There’s a city council election in Des Moines soon, and voters have questions about the rivers where the city draws its water supply.
The Des Moines Water Works spent more than $2 million over two years scrubbing high levels of nitrates from the water that goes to more than 500,000 customers.
“The cities are not in the driver’s seat here, they’re being driven,” he says.
Des Moines’ water utility tried to strengthen the federal Clean Water Act by forcing more regulations on farmers, suing drainage districts in three upstream farm counties in a lawsuit that could have changed the face of farming in the upper Midwest.
Ryan says because farm runoff is not regulated, cities have to spend a lot of money cleaning up water.
For that to change, Ryan says, cities are going to have to get creative.
Plus, there’s a lot of misinformation after the lawsuit, which angered a lot of farmers, says Tim Bardole, who farms about 2,000 acres in north-central Iowa’s Greene County and serves on the board of the Iowa Soybean Association.
And they’ve changed how they do things to help address various issues such as planting 1,500 acres of cover crops this year to keep more nitrates in the soil and out of waterways.
“When it comes down it down to it too, we drink water too.” The voluntary measures aren’t good enough for the Des Moines Water Works, which General Manager Bill Stowe says won’t back down.
“But national and state governments themselves.” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue recently signaled the Trump administration wants to eliminate more regulations for farmers, but didn’t specify what those might be.