Joshua Haack and his dad, Daryl, check corn on their century farm east of Primghar.
It’s mid-August, a couple of months before harvest time, and the plants are vibrant and green with ears full of yellow kernels.
“I think it looks good," Daryl Hack said. "And it’s end rows."
Iowa leads the country in corn production thanks to fertile soil, but farmers give their crops a boost by adding nitrogen fertilizer. Daryl has been farming for most of his life. For much of that time, he didn’t worry about how much to apply.
“Back in the day, 20 to 30 years ago, you put it on a little extra for insurance," he said. "We weren't hearing that it was leaching out there, that it was going on the river."
But nitrogen is getting into waterways.
A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists says runoff from farms in the Midwest causes up to $2.4 billion in damage to the Gulf of Mexico every year. Iowa faces its own water quality issues. High nitrogen levels threaten drinking water and can cause beaches to close in the summer.
To help fix the problem, state agricultural leaders have urged producers to voluntarily take steps to reduce fertilizer runoff as part of the Nutrient Reduction Strategy.
“Farmers in the past decade have made enormous progress towards those goals in terms of acres with cover crops, putting de-nitrification wetlands on the landscape, improving their nitrogen fertilizer management, but there's still much more work to do,” said Mike Castellano, an Iowa State University agronomist.
Iowa officials say farmers are doing more to address water quality concerns. Before the Nutrient Reduction Strategy, there were only about 10,000 acres of cover crops such as ryegrass which is planted to hold soil and nitrogen in place between growing seasons.
That number jumped to 2.8 million in 2021.
“That’s our goal, is to move everyone lower nitrogen use, but sustainable nitrogen use, per bushel of corn produced,” Castellano said during a summer field day with farmers in O’Brien County.
Castellano helps oversee the Iowa Nitrogen Initiative, a program where producers track fertilizer application and yields to produce the most corn with the least amount of nitrogen.
This season, 270 field trials took place with 72 producers. The goal is 500 a year.
“They care more about their bottom line instead of downstream pollution,” said Chris Jones, a retired University of Iowa researcher. "If we're killing off part of an ocean 1,500 miles away, that's an indicator that maybe what we're doing here isn't the best thing that we could be doing.”
Jones, who also wrote the book The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality, returned to Iowa 20 years ago to work at the Des Moines Waterworks.
“The condition of the water coming into the treatment plant was really quite bad at times. And so that was sort of... the beginning of my feelings about water here in the state of Iowa," he said. "In terms of nitrate, it's some of the worst in the continent. The Raccoon River has very high nitrate concentration, probably the highest nitrate stream of its size in North America.”
Jones says a system that relies on voluntary measures won’t work to reverse the state's water quality problems.
“We have this culture here in Iowa where we sort of pussyfoot around the farmers, and we don't tell them to do or not do something that is, you know, it’s a bad practice," he said.
Jones favors laws and regulation of nitrogen pollution to compel farmers to adopt different practices.
He says Iowa needs diversified crops beyond corn and soybeans, such as grains and vegetables. Before World War II, Iowa was a top producer of oats and apples.
But Jones says he can’t blame farmers who work within a broken system.
“The problem isn't the farmers are evil. The problem is, they're human beings," Jones said. "They're making decisions within a decision framework that many of us would make, given the same set of circumstances. And so, that being the case, we need a different decision framework.”
Joshua and Daryl Haack modified what they do to be part of the solution. They lowered their nitrogen use and said they might do even more after attending the Iowa Nitrogen Initiative field day.
“I had no idea you could get 195 bushels of corn without putting any nitrogen down,” Joshua Haack said.
They planted buffers and plan to potentially install bioreactors — a trench filled with woodchips where bacteria convert nitrate in water to harmless nitrogen gas.
“We try to do the best we can. But we're not to blame for everything that people want to blame us for,” Darryl Haack said with a laugh.
