Storm Lake Times Pilot

How little we have done in Iowa



One of the best things about our purchase of the Storm Lake Pilot-Tribune and Cherokee Chronicle-Times is being reunited with our old buddy Paul Struck, editor of the C-T. We asked the old Beaver, who played with former Chicago Cub Larry Biittner of Pocahontas, if he would favor the Times Pilot with the occasional “Struck Strikes Out” column.

(It just hit me that Paul, 75, must be the dean of the Northwest Iowa sportswriters’ corps — maybe all of Iowa. He’s been swinging away in Sioux City and Cherokee for more than 50 years because he is stubborn. If anyone on the sidelines can prove me wrong, go ahead.)

He countered that the Cherokee paper should publish samples of our 2016 editorials on the Des Moines Water Works lawsuit that won the Pulitzer Prize. I wasn’t certain at first that they should be dredged up. We already spoke our piece.

Then I went back and reread them. It struck me that nothing has changed in seven years but talk.

Nitrate levels are not declining in the Raccoon, Des Moines, Little Sioux, Floyd or Rock rivers. Saylorville Reservoir, from which Des Moines draws drinking water, is routinely threatened by toxic algae blooms fed by phosphorous runoff.

More than a decade after voters approved a fractional increase in the state sales tax for water quality improvement, among other conservation enhancements, the legislature has refused to abide by the amended state constitution by enacting the sales tax increase.

The North Raccoon Watershed Board has been pretty much a bust, bogged down in argument about how to proceed.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources is led by a director who doesn’t think to check her fishing license before catching a fish. She paid the fine.

That’s where we are at the state level.

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.

The late Bill Stowe, then CEO of the Des Moines Water Works, started a conversation in Iowa about how we approach our gentle land. 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.

Serious people are talking about ripping up the Conservation Reserve Program to grow more corn and wheat. (Vilsack is not one of them, thank goodness.)

The great majority of Iowans, farmers and rural residents included, want to engage in the conversation about how conservation can benefit all of us except for the vested interests that control this state.

Industrial ag interests have a grip on our politics and minds. They were willing to spend anything to quash Bill Stowe. It showed us who is actually in control of our government, from the courthouse to the statehouse, and it is not the citizen electors. The courts have consistently denied entreaties for Iowa to enforce the federal Clean Water Act on behalf of our few lakes and many rivers. 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.”

Art Cullen is the publisher and editor of The Storm Lake Times. He won the the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2017 and is the author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.” Cullen can be reached at times@stormlake.com.

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