On Monday the Iowa Department of Agriculture, Iowa DNR, and the Governor’s Office revealed a new website meant to serve a resource for urban and rural Iowans looking to make a difference in water quality.
CleanWaterIowa.org features different conservation practices, their benefits, and success stories of producers who tried them, with different sections for rural, urban, and industrial practices.
While many producers already employ conservation practices for erosion control, Iowa Ag Secretary Bill Northey says interests are migrating to water quality, as shown in the recent interest in cover crops with the IDALS cost share program. Northey hopes the website will help farmers try new things.
Critics of the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy take issue with the idea of voluntary compliance, and argue a non-regulatory environment does not yield results.
Northey says the website isn’t meant to make much of a case in defense of voluntary conservation practices, except perhaps through its posted success stories, but he does think it will inform the discussion on how to reduce nutrients in Iowa’s waters.
Northey says voluntary compliance can work, and thinks a combination of long- and short-term incentives push producers toward taking conservation seriously.
Most farmers want to do the right thing. We’re here for the long term. We intend often to have our family to farm this farm as well, so we want to control erosion, we want to maintain that productivity, we want our communites that we’re a part of to have clean water as well.
But these practices all have a way of feathering in with production opportunities as well. Cover crops not only is a good conservation practice, it can be a practice that can increrase organic matter on that farm, increase its productivity potentially, it can have weed control impacts, it certainly can save some of the fertilizer,
so it can have some economic and tilth benefits to that soil, so quality benefits that are ver beneficial in addition to the water quality as a driver.
