Landowners should be required to keep a 50-foot-wide buffer strip of permanent vegetation between cropland and waterways, said the Environmental Working Group, which proposed four “basic standards of care” to control agricultural runoff.
In a report, EWG said voluntary conservation — the U.S. policy for decades — was a treadmill to nowhere, based on its examination of eight watersheds in Iowa. Over a four-year period, “there was no lasting gain in protection and no or miniscule progress in reducing runoff,” said the report, because farmers plowed over buffer strips and grass waterways at almost the same rate as their neighbors planted them.
“We are fooling ourselves by clinging to the belief that voluntary conservation measures will clean up Iowa’s water,” said EWG. “Instead we need to set standards that restrict the most damaging activities … we should require landowners to meet four basic standards of care.” The four standards are a 50-foot buffer strip, healing or preventing temporary gullies, limiting livestock access to streams, and no spreading of manure on frozen or snow-covered fields.
Iowa has drawn national attention because of the Des Moines Water Works is suing drainage districts in three counties in northwestern Iowa over high nitrate levels in water in the Raccoon River. Excessive nutrients in waterways are a problem in other farm states, said EWG.
Bill Stowe, manager of the Des Moines Water Works, said the EWG findings were upsetting but not surprising. “The public health of over 500,000 central Iowans who rely on the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers for drinking water simply cannot wait for voluntary practices to catch up with the reality of degrading Iowa environmental protection,” said Stowe.