The Iowa Legislature faces a deadline this week on a series of bills that seek to clean up the state’s rivers and streams.
Waterways routinely exceed federal safety standards for nitrate, phosphorous and other toxic pollutants. Iowa Senate File 2265, also known as the Clean Water for Iowa Act, would require the state’s 4,000 factory farms to be constantly monitored for pollution. Right now, many are not.
Sen. Art Staed, D-Cedar Rapids, has sponsored a series of other bills that would require ag operators to file manure management plans, restore state funding for water quality monitoring, and prohibit manure application on frozen or porous ground.
“Water quality is poor in the state,” says Staed. “We have all of these impaired waterways. We have high levels of nitrogen in our water. We have e-coli. Beaches are closed. Cities like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids have to filter their water in order to get the nitrates out.”
Large animal confinement operators, known to pollute nearby air and groundwater with manure runoff, say they are operating within federal water safety standards.
Staed attempted to take on Iowa’s polluted waterways last year with a large, comprehensive bill that never made it out of a Republican-led committee. So this year, he broke that big bill down into several smaller ones.
“I decided to pick as many of those that I thought would be not costly to farmers, wouldn’t cost a lot of money for the state, but there actions to take to reduce pollution in the streams and waterways,” says Staed.
Staed adds cleaning up the water would address the state’s spiking cancer rate. Iowa has the second-highest number of reported new cases in the nation. The bills face a deadline later this week for Iowa lawmakers to act.
