A Water Crisis Has The ‘Poster Boys’ of Iowa Farming Ready to Talk Regulation

ROCKWELL CITY, Iowa—James Hepp is sick of excuses.

The 36-year-old farmer manages about 1,600 acres of corn, soy and small grains in northern Iowa. He keeps a close eye on his bottom line and says he wants to build a business that his three young children would be foolish not to join. For Hepp, a first-generation farmer, that means doing things differently from his neighbors.

In an effort to preserve soil health, he tills only narrow strips of land, leaving much of his field undisturbed. Hepp also avoids applying nitrogen fertilizer when he’s not growing crops.

At first, Hepp’s approach to farming focused on cutting costs. It let him make fewer passes with the tractor, saving money by using less diesel, herbicides and fertilizer. The benefits for soil and water quality were a bonus.

But after more than a decade of hearing government agencies and ag commodity groups in Iowa urge farmers to fall in line with the state’s voluntary Nutrient Reduction Strategy and adopt conservation practices that could limit the nitrogen and phosphorus runoff fouling waterways, Hepp is fed up with inaction.

“You know, the Nutrient Reduction Strategy has been around for what, 13 years now?” said Hepp, often held up as a role model for his runoff-reducing efforts. “If you’re not doing it now, I don’t know what’s going to make you do it besides regulation.”

Hepp represents one-third of the “Lobe Rangers,” a trio of corn and soy growers in Iowa’s flat and fertile Des Moines Lobe who have taken to social media to highlight the enormous gap between the conservation goals outlined in Iowa’s strategy for nutrient loss and the actual adoption of conservation practices on cropland. Fifth-generation farmers Matthew Bormann and Zack Smith round out the squad.

Bormann, Hepp and Smith are hardly the first Iowans to call for policies that target the environmental footprint of a relatively unregulated industry. Regulation has been a rallying cry in the last year for environmental groups, politicians and citizens who fear the state’s poor water quality could be linked to its rising cancer rates.

But as award-winning farmers and former county Farm Bureau board members who’ve made a living growing thousands of acres of Iowa’s two biggest commodity crops, Bormann, Hepp and Smith represent a different demographic in the reform camp: industry insiders.

In March, the men began posting short videos to Facebook demonstrating regenerative practices at work on their farms and calling for policy interventions to improve water quality. Their posts quickly gained traction on social media feeds across the state.

As Iowa grapples with a worsening clean-water crisis fueled by agricultural pollution, the Lobe Rangers see themselves as proof that regulation won’t herald the downfall of Iowa farmers.

“We’re doing this and it works,” Hepp said. “Like, what do you mean that you can’t afford to do it?”

Iowa Lags on Farm Conservation Progress

Last year, farmers in Iowa grew nearly 3 billion bushels of corn and 600 million bushels of soybeans. That’s enough grain to fill over 7,000 miles of railcars, a train that could stretch from the U.S. East to West coast twice over.

But the large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer that farmers are applying in the state have unwanted consequences, often leaching off fields to fuel algal blooms or unsafe nitrate levels in the state’s waterways before traveling south and harming the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2013, Iowa unveiled its Nutrient Reduction Strategy as a set of guidelines to stem the flow of chemicals from farmland into waterways and public drinking water sources. Since its inception, as in most agricultural states, the strategy has relied strictly on voluntary farm conservation efforts.

State programs and federal grants through the U.S. Department of Agriculture offer financial incentives and technical support for farmers who adopt conservation practices, like planting cover crops or adding buffer strips along waterways on their farms.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and state Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig doubled down on those incentives in a legislative package revealed in early May, which includes an additional $52 million to expand on-farm conservation in central Iowa and $100 million for public water treatment infrastructure.

On his farm in northern Iowa, James Hepp plants cover crops after each harvest. Last year, only 17 percent of Iowa’s farmland was cover cropped, compared to the 60 percent coverage the state estimates it needs to meaningfully reduce nutrient loads in waterways. Credit: Anika Jane Beamer/Inside Climate News

Critics, including the Lobe Rangers, say the favored voluntary approach has done little to improve Iowa’s water quality.

“People want clean water. If that’s the case, we need to have policy that gives us a mathematical chance of that happening,” said Smith, sheltering in his farm shop before a spring storm. “We don’t have anything close to that right now.”

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