Around 200 people showed up on James Hepp’s farm near Rockwell City Saturday morning. Some were farmers, milling around equipment designed to minimize tilling and fertilizer. But there were also lawmakers, candidates for office, representatives from Des Moines Water Works and advocates for better water quality in the state.
They came for the Lobe Rangers’ first annual field day.
The nonpartisan nonprofit’s name is a nod to the Des Moines Lobe, a flat, tongue-shaped region in north-central Iowa with some of the world’s most fertile soil. Roughly 80% of the land is used for intensive row-crop agriculture.
The Lobe Rangers’ founders — Hepp, Zack Smith and Matt Bormann — farm in the area and say it’s possible to be profitable while also preventing nutrients from flushing out of fields into waterways.
They’ve transitioned to no-till and strip till, use cover crops and apply fertilizer in season. But they’re frustrated by the lack of adoption by other farmers and say voluntary approaches to conservation are not delivering the scale of change needed to meet the state’s nutrient reduction goals.
Bormann said the public is also starting to lose patience.
“We think regulation is coming, and I think that it's time that we start shaping that ourselves as farmers in our own terms,” Bormann said. “We have science, plenty of it, that says this stuff works, and farmers aren't going to go broke doing it. We as farmers need to set the bar ourselves before somebody else writes the rules for us.”
What is the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy?
In 2013, Iowa set a target of reducing total nitrogen and phosphorus loads by 45% compared to the 1980-1996 baseline period. It’s part of a larger effort to reduce nutrient pollution in the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico.
High levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in waterways contribute to algal blooms, which can suck up oxygen and release toxins harmful to people, pets and wildlife.
Nutrient pollution is also an economic issue. Fish kills and spoiled beach vacations affect the seafood and tourism industries, while elevated nitrate concentrations in drinking water require expensive treatments and upgrades.
The Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, which was updated in 2025, requires large municipal and industrial facilities that treat 1 million gallons of wastewater or more per day to reduce their nutrient loads. The facilities and Iowa Department of Natural Resources negotiate deadlines as permits come up for renewal.
The strategy also outlines voluntary conservation practices to reduce nutrient pollution from “nonpoint sources,” which account for roughly 93% of the total nitrogen in the state’s waterways.
“We are an agriculturally dominated state, and so most of our nitrate that we see in our in our waters is coming from agriculture,” said Matthew Helmers, director of the Iowa Nutrient Research Center at Iowa State University, during the Lobe Rangers event.
Around 85% of Iowa’s land is used for agriculture, and most of it is dedicated to two annual crops: corn and soybeans.
“If we think about our land use 100 years ago, we had 10 million acres of corn, and we had small grains, hay ground, forage ground,” Helmers said. “We had something growing on the land a greater percentage of the year.”
Living roots reduce erosion, support beneficial microbes and absorb excess water and nutrients. But in most corn and soybean fields, the ground is bare after harvest until a crop is planted the next spring.
“We have an annual cropping system that is vulnerable to leaching, specifically during some of those spring periods when there's nothing growing,” Helmers said.
Without roots, nitrate can move with water in the soil into shallow groundwater or field tile drainage and cause problems downstream. Phosphorus, another plant nutrient that can pollute water, typically moves into waterways through soil erosion.
The Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy includes different scenarios to hit its targets through a suite of agricultural practices in fields and along their edges.
“One of them is we do the best job with nitrogen management in our fields, and we have about 60% of all the corn/soybean acres in cover crops,” Helmers said. “And we have about 7.5 million acres treated with wetlands … and about 6 million acres treated by saturated buffers and bioreactors.”
Around 17% of the state’s crop acres were planted with cover crops in 2024, according to the most recent report of conservation practice adoption levels.
Nearly 25,000 acres are treated by saturated buffers, bioreactors and multi-purpose oxbows, and nearly 166,000 acres treated by water quality wetlands, as of 2024.
“We do need to recognize this is a this is a marathon, not a sprint,” Helmers said, adding that certain methods like batch and build can help.
The ‘R-word'
But the Lobe Rangers want to see change happen faster in Iowa.
“One of the downfalls [of the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy], in our opinions, is it relied on voluntary change to happen,” Smith said. “It was a good idea off the bat to give farmers time to adapt, but we're 13 years later and we haven't adapted at a rate where we can expect meaningful results.”
To see improvement in Iowa’s rivers and streams, Smith said the Lobe Rangers want to shape policy, which could include regulations
“We get folks to run for the Legislature that are going to have the 'cojones' to stand up and vote for legislation that actually moves us in a meaningful direction forward,” he said.
Smith said they support funding IWILL, a conservation trust fund approved by voters in 2010, and creating a system of incentives and disincentives. Farmers who opt out of certain conservation practices would “provide the funding for those that do."
The Lobe Rangers said water quality has become a bigger voter issue this year, following two summers with water restrictions in the Des Moines area and growing concerns about Iowa’s rising cancer rates.
“A lot of people don’t like the ‘R-word.' I get it,” Smith said. “But then show me an alternative reality and how we solve this problem without it.”
