been used in U.S. agriculture since the 1990s, are known as “precision agriculture.”
“One of the issues that precision agriculture gets to is the overuse of inputs,” Orr says. “When you look at the environmental degradation, like the seepage of nitrogen fertilizer into water systems, simply having the ability to know exactly how much fertilizer and water should go on the plants is the best way to avoid that.”
When it comes to water use, precision agriculture can help farmers determine what is best for their own land—which may differ from what their neighbors need.
“[These issues are] basin-wide, but when it comes down to it, it has to be a conversation with an individual farmer,” Orr says. In his role in the extension office, he meets regularly with Arizona farmers to discuss which tools are best for their land. “Every field is different, and so I think that’s really what we have to do is study this before we do it.”
Silber-Coats hopes the WATA can help farmers and researchers begin adapting to water scarcity.
“We want to see specific action affecting water use or availability,” he said. “The atlas part of it helps us remember that context matters, and everything takes place somewhere.”
Technique Over Tech
In other parts of the region, farmers are relying more on conservation techniques than on the tech of the future.
“It’s [a matter] of respecting the water that we’ve been given as a gift, and we use it as many times as we can, as efficiently as we can.”
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), for example, pays the Quechan Tribe to forgo irrigating part of their land in the Imperial Valley. Through a pilot program, MWD pays the farmers leasing the land and the tribe up to $473 per acre. The farmers, who are both tribal and non-tribal, receive 75 percent of the payment, while the tribe receives the other 25 percent.
The Quechan used the money to contribute to a decades-long conservation project, restoring the wetlands surrounding the Colorado River. The tribe supplants pink saltcedar fronds, an invasive species that pulls water from the river, with native vegetation, including cottonwoods, willows, and honey mesquite.
In the Mojave Desert, 240 miles from the Imperial Valley, Michael Kotutwa Johnson lives and farms 11 acres on the Hopi Reservation. Johnson, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona School of Natural Resources and the Environment, dry farms with Hopi methods that do not require irrigation. These methods include wide row spacing, planting multiple seeds per hole, and planting drought-tolerant varieties of seeds.
“Our crops are suited to fit the environment,” he says. “Our seeds have been adapted for over 3,000 years to be raised with little moisture.”
For him, agricultural resilience in the West means less manipulation of the environment. “The only agriculture left in Arizona after about 20 years will be Indian agriculture,” he says, “because they do have the water rights, they do have the land.” Indigenous agriculture relies on an approach to land that is grounded in time-tested, abiding ecological principles rather than technical innovation.
“We respect the land, and we respect the impact that we can have on the ecosystem,” he says. “It’s [a matter] of respecting the water that we’ve been given as a gift, and we use it as many times as we can, as efficiently as we can.”
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]]>The post Utah Tries a New Water Strategy appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Before he was appointed head of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources, Joel Ferry was a full-time farmer—and a very good one. “I was the top ‘Young Farmer and Rancher’ in the state of Utah a few years ago,” he said on a recent phone call, as he drove across the state, minutes before heading into a meeting with the governor. “My wife was the Utah ‘Farm Mom of the Year.’ I’m raising my kids in agriculture.”
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols. Source: “Review and Synopsis of Natural and Human Controls on Fluvial Channel Processes in the Arid West,” by John J. Field and Robert W. Lichvar.
In Corinne, Utah, where his family has farmed for 125 years, Ferry, who is 46, raises cows, corn, and alfalfa. His is the last ranch before the Bear River—the longest river in North America that does not empty into an ocean—flows into the Great Salt Lake. On his farm, Ferry is witness to the effects of water usage in a drought-ridden region. “I’m personally seeing the impacts on the ecosystem, the impacts on the environment,” Ferry said, “and then also trying to balance these competing demands for agriculture and city growth. We’re right in the thick of it.”
The whole state of Utah, like many western U.S. states, is in the thick of it. Utah recently emerged from its driest 20-year period since the Middle Ages, while the Great Salt Lake, an iconic landmark of the West, is on course to dry up completely in a matter of years, not decades.
“In most other places, you’re penalized because you ‘use it or lose it.’ We flip that completely on its head through some of the statutes and laws that we’ve adopted.”
Ferry must now not only think of his ranch, but his neighbors, and their neighbors, and everyone else in the state, not to mention fish and wildlife that rely on rivers, lakes, and streams. Here, those resources are managed through a prioritization of water rights, where the oldest claims are first in line to receive an allocation of the water that flows through the basin. “The priority system has helped us manage a limited water resource in the West for over a century,” Ferry said.
But amid climate change, drought, and increased demands for water, Utah is trying to change the system, bucking one of the oldest water rules in the western U.S.
As it does in other Western states, Utah’s water policy fits under a principle of “beneficial use,” which declares that water rights holders must use their water for beneficial purposes, such as agriculture, or give up those rights. In Utah, though, the state legislature has passed multiple statutes that are attempting to encourage farmers to use less water without losing rights to it.
“Through our laws, we promote conservation,” Ferry said. “You’re benefited by conserving water. In most other places, you’re penalized because you risk forfeiture, you ‘use it or lose it.’ We flip that completely on its head through some of the statutes and laws that we’ve adopted.”
Water Rights in the West
The “first in time, first in right” doctrine, also known as “prior appropriation,” stems from the 1850s California Gold Rush, whose miners claimed stakes along rivers or streams and diverted the water as they needed it. Older claims, no matter where they were on the waterway, had priority rights to use the water. In 1928, California amended its constitution to include “beneficial use,” requiring those who claimed rights to water to make use of it. Today, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming all abide by the doctrine.
Utah is primarily tackling the problem through its Agricultural Water Optimization Program, which awards farmers funding to become more efficient with their water use.
In the past, the doctrine prevented conflicts over water, especially for people coming from the Eastern United States, where water was plentiful and so-called “riparian rights” are related to land ownership along a waterway. But it also created an entanglement of rights, and as more people moved into the West, putting a strain on water use, this entanglement has become a real obstacle to conservation.
In these states, the right to use a certain amount of water is granted by date. Those with the oldest water rights have first claims to the water, no matter where they are on the river—as long as they continue to use it. If you don’t use water, you can lose your right to it, which hardly incentivizes conservation.
These water rights are incredibly important right now for states and tribal nations along the Colorado River, which winds its way out of the Rocky Mountains, through the desert Southwest and (almost, under the right conditions) into Mexico.
More than 40 million people rely on the Colorado River and its tributaries in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming (the Upper Basin States) and in Arizona, California, and Nevada (the Lower Basin States). Through a complex legal agreement, these states share water from the Colorado River with each other and with tribal nations: the Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, Southern Ute, Jicarilla Apache, Navajo Nation, Chemehuevi, Colorado River Indian Tribes, Fort Mojave, Quechan, and Cocopah.
This agreement, known as the Colorado River Compact, is now under renegotiation, after prolonged drought and overuse of water caused a huge drop in the water held in Lake Mead—a key water bank and hydropower source for the region. If the states and tribes cannot agree on how to share the river, the federal government will take over. This has created a series of tough negotiations, as each state must agree to cutbacks—and to find the best ways to use the water they do have.
Utah’s Solution
Amid these conditions, Utah wants to do something different. It wants to find a way around the “use it or lose it” doctrine, to encourage farmers to conserve water without punishing them for it.
“I don’t want to say Utah is doing better than anyone else,” said Warren Peterson, an agriculture and water attorney who also grew up on a Utah farm, “but I’d like to think that if there’s a pack at the lead of the race, we’re in that pack.”
“These investments that I’ve made are to make my farm sustainable, so the next generation can farm and be successful.”
Utah is primarily tackling the problem through its Agricultural Water Optimization Program, which awards farmers funding to become more efficient with their water use. Utah’s new initiatives are meant to address stress and uncertainty for farmers. But on a larger scale, these initiatives are aiming to thwart, or at least delay, catastrophic water shortages in the region. If water consumption in the region continues at the current rate, Food and Water Watch warns, food prices, energy systems, and ecosystems could be impacted indefinitely.
At Ferry’s farm, for example, the fields are water optimized. He has thousands of feet of pipeline, drip irrigation, and GPS monitoring. He’s measuring his water use and the flow rate. In 2024, 190 farms received more than $20 million in funds to improve their on-farm practices. Each farm received an average of approximately $106,000. Forty-five irrigation companies received approximately $22 million to improve their practices.
“These investments that I’ve made are to make my farm sustainable, so that the next generation can come and farm and be successful, and so that I can continue to farm,” Ferry said. “I don’t want to have the stresses of drought and of a changing climate and of uncertainty. I want certainty in what I do. And by doing these and implementing these types of projects, I then gain the certainty.”
The Agricultural Water Optimization Program was passed in 2023. Along with acquiring funding to improve water practices, farmers can also file a “change application” to lease out any “saved water” through a water marketplace.
“It kind of gives an incentive to save that consumptive use and potentially be able to lease it or do something else with it,” said Utah State Engineer Teresa Wilhelmsen.
Wilhelmsen estimates that around 400 farmers applied for grants this year. However, not all farmers are jumping on board. “As you can imagine, there’s a fear of the state engineer with some folks,” she said, because the state engineer is often the one enforcing water rights and making sure people do not pull more water than they should. Peterson describes her as “the lead water cop.” This is why she is trying to frame these programs as opportunities to “tune up your water rights.”
Still, many farmers find the programs beneficial. Stanford Jensen, who runs a rotational grazing operation with cows, pigs, and chickens on a 560-acre no-till irrigated farm, is among them. Jensen’s irrigation is controlled by a local company. “All the water rights were put in the company years ago, so the company delivers all the water through a canal system that was put in in the late 1800s,” he said. “I’m a board member of that company. So, I went out and applied for the water optimization grant.”
“A lot of these challenges we’re looking at have taken many years to fully develop, and it takes years to respond.”
That grant of $500,000 went toward a $2 million upgrade to the irrigation system by implementing automated canal readers and controllers to reduce waste in the system. Jensen saw the optimization program as a chance to “make sure that we deliver water accurately, timely, and then hold back as much water as possible.”
Not all new water programs are taking hold. In 2020, Utah introduced a statute known as the Water Banking Act, whereby farmers who do not use their full water right can lease their water to others. In theory, this would allow farmers to lease out their water rights. The law led to the establishment of the First Water Bank of Utah, where water is treated as a currency. The bank aims to protect water rights and other assets. “Just depositing water in our bank eliminates the need to prove beneficial use,” the bank claims.
Ideally, this idea will promote water savings. Wilhelmsen notes that the adoption rate for water banking is currently low. According to her, the one application for the program that has been accepted is not yet set up or operating.
Future Use
Even with the more popular Agricultural Water Optimization Program in Utah, some believe more needs to be done. Burdette Barker, an irrigation expert at Utah State University, thinks efficiency is not the only issue that needs to be addressed; adaptation needs to be at the forefront, too.
“Will [the optimization program] alone meet the objectives that the state and others have?” he asks. “Probably not. Will it allow farmers to adapt better as tighter crunches come? I think so. They will help provide farmers with tools to cope or adjust.”
Barker notes that the Colorado River Basin has always faced problems with competing needs for water. “You’re running into issues where there’s less supply available, or going to be less supply available,” he said. While he thinks the state should be credited for finding ways to ensure that farmers remain safely in production, he is worried about the timeline.
“A lot of these challenges we’re looking at have taken many years to fully develop, and it takes years to respond,” he said.
Still, Peterson is holding out hope that these new programs will be more than a drop in the bucket toward improving water use. Farmers, who are sometimes blamed for the depletion of the Great Salt Lake, could actually lead the way toward saving it. And many have a personal incentive: protecting farms for future generations.
“Farmers are forward-thinking because they know the law of the harvest,” he said. “They aren’t going to foul up our water supply system so that their grandchildren cannot do what they do, and maybe even do it better. You hear farmers say that all the time, ‘I want to leave this so my grandkids can do this better than I did.’”
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]]>The post Across Farm Country, Fertilizer Pollution Impacts Not Just Health, but Water Costs, Too appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When Jeff Broberg and his wife, Erica, moved to their 170-acre bean and grain farm in Winona, Minnesota in 1986, their well water measured at 8.6 ppm for nitrates. These nitrogen-based compounds, common in agricultural runoff, are linked to multiple cancers and health issues for those exposed. Each year, the measurement in their water kept creeping up.
In the late 1990s, Broberg decided it was time to source from elsewhere. He began hauling eight one-gallon jugs and two five-gallon jugs from his friend Mike’s house. That was his drinking water for the week.
Six years ago, Broberg said, he was “getting too old to haul that water in the middle of the winter.” So, he installed his own reverse-osmosis water filtration system. The measurement of nitrates in his well has now reached up to 22 ppm. Post-filtration, the levels are almost nonexistent.
Broberg, a retired geologist, has committed what he calls his “encore career” to advocating for clean water in Minnesota. He only leases out around 40 percent of his tillable land and has retired much of the rest due to groundwater pollution concerns. Almost one year ago, a group he co-founded, the Minnesota Well Owners Organization, joined other groups to petition the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to address groundwater contamination in southeast Minnesota.
The EPA agreed, stating that “further action is needed to protect public health” and requested that the state create a plan for testing, education and supplying alternative drinking water to those most affected. Advocates in Wisconsin filed a petition, too. Last month, 13 separate groups in Iowa did the same.
This advocacy comes in light of increased regional attention on nitrate pollution and its health effects. In Nebraska, researchers have connected high birth defect rates with exposure to water contaminated with nitrates. In Wisconsin, experts warn that exposure to nitrates can increase the risk of colon cancer.
Access to clean water, as defined by the United Nations, is a human right. And yet many currently don’t have that right, even in a country where potable water is taken for granted. What’s more, the cost of clean water falls more heavily on less populated areas, where fewer residents shoulder the bill. A report by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that the cost for rural Iowa residents—who often live in areas with smaller, more expensive water systems—could be as much as $4,960 more per person per year to filter out nitrates from their water than their counterparts in cities like Des Moines. Nitrates are affecting water utilities from California to D.C., and the reason comes down to one major source: Agricultural runoff.
Where The Trouble Begins: ‘A Leaky System’
The root of water-quality issues in the Midwest starts with its cropland drainage system, a network of underground, cylindrical tiles that drain excess water and nutrients from the land and funnel it downstream. Those tiles, which were first installed in the mid-1800s and have now largely been replaced with plastic pipes, ultimately allowed farmers to grow crops on land that was once too wet to farm.
Lee Tesdell is the fifth generation to own his family’s 80-acre farm in Polk County, Iowa. Tesdell explained that when his European ancestors settled in the Midwest, they plowed the prairie and switched from deeply rooted perennial plants to shallow-rooted annual crops like wheat, oats, and corn instead.
“Then we had more exposed soil and less water infiltration because the roots weren’t as deep,” he said. “The annual crops and drainage tile started to create this leaky system.”
This “leaky system” refers to what is not absorbed by the crops on the field, most dangerously, in this case, fertilizer.
“It’s a leaky system because it’s not in sync,” said Iowa water quality expert Chris Jones, author of The Swine Republic book (and blog). “And farmers know they’re going to lose some fertilizer. As a consequence, they apply extra as insurance.”
Fertilizer as Poison
The U.S. is the top corn-producing country in the world, with states like Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, and Minnesota supplying 32 percent of corn globally. Corn produces lower yields if it is nitrogen deficient, so farmers apply nitrogen-heavy fertilizer to the crop. In fact, they must use fertilizer in order to qualify for crop insurance. The ammonia in the fertilizer oxidizes existing nitrogen in the soil, turning it into highly water-soluble nitrates that aren’t fully absorbed by the corn. Those nitrates leak into aquifers.
In 1960, farmers used approximately 3 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer a year. In 2021, that number was closer to 19 million. Farmers can use a nitrogen calculator to determine how much nitrogen they need—but nearly 70 percent of farmers use more than the recommended amount.
“Other people also have an American dream, and they want to be able to turn on their faucet and have clean water, or know that if they put their baby in a bath, they’re not going to end up in the hospital with major organs shutting down because they have been poisoned.”
As Jones explains in his blog, even with “insurance” fertilizer use, yields can often turn out the same: “What happened to that extra 56 pounds of nitrogen that you bought? Well, some might’ve ended up sequestered in the soil, but a lot of it ran off into lakes and streams or leached down into the aquifer (hmm, do you reckon that’s why the neighbor’s well is contaminated?), and some off-gassed to the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a substance that has 300 times more warming potential than carbon dioxide.”
Commercial fertilizer is just one contributor to high nitrate levels in groundwater. The other main factor, manure, is also increasing as CAFOs become more prevalent.
Nancy Utesch and her husband, Lynn, live on 150 acres of land in Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, where they rotationally graze beef cattle. In 2004, a family nearby became very ill from E. coli poisoning in their water.
“I was really upset that this had happened in our county,” she said. “A lot of the support was for the polluting farmer, and you know, farming is right there with the American flag and grandma’s apple pie.”
Utesch worries that the current system of industrialized agriculture has created a world where people living closest to the polluters do not have access to clean water themselves, and are afraid to speak out against the actions of their neighbors.
“Other people also have an American dream, and they want to be able to turn on their faucet and have clean water, or know that if they put their baby in a bath, that they’re not going to end up in the hospital with major organs shutting down because they have been poisoned,” she said. “If they clean a scrape because their grandchild fell down in the driveway, they could be hurting them if they use the water from the tap.”
The Plight of the Small Town
In June 2022, fertilizer runoff pushed Des Moines Water Works, the municipal agency charged with overseeing drinking water, to restart operations of their nitrate removal system—one of the largest in the world—at a cost of up to $16,000 per day. Des Moines finances its removal system from its roughly 600,000 ratepayers.
“Financially, Des Moines can spread out needed treatment over many thousands of customers, whereas a small town can’t do that,” Jones said. “If you have a small town of 1,000 people, your well gets contaminated, and you need a $2 million treatment plan to clean up the water, that’s a burden.”
“Financially, Des Moines can spread out needed treatment over many thousands of customers, whereas a small town can’t do that.”
While cities like Des Moines are willing to pay the cost to remove nitrates, other small communities will have a tougher time doing so. And once their aquifer is contaminated, “it doesn’t go away for a long time, in some cases, thousands of years,” Jones said.
Utica, Minnesota, which has fewer than 300 residents, has two deep wells, both measuring at unsafe levels for nitrates.
“[Residents are] scared to death,” Broberg, who lives in a neighboring town, said. “The city has investigated water treatment expenses at around $3 million for reverse osmosis, and they only last 10 years. A town of 85 households can’t amortize that debt by themselves.”
The town has applied for a grant from the state and is waiting to hear back.
Another nearby town, Lewiston, dug a new, deeper well to solve their nitrate problem.
“They went down there, and the water was contaminated with radium. It’s radioactive,” Broberg said. “So they kept their nitrate-contaminated well and their radium-contaminated well and blended the water so that it doesn’t exceed the health risk limit for either nitrates or radium.”
However, as Chris Rogers reported in the Winona Post, that plan didn’t quite work. Thus, Lewiston dug another well at a cost of $904,580, and is now sourcing all of their water from that new well. That well is now testing trace amounts of nitrates and has less radium than before.
Many rural residents also rely on private, personal well systems, which aren’t regulated for contaminants, to source their water. Forty million people rely on well water nationwide.
“Public water systems have these maximum contaminant levels that are set by the EPA. There are rules and regulations that they have to follow, but private wells aren’t covered by the Safe Drinking Water Act,” said Stacy Woods, research director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s really on individual well owners to decide whether to test their wells and what contaminants to test their wells for, and these tests can be really expensive.”
Broberg and his group are working to extend the protection of the Safe Drinking Water Act to well water. In southeast Minnesota, the EPA agreed to the plan, though the path forward is still uncertain as funding packages move through the legislature.
“I’ve spoken with people who simply don’t want to test their well water because they can’t afford to do much about it if they find out that their nitrate levels are unsafe.”
Without these protections in place, or intervention at the pollution source, rural residents often find the responsibility of clean water falling on them.
“I’ve spoken with people who simply don’t want to test their well water because they can’t afford to do much about it if they find out that their nitrate levels are unsafe,” Food and Water Watch Legal Director Tarah Heinzen said. “They are basically powerless to protect their drinking water resources from sources of pollution that aren’t being adequately regulated by the state.”
The solution, according to Woods, “is to protect the drinking water sources from that pollution in the first place.”
Conservation on the Farm
One way to do this is by using less fertilizer on the field. Another is to introduce on-the-field and edge-of-field conservation practices, like Tesdell is doing on his Iowa family farm.
Tesdell’s farm is not the typical Iowa farm, which averages 359 acres. Tesdell’s is 80. He does, however, rent 50 acres to a neighbor who grows corn and soybeans, like most Iowa farmers.
Where Tesdell’s farm differs is how he deals with excess nitrate. In 2012, Tesdell, who has always been drawn to conservation, became interested in adding cover cropping to his fields. Through his research, he came across other conservation practices such as wood chip bioreactors. He installed his first bioreactor that same year.
“There’s a chemical and biological reaction between the wood chips and the nitrate in the tile water,” Tesdell said. “Much of the nitrate then is turned into nitrogen gas, which is a harmless gas. We don’t take out 100 percent of the nitrate, but we take out a good percentage.”
According to Iowa State University, a typical bioreactor costs around $10,000 to design and install. Tesdell paid for his bioreactor partly out of pocket, but also acquired funding from the Iowa Soybean Association. For his saturated buffer, an edge-of-field practice that redirects excess nitrates through vegetation, Tesdell received funding from the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). To install the saturated buffer, Tesdell needed his neighbor to agree.
“We put that one on a tile that actually comes from my neighbor’s farm. Because the creek is going through my farm, it’s a more direct route to come off a hill [on] his farm,” he said. “Neighbors need to work together.”
Roughly 80 percent of the farmland in Iowa is owned by offsite landlords, who rent it out to farmers. Tesdell cites this as a roadblock to conservation practices.
“If the landowner doesn’t care, why would an operator care? They want to pull in with their 24-row planter, plant their corn, come in with the 12-row corn head in October and harvest, then truck it off to the ethanol plant,” he said. “I don’t blame them.”
Iowa currently has a “Nutrient Reduction Strategy” plan, which outlines voluntary efforts farmers can take to reduce their pollution. There is no active legislation that limits how much fertilizer farmers use on their cropland.
Heinzen, of Food and Water Watch, explained that agricultural pollution is largely unregulated, with the exception of concentrated animals feeding operations (CAFOs). “In fact, even most CAFOs are completely unregulated, because EPA has completely failed to implement Congress’s intent to regulate this industry, which we’re suing them over,” she said, referring to a new brief filed by multiple advocacy groups in February aimed at upgrading CAFO pollution regulation.
Even Des Moines Waterworks, with its state-of-the-art nitrate removal facility, is calling for change.
“We cannot keep treating water quality only at the receiving end,” spokesperson Melissa Walker said. “There needs to be a plan for every acre of farmland in Iowa and how its nutrients will be managed, as well as every animal and its manure.”
“You’re either going to have to change your practices, change your farming, or you’re going to have the accept the risk of preventable disease.”
Some communities have sued for damages related to nitrate-contaminated groundwater. In Millsboro, Delaware, residents received a payout but still have contaminated water. In Boardman, Oregon, five residents are suing the Port of Morrow and multiple farms and CAFOs due to their well-water testing “at more than four times the safe limit established by the U.S. EPA,” Alex Baumhardt reported in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.
A few weeks ago, 1,500 tons of liquid nitrogen were spilled into an Iowa river. No living fish were found nearby. Today, polluted water flows downstream into the Gulf of Mexico, where it causes “dead zones” stripped of marine life.
“You’re either going to have to change your practices, change your farming, or you’re going to have the accept the risk of preventable disease,” Broberg said. “And you need to put that equation in your family budget. If you’re going to get bladder cancer, diabetes, birth defects, juvenile cancers—what are those going to cost?”
When asked why protecting water is so important, Tesdell paused and looked away. His voice cracked with emotion. “It’s for the grandkids.”
The post Across Farm Country, Fertilizer Pollution Impacts Not Just Health, but Water Costs, Too appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post An Iowa Fertilizer Plant Purchase Spurs Antitrust Concerns appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When farmer Joshua Manske heard about the acquisition of an Iowa fertilizer plant by Koch Industries in December, he saw it as a “microcosm of what’s going on nationally.”
Manske runs conventional crop operations in Iowa and Minnesota, including managing a 1,000-acre family farm in northern Iowa, and primarily plants a rotation of corn and soybeans. Because corn requires nitrogen fertilizer to grow, Manske is concerned that further consolidation of the fertilizer industry will drive his input prices up more.
“It’s kind of like, ‘Okay, here we go again,’” he said, referring to the acquisition. “You want competition. That’s what’s going to help drive your fertilizer prices where they should be between supply and demand. And if you don’t have that, well, then [prices] struggle. And then it makes everybody struggle.”
The application of nitrogen, phosphate, and potash fertilizers on cropland is a foundation of industrialized agriculture. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, nitrogen fertilizer sales increased from 17 pounds per acre in 1960 to 83.6 pounds per acre in 2013. Fertilizer costs comprised nearly 20 percent of U.S. farm costs in 2022, and even more for farmers growing corn and wheat.
In 2012, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad gave an Egypt-based company (which is now a Netherlands-based company known as OCI N.V.) a $240 million tax incentive to build a $1.4-billion fertilizer plant to Iowa. Branstad’s investment was touted as the “largest single capital investment in state history.”
The goal of the project was to bring jobs to Lee County, where unemployment rates were higher than the rest of the state. Another goal was to increase competition in the fertilizer market, where just a few firms dominate, with the hopes of lowering fertilizer prices for farmers and food costs for consumers.
The fertilizer plant opened its doors in 2017, and employed 200 full-time workers when it opened. But in December 2023, Koch Ag & Energy Solutions—one of the firms the Iowa plant was built to challenge—announced it was buying the plant for $3.6 billion.
Fertilizer is one of the most consolidated industries in agriculture; today, four companies control 75 percent of the fertilizer market. Koch Industries is one of them—and was the second-largest private company in the U.S. last year, with a revenue of $125 billion. (According to economists, once four firms control more than 40 percent of the market in any industry, abuses are likely to occur.) Under President Biden, the federal government has also put considerable time, attention, and money into changing that. Over the last four years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has invested $174 million in independent fertilizer plants not owned by the big four, with a stated goal of increasing competition.
At the end of January 2024, 18 advocacy groups, including the Iowa Farmers’ Union, wrote to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) requesting an investigation into the legality of the purchase, given the consolidation of the fertilizer market.
“While we would harbor grave concerns about any acquisition that further consolidates an agricultural sector as concentrated and as critical as fertilizer, those concerns are much more serious given this deal involves hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars,” the letter said. “To safeguard our economy and indeed our democracy, our enforcers must prevent dominant firms from capitalizing on investments made with public resources.”
Later this month, FTC Chairperson Lina Khan is set to attend a community listening session with members of the Iowa Farmers’ Union to hear their concerns.
Food and Ag Monopolies
John Gilbert’s sustainable almost-800-acre corn, soybean, oat, and pig farm in Hardin County, Iowa has been in the family since the 19th century. “When I was growing up, farming was a lot of smaller farms. Everybody had livestock of one sort or another,” said Gilbert. “Integrated livestock and crops, that was pretty much standard.”
He characterizes that period of farming as a time when everyone was “maybe having a recreational drink after work or maybe enjoying a puff or two on one of those fancy cigarettes.”
Today, according to Gilbert, farmers are struggling—and more “into heavy addiction to hard drugs.”
“So-called highly efficient agriculture comes at a cost, and those costs are being externalized into people’s health and in poor water quality and in the fact that nobody wants to stay in Iowa,” Gilbert said.
Gilbert was against the fertilizer plant when it was first being built, in part because of the huge state contribution required. “I’ve long been convinced that there’s very little justification for governments putting tax breaks into business,” he said. “It wasn’t that they were going to put a few local tax dollars to get it located in Wever, Iowa; it was the fact that the state was willing to put close to half a billion dollars into it.”
When Gilbert heard about the planned Koch acquisition, he was troubled by how Koch Industries has moved into multiple areas of agribusiness. In 2015, Koch was the fifth-largest ethanol producer in the country. They also owned approximately 340,000 acres of Montana land with cattle, elk, and a trout stream until they sold it to Rupert Murdoch in 2021.
Gilbert’s concerns are not unfounded: Monopolies dominate many aspects of agriculture in the U.S. Four companies control more than 70 percent of the pork industry (JBS, Tyson, Smithfield, and Hormel), and four companies control more than half the chicken processing market (JBS, Perdue, Tyson, and Sanderson). Additionally, four companies also control the majority of the global seed market (Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina, and BASF).
Consolidation impacts farmers when it comes to how they can meet their bottom line, but it affects consumers, too: As the pandemic revealed, when companies don’t face competition, they are able to inflate food prices as they see fit.
“I’m a believer capitalism, but you have to have good competition for the system to work,” Manske said. “When that’s not happening, everybody suffers, from a farmer on the field to the consumer at the grocery store.”
It is no surprise that groceries are more expensive than ever—the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that food prices are 5 percent higher in 2023 than in 2022. As fewer and fewer corporations control more of the food supply, resulting in larger profit margins than ever, consumers pay the price.
“Whether it’s nitrogen or airline tickets or Ticketmaster, at what point does it become a power balance where one entity has great power over a lot of people who have little power?” Gilbert said. “It’s really the government that needs to be in a position to keep those scales in balance.”
At the end of January, Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand sent a letter to the FTC and DOJ calling for the agencies to reject the sale.
“Iowa taxpayers have hundreds of millions of dollars invested into this plant as a way to promote competition and keep prices low,” Sand told Civil Eats. “If you sell it to the biggest partner in the industry, you are literally defeating the purpose of that investment by taxpayers.”
Sand is also concerned about the job security of those working in the plant, should it be acquired. “It’s not uncommon for one of the biggest players in any industry to buy a piece of that industry from an opponent and then actually shut it down,” he said.
The Price of Nitrogen
For almost three decades, former Iowa Soybean Association president Robb Ewoldt has been growing corn and soybeans on his 2,000-acre eastern Iowa family farm. He also raises cattle and hogs—“and two boys,” he says. After water, nitrogen is the most important ingredient in growing corn, Ewoldt told Civil Eats.
Over the past two years, nitrogen fertilizer and grain prices have both skyrocketed in large part due to the ongoing war in Ukraine. While the high grain prices are a boon for farmers, rising fertilizer costs are evening out their books.
Even though fertilizer prices have been higher than ever in the past few years, Ewoldt is not sure how much of a difference the Koch acquisition of the plant would make to his everyday life.
“I am a farmer,” he said. “I’m sure there’s people that have studied this stuff and can give us reasons why this might be a bad thing. I look at it for what I’m paying and how it affected me two years ago, and I don’t think that there’s going to be that big of a change.”
However, Iowa State Representative Megan Srinivas, who serves on the state’s agriculture committee, told Civil Eats that Koch’s rising dominance in the agriculture sector could potentially cause increased prices for all farmers.
“Koch already has quite a large conglomeration of fertilizer plants,” she said. “And ostensibly taking away a major competitor in the state would drive us more towards a monopoly where we wouldn’t have the competition needed to help keep the prices lower,” she said.
Manske is already skeptical of how fertilizer prices are set. “I’d love to know what made my fertilizer worth $1,100 last year. It’s the same product they put in the ground this year, but it’s 560 bucks, or vice versa,” he said. “A lot of people will say, ‘Well, you were selling corn for seven bucks and beans for 15 [per bushel], so what’re you complaining about?’ Well, your bottom line might be better off when the input prices are lower, and commodities aren’t as high. We talk about yield all the time, but what’s our [return on investment] per acre? That’s really what matters to keep us in business.”
Many farmers regularly over-apply fertilizer to their crop as a sort of insurance to keep yields high. Much of the over-application ends up in Iowa drinking water, leading to high levels of cancer-causing nitrates and ultimately contributing to downstream hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Future of Farming in Iowa
Fertilizer prices are just one piece in a much larger puzzle of the sustainability of family farming, a lifestyle that further industry consolidation continues to threaten. According to a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Midwest has seen the greatest levels of cropland consolidation. This consolidation is pushing out new and young farmers as they struggle to compete with the value of the land itself—in many cases renting or selling the land is a safer bet than farming it and competing against the yields of the big players.
“We’ve made it harder and harder to be active in agriculture as a way of life,” Sand said. “It’s a way of life. It’s not just an income. It’s not just a job. And we’re making it harder for people to do that.”
As the latest USDA census describes, the number of farms in the country is decreasing—except for those over 5,000 acres. An increase in large-scale corporate agriculture has created record-setting oversupply this year, which will likely slash the incomes of many farmers. Still, fertilizer companies are doing well: In its 2022 annual report, OCI N.V. reported an almost 54 percent increase in revenue in 2022 over 2021, and an 84 percent increase in net profits.
Farmers are telling a different story. “There’s some years where you just can’t do much to make a profit,” said Ewoldt. “This year, we’re going to see an issue. We’re going to see our net returns drop drastically. I think they’ve shown maybe a 30 percent reduction in income on the farm in general across the United States.”
Experts predict a difficult year ahead for commodity prices due to “plenty of corn available to the market.” The USDA estimates that a corn bushel will likely go for an average price of under five dollars per bushel—a steep decline from the $6.54 from last year.
“Keep an eye out for what’s going to happen in the farm economy here this year. It’s not looking great at the moment,” Manske said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty. Where are the interest rates going to go? Where are commodity prices going? It would be nice to have an updated farm bill instead of just renewing the old one.”
The future of the Iowa fertilizer plant is unclear as the FTC and the DOJ investigate.
“While contested sales are rare, the FTC and the DOJ have the authority to block the sale of a company if they determine it harms competition, creates a monopoly, or violates anti-trust laws,” Sand said. “After an investigation and review process, the FTC and the DOJ may enter into a settlement with the companies or take legal action to block the sale.”
Iowa Farmers’ Union president Aaron Lehman is grateful that FTC Chairperson Khan plans to attend a Union listening session later this month.
“She’s been a good listener for us before when we brought farmers to Washington,” Lehman said. “We’re pleased that they’re listening as well as they are.”
As Scott Syroka reported in the Iowa politics website Bleeding Heartland, Koch Industries is one of five companies that is exempt from paying utility replacement taxes to the state. Each year, OCI pays millions of dollars in replacement taxes because it is connected to an interstate natural gas pipeline, which transfers a primary component for nitrogen fertilizer. It’s possible that if Koch acquires the plant, they will pay none, which would further siphon income from the state.
Iowa is not only becoming more difficult for smaller farmers to maintain their livelihood; it is also becoming a more polluted place to live. Gilbert pointed to rising cancer rates in Iowa, which are likely caused by high levels of nitrates—found in fertilizers—in the drinking water.
“The real measure of how productive a landscape is not how much grain you can raise or what your yields are,” Gilbert said. “It’s how many people does it support? From that standpoint, Iowa’s becoming a desert.”
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]]>The post The Iowa Trout Stream at the Center of a Feedlot Fight appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In 2017, Larry Stone heard whispers about construction taking place near his home in Clayton County, Iowa. A retired photographer, Stone pulled up to the site, located around 20 miles away from where he lives, and began taking photos.
“A guy came roaring up on his little ATV and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’” Stone recalled recently.
His curiosity eventually landed Stone a tour of the project: Walz Energy, a joint venture between a cattle-feeding operation and an energy company. The idea, the manager explained, was that Supreme Beef would run a feedlot, and Feeder Creek would supply a biodigester, a machine that would process manure and capture the resulting methane to be sold as energy.
“The [manager] said, ‘This is not a feedlot; it’s a renewable energy project. We need at least 10,000 cows to get enough manure for the amount of methane we want to generate,’” Stone said.
“Anything that is a contaminant on the surface can get down into the fractured bedrock very easily and very quickly contaminate the groundwater.”
The biodigester project fell apart, but the plan for a 11,000-head feedlot moved forward. Without the biodigester, Supreme Beef—which is perched on the headwaters of Bloody Run Creek, a spring-fed trout stream filled year-round with rainbow, brook, and brown trout—had to come up with a plan to get rid of its manure, known as a nutrient management plan (NMP), which would need to be approved by Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
According to the DNR, any open feedlot operation with 1,000 or more animal units needs to submit a plan to ensure the operation does not over-apply manure to surrounding cropland.
Seven years ago, the Iowa Sierra Club, the Iowa chapter of Trout Unlimited, and a group of concerned citizens formed the Committee to Save Bloody Run in response to that plan, which they saw as scientifically incomprehensible. Since then, the committee has been opposing Supreme Beef’s operations and fighting the feedlot’s manure management plans.
The scrutiny of these plans is timely, as Iowa now has the second highest cancer incidence in the country, and it is the only state where rates are increasing. Many cancers are linked to nitrates, which are found in drinking water contaminated with manure or nitrogen fertilizer, and advocates are concerned about the link.
The fight to keep Iowa waterways clean is decades long—and the increase in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) there is only making the fight more difficult. Each year, animals in CAFOs produce twice as much waste as the entire U.S. population. Although the state is known for hog production—hogs outnumber people 7:1—the number of cattle in Iowa feedlots is increasing, too. And for good reason: Cattle is the top-ranked agricultural commodity in the U.S.
The fight is especially contentious in northeast Iowa because the region is unlike the rest of the state, where fertile layers of soil were left behind from glacial drift and now act as a filter for water that moves down into the aquifers below. Northeast Iowa’s Driftless region has not seen glacial drift in over 2 million years.
An aerial view of the Supreme Beef facility taken by drone. (Photo credit: David Thoreson)
Chris Jones, a retired University of Iowa research engineer and the author of The Swine Republic, explains that because of this difference in the soil, the region has never been well suited for large-scale industrial agriculture. “Anything that is a contaminant on the surface can get down into the fractured bedrock very easily and very quickly contaminate the groundwater,” he said. “So, when we try to farm at these very large scales . . . that presents a real acute and chronic hazard to the water resources in that area.”
According to the committee, Supreme Beef likely first moved cattle to its farm in 2021, when it was operating on a NMP approved by the DNR, but that plan was later thrown out after the Committee to Save Bloody Run challenged it in court. In November 2023, DNR accepted a new NMP from Supreme Beef, despite years of opposition.
Advocates say they’re up against collusion between the DNR and the Iowa Legislature, which they believe to be doing everything in its power to keep the cattle feedlot open—regardless of its impact on water quality. DNR claims it is simply following standard procedure.
Now, the committee is attempting to defend against agricultural pollution using a new approach: It’s taking the DNR to court over its water use permit laws.
“All those cattle drink a lot of water,” said Jones, who is an expert witness in the case. “There has been some concern that the Supreme Beef well would rob water from other nearby wells that serve both homesteads and that are used for watering livestock.”
One resident who lives not far from the Supreme Beef operation, Tammy Thompson, claims in the suit that she needed to drill a new, deeper well because their water was contaminated.
“DNR strongly believes that the water use permit should be renewed. They feel that it’s not their responsibility or obligation to determine how the water is being used and how that use might impact the environment,” said Jones.
Supreme Beef did not respond to Civil Eats for comment for this story,
Origins of the Current Fight
Retired chemist Steve Veysey has been fishing in Bloody Run Creek for decades. The creek is 50-70 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, and thanks to natural springs, it never freezes over. He also likes the fact that it’s shallow enough to wade in.
In 2006, Veysey was one of the plaintiffs in a group that sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for not requiring the state of Iowa to enforce standards in the antidegradation policy nestled within the Clean Water Act. The policy states that “existing instream water uses and the level of water quality necessary to protect the existing uses shall be maintained and protected.” Veysey and other plaintiffs claimed Iowa regulations did not ensure this.
“In terms of water quality, there was the presumption of crap instead of the presumption of quality,” Veysey said. “And we won. EPA forced the state, essentially, to adopt new rules that presumed a stream or river segment had beneficial uses unless it was proven otherwise.”
As a part of that victory, the state created a list of “Outstanding Iowa Waters” deemed worthy of protection. Bloody Run Creek was one of them.
Then, in 2017, over a decade after the Clean Water Act victory, Veysey found himself again advocating to get the government to keep Bloody Run clean.
“There were a couple of, I would call them, con men, who went to the Walz family, which had a very small cattle operation at that time. They convinced them they could make lots of money by expanding their operation and having it be a methane digester and a waste energy operation,” said Wally Taylor, legal chair of the Iowa Sierra Club who argued the antidegradation case in 2006.
Under the initial biodigester plan, the DNR permitted Walz Energy as an industrial wastewater treatment facility. During that construction, they created and received permitting for an industrial wastewater treatment lagoon. According to Veysey, when the biodigester plan stalled, the feedlot repurposed the basin as a 39-million-gallon earthen lagoon to house raw manure right on top of the Bloody Run watershed.
In a 2021 petition for judicial review submitted in Iowa District Court, the Committee to Save Bloody Run argued that the lagoon directly defied state’s definition of an “open feedlot structure,” but due to a technicality, which states that open feedlots can use “alternative technology” to “dispose of settled open feedlot effluent,” the judge ruled that it was legal.
“If manure gets in a stream [and] decays, it sucks the oxygen out of the water,” Veysey said. “Now, all of a sudden, the dissolved oxygen that fish need to survive goes below a certain threshold and your fish die.”
Steve Veysey fishes for trout in Bloody Run Creek. (Photo credit: Larry Stone)
Pollution by way of the Supreme Beef operation is not purely hypothetical. In 2018, the Iowa DNR fined Walz Energy $10,000 for illegally discharging stormwater into Bloody Run Creek while building the feedlot. They were fined again for other violations, and in 2018, the DNR attorney recommended the case be taken up by the Iowa attorney general’s office.
Then, in an unusual move, the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission (EPC), a long-standing group comprised of Iowans appointed by the governor, decided to allow the DNR to resolve the problem on its own, and gave the agency full jurisdiction over Supreme Beef, without an attorney general investigation.
A DNR for Whom?
In September 2023, Supreme Beef submitted what would become its final NMP and, after multiple revisions, in November, the DNR accepted a revised plan it never opened for public comment.
The day after the plan was accepted, Taylor, legal chair of the Iowa Sierra Club, said Supreme Beef began spreading manure onto nearby farm fields—a move that members of the committee worry will oversaturate crops and result in the remaining manure leaking into the headwaters of Bloody Run.
The advocates say the pattern is part of a familiar history. “We think that the DNR gave Supreme Beef a heads-up ahead of time before they even actually approved the plan,” said Taylor. “The DNR has, for years, taken a hands-off approach on animal feeding operations and let them get by with lots of things.”
“The DNR has, for years, taken a hands-off approach on animal feeding operations and let them get by with lots of things.”
Back in 2021, open records requests filed by a reporter from the Cedar Rapids Gazette confirmed that Senator Dan Zumbach, the father-in-law of Jared Walz, a co-owner of Supreme Beef, worked with the DNR to find ways to get the plant approved. Zumbach, who is vice chair of the Iowa Senate Appropriations Committee, has received campaign donations from Monsanto, Bayer, Koch Industries, Smithfield, and DuPont, all large agribusinesses that might impact his decision. Zumbach did not respond to Civil Eats for request for comment for this story.
In 2022, Veysey, Taylor, Stone, and Jessica Mazour submitted an ethics complaint to the Iowa Senate against Zumbach. They referred to emails between Iowa government officials accessed through a public record request to argue that Zumbach was misusing his power as a state senator to assist with his son-in-law’s feedlot.
The complaint also noted various instances where Veysey attempted to verify the math in the NMP and said he found faulty calculations, which the group believes ultimately allows Supreme Beef to “significantly underestimate the number of crop acres they would really need for manure application.”
“The mistake was clearly pointed out to DNR staff during the public comment period by many reviewers but was ignored,” the complaint read. It was ultimately dismissed by the Iowa Senate.
In response to these claims and the others in this story, the DNR told Civil Eats that it “approved the NMP under the parameters set forth in state law and administrative rules” and then referred to a set of specific requirements and environmental protection codes.
It has been widely reported that Zumbach likely used his position in the legislature to pressure Chris Jones to stop writing his University of Iowa blog, which featured his research on Iowa water quality data. As Robert Leonard reported in Deep Midwest, Jones alleges that the pressure came with an implied threat that funding for monitoring systems could be impacted.
A few weeks later, Zumbach co-sponsored Senate File 558, which was signed by the governor in June 2023 and effectively shifted funding away from water sensors put in place to measure water pollution. Earlier that year, a sensor Jones had installed at Bloody Run Creek measured levels as high as 23.9 mg of nitrate and nitrite per liter. The EPA’s safe drinking water standard is 10 mg per liter, and new research shows that any more than 5 mg puts people in danger
“This was sort of a brazen abuse of power,” said Jones. “He’s defunding the water quality sensors that are immediately downstream from the Supreme Beef operation.
After previous efforts to push back against Supreme Beef’s NMPs proved unsuccessful, members of the Committee to Save Bloody Run are now involved in a lawsuit against the DNR focused on water use permit regulations.
Attorney James Larew is arguing that the DNR did not consider the public interest—which included around 70 comments in opposition—when it renewed Supreme Beef’s water use permit, which allows it to withdraw an anticipated 21.9 million gallons per year. Goat farmer Tammy Thompson, whose farm is located approximately 500 feet away from the feedlot, declared in the suit that “the contamination was so bad that it prohibited us from being able to move forward with our entrepreneurial endeavor of selling goat milk.”
“If you’re doing something right, Satan’s going to keep coming after you. I don’t understand why they keep coming after Supreme Beef.”
The approach to regulation—or lack thereof—is familiar to those who have been watching the farm landscape in Iowa. “There’s only one instance that we could find where an application for a water use permit had ever been denied by the Department of Natural Resources,” said Larew. “We’re talking tens of thousands going back into the 1950s, never challenged. The statutes themselves indicate that it’s not just the quantity of water the department should be concerned with but also these larger public interests.
While Supreme Beef did not respond to Civil Eats’ request for comment, at the hearing in the DNR building in the beginning of February, co-owner Jared Walz expressed frustration about the latest lawsuit.
“If you’re doing something right, Satan’s going to keep coming after you,” Walz said. “I don’t understand why they keep coming after Supreme Beef.”
The Committee to Save Bloody, however, doesn’t intend to stop fighting for clean water. The seven-year battle has been driven by retirees hoping for a better future for Iowa waterways. It’s an uphill battle, but the stakes are high, said Veysey. “If we can’t protect the best [waters] we have, we can’t protect any of it.”
Some farmers are also resisting the expansion of large agribusinesses like Supreme Beef. As Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmer’s Union, put it, “Food is being controlled by folks who have very little concern for our communities and our landscapes.”
Iowa lakes and streams feed into the Mississippi River, which flows thousands of miles across the country before reaching the Gulf of Mexico, where agricultural runoff is a major contributor to hypoxia in the dead zone.
“Our waterways do not stop at the state line,” Lehman said.
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