Iowa has reeked for several weeks as an armada of honey wagons sprayed their brown bounty on black dirt, followed by the white anhydrous ammonia tanks.
They’re everywhere as I traveled Iowa and southern Minnesota the past month, and the stench is putrid. You could even catch a whiff in Des Moines last Wednesday and Thursday.
It sure must be cheap or farmers are flush with cash. Iowa farmers lose about 30% of the nitrogen they apply to air and water. As a result, the Raccoon River is among the most endangered in America because of nitrate pollution.
Most fertilizer is applied in the fall over fear of a wet spring. Many agronomists caution against fall application because so much of it ends up suffocating the Gulf of Mexico. That message obviously is not sinking in. When the Biden Administration offered a crop insurance spiff if you avoided fall anhydrous, just 57 of these enhanced-subsidy policies were sold.
The production system is just not that interested in the Gulf of Mexico, or that the drinking water source for the Des Moines metro area is rife with nitrate.
Cover crops help hold nitrate (and soil) in the field, but they are considered fanciful or a bother. You have to strain to find them in fields near the Raccoon or Des Moines rivers.
People around the state are gagging over concentrated application of manure that festered in pits. Chicken manure can set nose hairs on fire. Yeah, the smell of manure has always been a feature of rural life but not in these toxic concentrations.
So it is useful that Chris Jones of Iowa City is exploring a run against Republican Mike Naig for Secretary of Agriculture.
Jones probably would lose. Naig is a nice guy who avoids risk and difficult questions, perfectly fit to have his name on gas pumps. His is the reassuring voice telling us that we are making progress on the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico voluntarily, when in fact we are not.
Jones got shoved out of his research job at the University of Iowa for stating the obvious on a state-owned website. He is cantankerous and unmanageable. He tells the truth.
I know him fairly well. I have interviewed him many times as the chief critic of the ag pollution regime. I appeared on stage with him just last week at the Harkin Institute at Drake University to talk about how pollution and rural decay are inextricably linked.
Jones is indelicate but deals in facts, such as we produce enough crap equivalent to 125 million people and spray it everywhere. He wrote a book called "The Swine Republic" full of nuggets like that.
Conventional farmers curse his name like they did Bill Stowe’s, the late CEO of the Des Moines Water Works who sued Buena Vista, Sac and Calhoun counties over nitrate pollution by drainage districts. Stowe lost in court, but was starting to win the argument in public opinion.
Iowans want clean air and water. They voted in 2010 by more than 60% to amend the state constitution so a permanent stream of revenue would flow to natural resource protection and enhancement. The legislature has ignored it for 15 years.
Naig has been able to assure people that things are being done, like building bioreactors along the Raccoon. Nitrate levels are not declining.
Jones is irascible. He is not the reassuring type. He will force an uncomfortable conversation about the way we do things. He calls out political and academic cowardice. That conversation will be welcome in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, where drinking water is imperiled. Large crowds gather when you talk nitrate. Few people in Des Moines knew what nitrate was 30 years ago.
Jones will be portrayed as a bogeyman by the chemical companies and Farm Bureau, just as Stowe was for blurting out the facts: We cut pork and turkey in Storm Lake, where the food pantry is constantly challenged. Something is wrong with that picture.
We are convinced that losing 30% of applied nitrogen is just a cost of doing business. When you are managing more ground than a pharaoh you better get after it in the fall because you can’t swing it all in the spring.
Somebody needs to talk about this stuff even if they are quixotic. Mike Naig will have the Farm Bureau. Chris Jones has three chords and the truth. They will make him out to be a maniac. Who do you think will win? My nose tells me Naig. Jones wins if he can get people to at least think about what their nose tells them.
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