Gulf Coast program awards Iowa

• By AMY WOLD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 2, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:00 a.m.

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NEW ORLEANS — Iowa isn’t so far from Louisiana when it comes to water quality, representatives from the agriculture community say.

“We’re all interconnected,” said Bill Northey, Iowa’s Secretary of Agriculture.

Northey, and others from Iowa, were in New Orleans this week to accept an award from the Gulf of Mexico Program for work they’ve done to reduce the amount of nutrients that get into water draining into the Mississippi River.

The Iowa group was recognized for its work in reducing nutrients — primarily nitrogen — that runs off farmland through underground drainage systems.

These “tile drains” make more land farmable, but they contribute about 90 percent of the nitrogen load leaving Iowa for the Mississippi River, said Dean Lemke, with the Iowa Department of Agriculture.

Nutrients from farm and urban sewer systems flow down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico. There, the nutrients feed small organisms that use up oxygen in the lower depths of the Gulf of Mexico, creating an annual summer “dead zone,” also known as hypoxia.

The Iowa partnership used federal funds and voluntary farmer participation to build wetlands at the end points of some tile drainage systems, Lemke said.

The wetlands use the nitrogen and can prevent between 40 and 90 percent of the nitrogen from fertilizer from getting into nearby water bodies and eventually the Mississippi River, he said.

To get that kind of reduction, the wetland needs to be between 0.5 percent and 2 percent of the size of the land being drained into it, Lemke said.

It’s estimated that 75 wetlands created in Iowa would remove 54,000 tons of nitrates from the water drained from 86,000 acres during a 150-year period, he said.

The first wetland in the program was built in 2003, and 72 have either been built or are in the process of being built or designed, Lemke said.

“It’s been popular with Iowa landowners. We have a waiting list of people who are waiting to go if we can find the money,” Lemke said.

Rick Robinson of the Iowa Farm Bureau added that the difference between the number of landowners who want to join the program and the money available is between $25 million and $100 million a year.