Protecting water from ag runoff costs Iowa $400 million a year
January 8, 2008

An ISU study suggests that it costs Iowa more than $430 million a year to reduce runoff from farm fields into the state's waterways. The conflict is between the need for fertilizers high in nitrogen and phosphorus (which help many crops, especially corn) and the risk that high levels of nitrates and other fertilizer byproducts create in our drinking water. Runoff can be controlled by a variety of methods, including terracing, buffer strips, and products like turbidity curtains and soil-reinforcement geotextiles. Much of the current spending goes to Conservation Reserve Program payments to keep farmers from planting crops close to waterways, but as the incentives to grow more crops to meet the demand for ethanol and biodiesel increase, those conservation payments may no longer be enough to dissuade farmers from using that land.

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last revised January 2008