Beyond voluntary: It's time to get serious about clean water in Iowa
Cancer rates are through the roof. Well over half our tested waterways are polluted. Water bills are sky high. Year after year, the data tells a story of a worsening water pollution crisis in Iowa. It is clearer than ever that our foolhardy reliance on voluntary cleanup is poisoning us.
Experts have known for decades that industrial-scale concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are water polluters. Yet over the past 30-plus years, the number of large CAFOs in Iowa has more than quintupled. When Big Ag moved in, corporations ran many family farmers off their land and trapped others in contracts that lock in animal-rearing practices predicated on pollution. Today, Iowa is home to more of these factory farms than any other state — so many thousands of operations that even the state can’t keep track. But the numbers we do have speak volumes.
Operating as sewerless animal cities, factory farms pump unimaginable quantities of waste into our water. A Food & Water Watch analysis of USDA and EPA data found that Iowa’s factory farms produce 108 billion pounds of manure every year — that’s 25 times as much as Iowa’s human residents. Unlike human sewage, barely a fraction of CAFO waste is monitored and none is treated. To make matters worse, factory farms stuff animals with pesticide-heavy diets and strict antibiotics regimens to manage the industry’s inherently high disease risk. And as the saying goes, what goes in must come out. The copious wastewater that flushes out of these facilities is chock full of pharmaceuticals, pathogens, nitrates and pesticides — all known to cause human diseases, including birth defects and cancers.
Iowa’s factory farms and the industrial-scale row crops grown to feed confined animals have contaminated more than 1,000 miles of rivers and streams, polluted over 59,000 acres of lakes, ponds and wetlands, and contributed to a Connecticut-sized dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
And what do we have to show for it? For one, the second highest cancer rate in the nation (with up to 300 cases a year caused by nitrate-polluted drinking water polluted by industrial sources including factory farms). For another, up to $66 million a year in statewide drinking water cleanup costs, including a $10,000-a day cost for nitrate removal in Des Moines drinking water (where residents have seen an 80% increase in water bills over 15 years). Not to mention tens of millions of dollars lost in recreational business. The list goes on.
For years, Iowa’s legislators have allowed factory farms to operate with little to no oversight. In fact, according to an estimate from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, less than 4% of CAFOs even have a water pollution discharge permit.
But it does not have to be this way. It is abundantly clear that our voluntary approach to pollution reduction has failed. Lately, Iowa regulators have done more to enable water pollution than prevent it. The Legislature’s high-profile decisions last year to defund statewide water quality monitoring equipment and complain about a clean water advocate on the University of Iowa faculty who then left underline this fact.
Democrat or Republican, rural or urban, farmer or not, we all drink the water. It’s time to get serious about clean water in Iowa. That means treating factory farming as the polluting industry it is and holding it accountable.
By our estimate, nearly 4,000 Iowa factory farms are operating today without water pollution permits. The Clean Water for Iowa Act would require all factory farms to obtain water pollution permits, finally bringing their regulation in line with that expected of other industrial operations, from coal plants to paper mills. Furthermore, the Clean Water for Iowa Act would finally provide the public with much-needed information about which facilities are polluting and where.
It’s time Iowa moves beyond voluntary half measures and gets serious about clean water — the Clean Water for Iowa Act, introduced Feb. 7, is the legislation to get us there.
Michaelyn Mankel is an Iowa organizer with the national advocacy group Food & Water Watch. She lives in Des Moines.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Hold factory farming accountable for polluting Iowa water
