Iowans are waking up

A Storm Lake Times Pilot editorial

It isn’t often that over 1,000 Iowans will gather on a summer’s Monday evening to learn about nitrogen, phosphorous and water. Something is in the air. People filled Sheslow Auditorium at Drake University on Aug. 4, and hundreds more watched online while some of our leading environmental scientists described how our water could kill us.

The crowd reviewed the work of 16 scientists commissioned by Polk County to get at the root of surface water pollution in Iowa. Not much was news to anyone who had paid attention over at least the past 20 years: Modern, industrialized agriculture accounts for 80% of the nitrate pollution coursing in our rivers and plaguing our water supplies (and suffocating a swath of the Gulf of Mexico). The scientists declared that the links to chronic illness, including cancer, are irrefutable.

We have reported on this issue as it affects the Raccoon River and Storm Lake since 1990. The Des Moines Water Works in 2015 sued over nitrate pollution of the Raccoon, the principal drinking water source for 500,000 people. A federal district court judge and the Iowa Supreme Court laid the claims aside, saying it is the legislature’s job to regulate, if at all. The legislature has chosen not to regulate.

The public snored.

That was the primary point of the Drake convention. People showed up. They applauded the science. They booed the lame nutrient reduction strategy. They vowed to get to work.

It comes decades late. The public and our politicians slept through the poisoning in our search for limitless corn yield, while rural Iowa was laid asunder through the cancer of consolidation. This happened under Republican and Democratic regimes. The pollution has been getting worse with the hands-off approach of Gov. Reynolds, who is not seeking re-election in 2026.

This summer came a rare lawn-watering ban in Des Moines. That actually got people’s attention and finally prompted some action. They would have brought pitchforks if it hadn’t just rained.

The problem was that the upstream nitrate flush this spring, pent up from years of drought, was so stout that the world’s largest nitrate removal system could not keep up. To conserve water to drink, the sprinklers would have to cease.

Many of us have come to believe that industrialized agriculture plays a role in chronic respiratory, cardiac and cancer issues in Iowa. You can’t just blame it on the beer, as the governor does. People have had enough of the baloney. So they showed up to soak up some facts.

The display of anger over water (and air) pollution should give politicians pause.

Cancer is a visible concern among everyone. Northwest Iowa has the highest rates of prostate and breast cancer, along with the densest concentration of livestock, in the USA. Storm Lake reeked as we stepped outside the Cobblestone Ballroom on Saturday night. Our classmates from St. Mary’s 50 years past could not believe their noses — and they grew up with hogs on the farm! We live in a cloud of it. Our attorney friend from Algona who vacations in Okoboji now tests the water before letting the grandkids go in.

People are getting fed up with it.

It’s an open governor’s race in 2026. The Republican candidates will dutifully offer more of the same from their paymasters in West Des Moines. The probable Democratic nominee, State Auditor Rob Sand, is still trying to find religion on how to think about pollution. He does not want to be perceived as being anti-agriculture. What he fails to understand is that you do not have to pollute to farm. That is how we have been taught to think by the consolidators who bring us the Saturday night stench. Sand has to be able to see the crowd. He knows that people in Decorah, where he grew up, value clean water but vote Republican when Democrats run like sheep.

You can do fine by keeping a reasonable distance from the river banks. Isn’t that fall fertilizer lost to the drainage tile come spring — 30% of it? Is it appropriate to pay pennies on the mile of an anhydrous fish kill down the Nishnabotna? Does anyone pay attention to those manure management plans you are supposed to file? (That person got laid off from the Reynolds DNR.)

There is a gaping political opening if anyone dares to rush through it.

It’s not just about the water. It is about who we have become as Iowans — serfs on our own land in debt to the company store, living by a prescription written on Wall Street. It corrodes our communities. The lights go out in the Early school. Every now and then Iowans wake up to realize that they are being put upon and sold out. This might be one of those pivotal moments. We are optimists in that way.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this editorial appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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