Iowa’s weather is changing and so is farmland ownership. Society can no longer assume that landowners see or comprehend what is happening with their precious land and with our priceless waters. Government needs to step up enforcement of soil conservation laws, especially with absentee landlords who are not around to see and be responsible for what is happening.
---Duane Sand, Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, Des Moines, Iowa
Frankly, I don’t think our soil erosion problems need to be what they are. Many farmers do well but are not praised for it. On the other hand, the careless ones and those who might be termed outright vandals no longer even get their knuckles rapped. Voluntary conservation works well, but only if it’s proactive. Our compliance laws can still work, too, but they need to be universal—applied to all cropland—and enforced.
---Paul W. Johnson, Farmer and Former Chief, USDA, NRCS, Decorah, Iowa
The Environmental Working Group has a not to be missed report out on the rate of topsoil loss in Iowa, how this rate is accelerated by our current agricultural policy, and how today's farmers who are practicing good conservation are doing so only out of good faith. Our government needs to step up conservation laws which have been erased over the years, especially since it appears that the richest soils of America, those of Iowa the central Great Plains are getting wetter and flooding more frequently due to climate change. We have been blessed with a priceless natural resource, our rich topsoil, which we are taking for granted and treating as a third world factory. Policy is everything when it comes to reversing recent trends of all-out fencerow to fencerow production.
Six million Iowa acres eroded at twice the “sustainable” rate in 2007
Today, the soil erosion problem in Iowa and nearby states is nowhere near the scale of those historic calamities, but the data show that the situation is getting worse. Chronically underfunded voluntary conservation programs are failing to blunt the damage caused by federal policies that push farmers to plant crops fencerow to fencerow. Between 1997 and 2009, the government paid Iowa farmers $2.76 billion to put conservation practices in place. It paid out six times as much — $16.8 billion — in income, production and insurance subsidies that encouraged maximum-intensity planting, not conservation. Across the Corn Belt, the gap was even greater — $7.0 billion for conservation and $51.2 billion for income, production and insurance subsidies.
The $18.9 billion spent to subsidize expansion of the corn ethanol industry, along with misguided federal mandates to produce increasing amounts of ethanol, further increase the pressure to intensify production. ...
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