EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Across wide swaths of Iowa and other Corn Belt states, the rich, dark soil that made this region
the nation’s breadbasket is being swept away at rates many times higher than official estimates.

That is the disturbing picture revealed by new techniques that track soil erosion with
unprecedented precision, corroborated by aerial surveys by the Environmental Working Group (EWG)
that produced striking visual evidence of the damage.

In some places, recent storms have triggered soil losses that were 12 times greater than the
federal government’s statewide average for Iowa, stripping up to 64 tons of soil per acre from the
land, according to Iowa State University (ISU) researchers who developed new techniques that allow
them to measure the impact of each deluge. In contrast to the reassuring statewide averages, the
data indicate that farmland in 440 Iowa townships encompassing more than 10 million acres eroded
faster in 2007 than the rate considered sustainable. In 220 townships totaling 6 million acres, the
rate of soil loss was twice the “sustainable” level.

The aerial survey conducted by EWG in the spring of 2010 indicated that the soil erosion and runoff
is likely far worse than even the ISU numbers suggest because researchers’ current models do not
account for the effect of widespread “ephemeral gullies.” In heavy rains, these gullies reappear
rapidly where farmers have tilled and planted over natural depressions in the land, forming
“pipelines” that swiftly carry away all the water the earth cannot absorb.

The ISU data and EWG’s survey reinforce long-standing doubts about the very system used to describe
the so-called “sustainable” level of erosion — how much soil loss the land can tolerate before it
loses its ability to sustain a healthy crop. These “T values” are gauzy estimates at best, and there
is substantial and growing evidence that they greatly overstate the ability of cropland to remain
fertile in the face of the ravages of soil erosion and water runoff, especially at a time when a
warming climate is producing ever more frequent severe storms. For lack of a better alternative,
however, this report’s discussion does use T values as a point of reference.

The runoff from vulnerable farmland not only washes away soil – the fertile legacy of eons of
geological processes – but also carries with it a potent cargo of fertilizers, pesticides and manure
that flows into local creeks and streams and eventually into the Mississippi River. Ultimately it
ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, generating the notorious dead zone ¾ a zone of depleted oxygen that
suffocates almost all marine life where it forms each year.

Gullies cut into crop fields like those in these photos scarred most of the fields EWG surveyed in
May, 2010, visible evidence of serious erosion that is likely far in excess of rates considered
“sustainable.” Water cutting gullies into unprotected fields carries mud, fertilizers, pesticides,
herbicides and sometimes bacteria. As in these photos, many empty directly into streams or ditches,
becoming direct pipelines carrying polluted runoff to waterways. Polluted runoff from crop fields is
the single most important source of water pollution in Iowa and the nation.

The accelerating soil loss is being driven by a combination of federal farm policies that encourage
and subsidize sowing commodity crops on even the most fragile terrain and by intense rainstorms that
are occurring with increasing frequency as Earth’s climate warms. The recent history of severe
springtime flooding across the Midwest is but the most immediate consequence of this trend, but the
impact on the region’s agriculture and environment will be the greater and more lasting disaster.

Meanwhile, efforts to curb soil erosion, many of them launched under a 1985 law that temporarily
produced a 40 percent reduction in erosion and runoff from the most vulnerable cropland, have
faltered badly. The backsliding began in 1996 when Congress made an abortive attempt to phase out
the farm subsidy program, along with its soil conservation requirements. In the end, lawmakers
instead returned to plowing billions into farmers’ hands through ad hoc disaster payments,
restoring the earlier farm subsidy program with a vengeance by 2002.

Although provisions of the 1985 farm bill requiring famers who accept subsidies to implement soil
conservation measures on their most vulnerable cropland remain on the books, official reports and
anecdotal evidence shows that enforcement has waned.

EWG’s findings are an urgent reminder that the Corn Belt’s carpet of immensely fertile soil, a
resource that accumulated over thousands of years before European settlers introduced organized
agriculture, is not inexhaustible. From the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to the barren moonscapes of
today’s Haiti and Madagascar, history is littered with evidence that what nature has provided unwise
practices and policies can rapidly squander.

Today, the soil erosion problem in Iowa and nearby states is nowhere near the scale of those
historic calamities, but the data show that the situation is getting worse. Chronically underfunded
voluntary conservation programs are failing to blunt the damage caused by federal policies that push
farmers to plant crops fence-row to fence-row. Between 1997 and 2009, the government paid Iowa
farmers $2.76 billion to put conservation practices in place. It paid out six times as much ¾ $16.8
billion ¾ in income, production and insurance subsidies that encouraged maximum-intensity planting,
not conservation. Across the Corn Belt, the gap was even greater — $7.0 billion for conservation
and $51.2 billion for income, production and insurance subsidies.

The $18.9 billion dollars spent to subsidize expansion of the corn ethanol industry and misguided
federal mandates to produce more and more corn ethanol further increase the pressure to intensify
production.

To turn this situation around, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) must intensify its annual
inspections to determine whether producers are controlling soil erosion and runoff from their lands
and make full use of its authority to impose graduated penalties on farmers who fail to get into
compliance.

In addition, EWG believes that Congress must:

• Reopen and revise all the legacy soil
  conservation plans approved and applied before July 3, 1996, requiring that they reduce erosion to a
  truly “sustainable” level and prevent ephemeral gully erosion on highly erodible cropland.
• Require treatment and/or prevention of ephemeral gully erosion on all agricultural land — not
  just highly erodible land — owned by producers or landlords receiving income, production, insurance
  or conservation subsidies.
• Require a vegetative buffer zone at least 35 feet wide between
  row crops and waterways.
• Re-attach compliance provisions to all existing or new crop and
  revenue insurance programs to meet conservation compliance standards.
• Ensure that farmers
  who convert native prairie or rangeland to row crops are not eligible to receive income, production,
  insurance or conservation subsidies on those acres.
• Adequately fund the technical staff—out
  of funds provided for programs covered by compliance provisions—needed to develop and implement
  conservation plans and to conduct annual inspections to certify that plans are in place.

LOSING GROUND – FULL REPORT

In April 2010, USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) released data estimating the
rate of soil erosion on agricultural land in the United States.¹ On the surface the data
from the 2007 National Resources Inventory (NRI) were reassuring. Erosion in Iowa averaged
5.2 tons per acre per year, slightly higher than the allegedly “sustainable” rate of 5 tons per acre
per year. Across the entire Corn Belt, erosion averaged only 3.9 tons per acre per year.

But there is compelling evidence that soil erosion and runoff from cropland is far worse than the
NRI estimates suggest. Indeed, it appears that our nation is losing ground in the decades-old fight
to gain control over this most fundamental and damaging environmental problem in agriculture.

Events versus Averages

The Iowa Daily Erosion Project (IDEP), led by Iowa State University scientists working
with a long list of partners, is producing compelling evidence that soil erosion is far worse than
the NRI estimates. Combining information on daily rainfall amounts, soil type, slope, crop rotation
and conservation practices, the project is able to generate, for the first time ever, detailed
estimates of erosion caused by each individual storm that hits Iowa in the course of a
year.² IDEP then estimates minimum, average and maximum rates of soil erosion and runoff
that likely occurred on agricultural land (cropland, pasture, hay fields) in each of 1,579 Iowa’s
townships after each storm

(see sidebar).

The project’s techniques have introduced the most significant new tool for measuring soil erosion
since the NRI was developed in the 1980s. The NRI, which set up a system of collecting data on wind,
water, soil type and land use changes at some 800,000 points across the country, revealed for the
first time that some farmed areas were eroding far more rapidly than others. That allowed
policymakers and program managers to target conservation efforts on the most sensitive areas and
led, for a time, to significant progress in efforts to slow erosion rates.

The new techniques developed by IDEP are an advance of similar importance, yielding dramatic new
insights into the pace and location of severe erosion events. This far more precise information
shows that larger storms can cause serious damage that is largely obscured by the long-term,
statewide averages generated by the NRI. These new data produce a far more detailed picture of the
toll erosion takes on our soil and water down to the level of individual townships and make clear
that farmers and policymakers must do much more to protect agricultural land from this old enemy.

Townships are key components of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), which is regulated by the U.S.
Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management.³ Each township is a square six miles
long by six miles wide, made up of 36 smaller squares, called sections, which are each one square
mile in size. A section encompasses 640 acres and a township encompasses 23,040 acres. An acre is
about the size of a football field. IDEP does not report how many acres in a township are
agricultural lands, but agriculture dominates the Iowa landscape. In 2002, 88 percent of Iowa’s land
was in cropland, pasture or hay. Trees or water covered 9 percent and 3 percent was urban. IDEP does
not report estimates of soil erosion and runoff from predominantly urban townships.⁴

By focusing on individual storms, the IDEP produces much more detailed and accurate estimates of
soil erosion than the statewide average annual estimates produced by the NRI.

The picture that emerges is alarming.

In 2007, the project estimated that storms resulted in rates of soil erosion in some townships
ranging up to more than 64 tons per acre per year on agricultural land. That figure is 12 times
greater than the statewide average annual erosion rate of 5.2 tons per acre per year estimated by
the NRI. The project estimates that agricultural fields in 440 townships encompassing 10.1 million
acres may have suffered erosion at rates greater than the NRI statewide average and that eight
townships encompassing 184,000 acres experienced utterly disastrous average erosion rates
greater than 50 tons per acre (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Millions of acres in Iowa eroded at more than 5 tons per acre ¾ the so-called “sustainable” rate ¾ in 2007.

Put a Box Around 10-pt copy below

The Iowa Daily Erosion Project

The Iowa Daily Erosion Project is a collaboration of scientists at Iowa State University, USDA’s
National Soil Erosion Research Lab, USDA ‘s National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment,
and the University of Iowa (http://wepp.mesonet.agron. iastate.edu/). The
project is designed to produce daily estimates for rainfall, runoff and soil erosion for the State
of Iowa.

The project was developed because important factors that determine rates of erosion and runoff from
agricultural fields, such as soil type, slope steepness and length, crops planted and conservation
practices, vary greatly across the landscape. Moreover, localized heavy rainstorms commonly occur in
Iowa and in other Corn Belt states. As a result, localized soil erosion losses and runoff volumes
can be extreme. Most estimates of soil erosion and runoff, however, are based on rainfall amounts
that are averaged over many years. Such long-term averages miss the effect of the highly variable
and extreme rainfall events that cause the most damage from erosion and runoff in agricultural
watersheds.

The Iowa Daily Erosion Project uses the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model for estimating
soil erosion and runoff from agricultural fields, including cropland planted to row crops or hay and
pasture. Key information regarding topography, soils, crop rotations and management practices are
taken from USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, 1997 National Resources Inventory (NRI).
That information is coupled with rainfall amounts and other weather data provided by NEXRAD
precipitation radar and the Iowa Environmental Mesonet (http://mesonet.agron.iastate. edu/).

The project uses information from 17,848 NRI sample sites in Iowa that include agricultural land.
USDA provides information about NRI sample points within each 36 square mile township, but does not
reveal the precise locations of NRI sample points within those townships. The rainfall data is
provided in 15-minute intervals every day in the Hydrologic Rainfall Analysis Project (HRAP)
projection grid. Each grid cell is about 2.5 miles by 2.5 miles in area.

Because the 6 by 6 mile township grid does not line up precisely with the 2.5 by 25 mile HRAP grid,
the project uses a statistical procedure to estimate the erosion and runoff that likely occurred
during a storm. Each HRAP grid cell is assigned to the township that contains its center point. Then
all of the possible combinations of rainfall amounts and information from NRI points in a township
are modeled in WEPP. The result is a large distribution of possible rates of erosion and runoff
volumes for each township each day. The project reports that average of all those possible erosion
and runoff amounts as well as the maximum and minimum erosion and runoff prediction for each
township each day.

As is the case with all the models currently used in conservation planning or national assessments,
the model results are estimates of the erosion and runoff that likely occurred based on the
combination of rainfall intensity and land characteristics might have occurred on a particular day
and in a particular township. The minimum estimate of erosion and runoff is best thought of as the
best-case scenario—the erosion and runoff resulting from the least amount of rainfall falling on the
least vulnerable or best protected agricultural land in the township. The maximum erosion and runoff
is the worst-case scenario resulting from the most intensive rainfall falling on the most vulnerable
or least protected land in the township. Both minimum and maximum erosion and runoff events likely
occurred somewhere in the township during the same storm. The reported averages give an indication
of the general risk of erosion and runoff across all agricultural land in a township during a
particular storm.

The biggest problem that confronts the Iowa Daily Erosion Project is the lack of current,
comprehensive and site-specific information about the presence or absence of conservation practices
on the Iowa landscape. The lack of such information hampers all efforts to get an accurate and
up-to-date picture of the health of Iowa’s soil, waterways, and watersheds.

Surveys of conservation tillage completed by the Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC),
however suggest that there has been relatively little increase in the percent of crop field on which
farmers practice conservation tillage.⁵ The CTIC survey found that conservation tillage
was used on 37 percent of crop acres in 1998. That percentage had grown to 42 percent in 2008. This
is a welcome, but not a dramatic change from the situation in 1997 – the year used by IDEP to make
its estimates of soil erosion following storms in Iowa.

Statewide erosion averages—by necessity—provide a very poor picture of what is
actually happening across large areas of Iowa or any other state or region. The statewide
average erosion for agricultural land in 2007, according to IDEP data, was only 4.7 tons per
acre—less than the amount reported by the 2007 NRI. The statewide average was low despite the
likelihood that agricultural land in 440 townships encompassing more than10 million acres eroded at
more than the “sustainable” rate, and land in 220 townships encompassing almost 6 million acres
likely eroded at twice the “sustainable” rate

Figure 2: In 2007, actual rates of soil erosion on millions of acres of Iowa agricultural
land likely exceeded the reported statewide average of 5.2 tons of lost soil per acre.

Iowa and its neighboring states experience multiple erosive rainfall events each year. Adding up the
erosion that likely occurred in each storm reveals that erosion on agricultural land frequently
exceeds the “sustainable” level ¾ often by several times ¾ in many townships (Table 1).

Table 1: Soil erosion often exceeds the “sustainable” rate of 5 tons per acre per year.

As Table 1 shows, average soil erosion exceeded the “sustainable” rate in at least some townships
every year except 2006. Agricultural land in six townships (encompassing about 138,000 acres) risked
absolutely disastrous average erosion rates exceeding 100 tons per acre.

Cropland that sheds soil also sheds a great deal of water, often polluted with fertilizers, manure
and pesticides. The volume of polluted water running off agricultural land varies dramatically
depending on the time of year. In 2009 — the wettest year between 2002 and 2009 — runoff from
agricultural land in 1,502 townships (encompassing 34.6 million acres, essentially the entire state)
exceeded 136,000 gallons per acre. Runoff in 956 townships (22.0 million acres) exceeded 271,000
gallons per acre, and in 141 townships (3.2 million acres) it exceeded 543,000 gallons per acre.
Total runoff was greater in 2009 and 2007 than in 2008, the year of devastating floods in eastern
Iowa, which illustrates the importance of the timing and location of storms. In 2006, a dry year,
runoff from agricultural land never exceeded 136,000 gallons.

Over time, almost all agricultural land experiences large amounts of runoff, just as that land
suffers large amounts of erosion. Between 2002 and 2009, for example, runoff from agricultural land
in 1,359 townships (31 million acres) exceeded 543,000 gallons per acre; runoff from agricultural
land in exceeded 1 million gallons per acre in townships encompassing 7.9 million acres.

Put a Box Around 10-pt copy below

Average Can Be Meaningless

From early spring to the beginning of July, intense rainstorms, many of which are localized, cause
extensive rill and gully erosion on Iowa farm fields. Such large erosion events are random. They
don’t happen every year, but when they do, they are significant. Even when experts declare average
soil loss to be less than the soil loss tolerance or “T” value, some places are losing significant
amounts of soil.

Only soils with dense vegetative cover are completely protected from soil erosion, and corn-bean
ground is virtually bare from November through the end of June, when the crop canopy begins to close
up. Even with no-till, terraces, grassed waterways, and all the other best management practices
(BMPs), we can’t escape this fact.

High-intensity rainstorms are predicted to increase in frequency because of climate change. Iowa
must thus confront the potential for even more soil erosion if it is to attempt to reduce flooding
and begin to improve water quality in the state’s lakes and streams.

Laura L. Jackson, Professor of Biology

University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls

Perfect Storms

A severe storm over poorly protected soil can cause permanent and irreversible damage in a single
day — or a few hours. Spring is the most dangerous season for soil erosion and runoff. The danger is
greater if melting snow has saturated the soil, which means more of the rain runs off across the
fields rather than soaking in. No crops are growing to stabilize the soil and take up water. Unless
good soil conservation practices are in place, spring storms can, and often do, result in heavy
runoff accompanied by severe soil erosion.

Over three days in 2007 (May 5-7), such a storm passed over large portions of southwest Iowa.
According to IDEP, average erosion exceeded “sustainable” rates in 198 townships (4.6 million
acres). On May 6, the worst day, 182 townships encompassing 4.2 million acres suffered erosion
exceeding “sustainable” rates for an entire year. In 69 townships (1.6 million acres), soil eroded
at twice the “sustainable” rate, an average of 10 tons per acre. In 14 townships (323,000 acres),
the rate was more than 20 tons per acre (Figure 3).

The estimates of soil erosion averaged over a township can obscure much more extreme damage to the
most vulnerable cropland. The maximum rates of erosion occur on the single most vulnerable and
poorly protected crop field represented by an NRI sample point in the township. The same storm will
cause far less erosion on a pasture or a hayfield than on cropland because the grass cover provides
much more protection than crop residue. Steeply sloping cropland, unprotected by good conservation
practices, will erode terribly. And the amount of polluted runoff will be much greater.

Figure 3: A single 2007 storm likely caused catastrophic soil erosion on the most vulnerable
and poorly protected agricultural land.

The worst-case scenario painted by IDEP for the May 5-7, 2007 storm is truly sobering (Figure 3). In
just three days, the single most vulnerable and poorly protected agricultural field in each of the
665 townships (encompassing 15.3 million acres) may have eroded at rates that exceeded the estimated
annual T value. In 446 of those townships (encompassing 10.3 million acres), that much
erosion occurred on a single day — May 6. That same day, the single most vulnerable agricultural
field in each of 230 townships (encompassing 5.3 million acres) may have eroded at rates above 20
tons per acre. The single most vulnerable and poorly protected field in each of the 10 townships
(encompassing 230,000 acres) may have eroded at a catastrophic rate of 100 tons per acre in a single
day.

IDEP statistical analyses cannot report how representative the single most vulnerable and
unprotected field that suffered the maximum rate of soil erosion is of other fields in each
township. It is possible that there are no other fields in each township that are as vulnerable and
poorly protected. It is also possible that there are many such fields in the township.

What the IDEP results do tell us is that a single storm can cause catastrophic damage on vulnerable
fields that are poorly protected.

Storms that cause soil erosion and polluted runoff that are far above average are frequent events in
Iowa and are becoming more so all across the Corn Belt.⁶

Gullies Not Counted

Soil erosion and runoff is actually worse ¾ likely far worse ¾ than even the alarming IDEP estimates
because the currently available models cannot account for the erosion caused by ephemeral gullies.
Such gullies are called “ephemeral” because tillage temporarily obliterates them, but they quickly
reappear when the next storm occurs.

Surprisingly little research or monitoring has been done to determine how much erosion occurs in
ephemeral gullies. A study simulating erosion in ephemeral gullies reported rates ranging from 2.23
tons to 4.91 tons per acre per year.⁷ A survey conducted by NRCS found that the erosion
in ephemeral gullies ranged from 1.22 tons per acre per year in Michigan to 12.8 tons in
Virginia.⁸ The same report concluded that including ephemeral gully erosion in national
estimates could more the double the amount of soil loss thought to be occurring.

AFTERMATH OF A STORM

On May 27, 2010 EWG staff and a cameraman climbed into a helicopter in Ames, Iowa, to look for signs
of soil erosion and water runoff caused by a rainstorm two days earlier. We didn’t have to fly far
or long to find them. Everywhere we looked, recently planted fields of corn and soybeans were etched
with dark gullies. Indeed, this telltale signature of erosion and runoff was everywhere we looked,
even before we got to our original destination – an area of Marshall County (just 40 miles east of
Ames) where rain had fallen two days earlier.

Figure 4: On May 27, 2010, EWG staff flew over a small area of Marshall County, Iowa looking for
telltale signs of severe erosion two days after rain fell on newly planted crop fields. This photo
shows the locations where video photography documented what we saw.

The May 25 rainstorm was not unusually heavy for Iowa in the spring. According to rainfall data
collected by the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, the rainfall that day ranged from 0.25 to 1.65 inches
in the area surveyed.⁹ A May 12 storm produced an average of 1.45 to 1.93 inches in the
area surveyed and may well have contributed to the obvious signs of erosion, runoff and gullying.
Storms that produce two inches or more of rain, however, are common. Six occurred somewhere in Iowa
in April of 2010, three in May, 14 in June, 15 in July and XX in August. To date, 2010 has proved to
be a very stormy year, with serious consequences for Iowa’s soil and water resources and for its
citizens, whose lives and property have been repeatedly threatened by flooding. But the heaviest
downpours occurred after EWG’s May 27 aerial survey.

What we saw was very disturbing:

Figure 5: Gullies cut into crop fields like those in these photos scarred most of
the fields EWG surveyed, visible evidence of serious erosion that is likely far in excess of rates
considered “sustainable.” Gullies form when rainwater flowing over a field concentrates into narrow
channels that strip away soil and even newly emerged plants. Farmers till up the soil each year to
fill in the gullies, but this practice just makes them more vulnerable to erosion the next spring.

Figure 6: Water cutting gullies into unprotected fields carries mud, fertilizers,
pesticides and sometimes bacteria. As in these photos, many empty directly into streams or ditches,
becoming direct pipelines carrying polluted runoff to waterways. Polluted runoff from crop fields is
the single most important source of water pollution in Iowa and the nation.

Figure 7: These photos show plowing and planting right next to ditches and streams,
greatly increasing the chances that mud, farm chemicals and bacteria will end up in waterways. Crops
and soil carrying fertilizers and chemicals end up falling directly right into the stream. Scenes
like these are troublingly common.

Figure 8: This 2009 photo makes clear that what EWG researchers saw in 2010 was not
unusual. The faint outlines of gullies etched visibly into most crop fields. Also visible are a few
waterways that have been bordered by grasses, a highly effective practice that heals gullies and
protect waterways. Rather than using such methods, however, many farmers fill in these gullies every
year, only to have them erode again during the next storm. The repeated filling and reforming of
gullies sends a steady stream of mud and polluted runoff to streams and rivers.

Put a Box Around 10-pt copy below

One Large “Construction Site”

Every spring in Iowa, we create the equivalent of a 20-million-plus-acre construction site with
soils highly vulnerable to being washed away. It is common to see erosion’s ugly scars on the
state’s farm fields—deep rills and gullies several feet deep after a 3- to 4-inch rain.

Over the last hundred years, Iowa has lost a significant portion of its most important treasure, the
gift of excellent soil—the miracle that sustains us. Four inches of rain over two days is normal for
our region of the world, but severe soil erosion caused by your basic spring showers is not.

We say we love America, but we are eroding its flesh and desecrating its waters by overt and
careless acts. In spite of all the talk about conservation and stewardship, the obvious scenes of
soil loss and evidence of polluted streams speak for themselves. By not doing our best to protect
our soil and water, we in effect dishonor America and those before us who sacrificed so much. As
Wendell Berry asked, to what extent do we defend against foreign enemies a country that we are
ourselves destroying?

I admire farmers who practice long crop rotations, protecting the soils with deep-rooted crops,
using few or no pesticides, and applying all other practices that enhance soil and water quality. If
only our policymakers would structure markets and create public policies that encourage soil and
water stewardship.

Kamyar Enshayan, Director,

Center for Energy & Environmental Education,

University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls

EROSION ADDS UP

Looking storm-by-storm at soil erosion and runoff paints a troubling picture of the health of Iowa’s
soil, watersheds and waterways. The picture becomes even more troubling when one looks
storm-by-storm over a number of years (Figure 9). Agricultural land that escapes damaging erosion
one year may well suffer badly the next. Over time, the amount of land that has managed to dodge
damaging storms gets smaller and smaller. Moreover, many townships appear at risk of severe erosion
year after year. Agricultural land in 128 townships (2.9 million acres) likely suffered erosion of
five tons per acre in four of the eight years from 2002 to 2009. Agricultural land in five townships
(115,000 acres) suffered that rate of erosion in seven of those years.

Figure 9: Most Iowa agricultural land suffered damaging soil erosion at some point between
2002 and 2009.

Total average erosion on agricultural land in 688 townships (15.9 million acres) exceeded
20 tons per acre between 2002 and 2009. Total average erosion exceeded 50 tons per acre in
233 townships (5.4 million acres) and 100 tons per acre in 50 townships (1.2 million acres). Total
average erosion of this magnitude means that highly vulnerable and poorly protected land
must have suffered serious damage, perhaps on more than one occasion, over the eight years.

Put a Box Around 10-pt copy below

A Glass Half Full…or Half Empty

I’ve always anguished over a half-full glass. One day, as I drive across our state, the land looks
good; the next day all I see are imperfections. I honestly think we’re doing better today than we
did when I started farming 35 years ago. The Upper Iowa River is running clearer, gullies are
smaller, and the soil has more crop residue left on it at the end of the year. Most farmers don’t
plow as close to their streams as they once did, and it’s not unusual to see well-positioned
vegetative strips on contoured hillsides. Some farmers clearly know how to farm well and have the
tools to do so.

But the age-old problem of poor farming persists. Drive down any back road in Iowa today and chances
are good that within a few miles you’ll see some of the finest conservation and then some of the
worst.

With the intense rainstorms that have hit our state over the last couple of years, I’m convinced
that we’re getting more careless, assuming always that we’ll have an average or better than average
spring. Then, wham! We’re hit with a gully-washer, and we all wring our hands and say it was
nature’s fault, not ours. In other words, we are conservation planning for averages, not extremes.
But nature doesn’t seem to work that way. We need to rethink and upgrade our standards.

In recent years, on large sloping fields, we’re seeing more and more black stripes where there
should be grassed waterways. Those stripes represent plowed-in gullies. Because we’re usually more
concerned about sheet and rill erosion, “waterway gullies” are often seen as a normal cost of doing
business.

One of the saddest sights I’ve seen was during springtime in southeastern Iowa a couple years ago.
Field after field had dozers working up and down hills to fill in the deep gullies formed by the
unusually hard spring rains. Last year, I drove through the same area and saw precious few
well-constructed waterways. It’s as if the farmers have decided that their one-in-a-hundred-year
flood was past and they don’t have to worry for another 99 years.

Frankly, I don’t think our soil erosion problems need to be what they are. Many farmers do well,
but are not praised for it. On the other hand, the careless ones and those who might be termed
outright vandals no longer even get their knuckles rapped. Voluntary conservation works well, but
only if it’s proactive. Our compliance laws can still work, too, but they need to be
universal—applied to all cropland—and enforced.

Paul W. Johnson, Farmer and Former Chief,

U.S. Department of Agriculture,

Natural Resources Conservation Service,

Decorah, Iowa

EROSION’S LONG, DESTRUCTIVE TRAIN

The gullies and unprotected stream banks captured by EWG’s aerial survey are the beginnings of a
long train of polluted water and degraded soils that stretches from Minnesota to the dead zone in
the Gulf of Mexico.

Polluted Runoff

The sheer amount of runoff can be enormous. A half inch of water running off a 40-acre crop field —
small by Iowa standards — amounts to 543,000 gallons, almost enough to fill an Olympic-sized pool
(660,000 gallons). The May 25 storm produced runoff ranging up to 10,500 gallons per acre in the
area EWG surveyed. The more intense May 12 storm produced up to 19,800 gallons per acre, and
downpours often result in far larger volumes.

Gullies like those observed in Marshall County are pipelines that also carry mud, fertilizers,
pesticides, manure — essentially anything that is applied to a crop field — into streams.

The pipeline is especially direct when a gully runs right into a stream or ditch, as was often the
case on the fields EWG surveyed. The NRCS estimates that 50-to-90 percent of the soil in such
gullies ends up in the stream.¹⁰ The amounts can be huge. A gully 3 inches deep, 2 feet
wide and 100 yards long represents 6.8 tons of eroded soil, more than the load of a typical
single-axle dump truck.

Farmers routinely fill in gullies in order to smooth out their fields and boost their plantable
acreage. This keeps supplying more and more soil to the gully — soil that ends up in the stream when
the next storm hits. Cumulative soil losses increase as gullies are refilled and eroded over and
over again, potentially making the total lost each year three- to-six times greater.¹¹

This sediment — mud — is itself a pollutant, as well as a carrier of other contaminants. Muddy water
degrades fish habitat and clogs water treatment plants. Sediment is the most widespread pollutant
damaging rivers and streams, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and
agriculture is the primary source of that sediment.¹²

The water and mud running off of crop fields carry with them a potent stew of pesticides,
fertilizers, manure, bacteria and other pollutants.

According to the Iowa Policy Project Iowa farmers apply 1.7 billion pounds of nitrogen and 635
million pounds of phosphorus to corn and soybean fields.¹³ USDA’s National Agricultural
Statistics Service (NASS) reported that Iowa farmers in 2005¹⁴ ¾ the latest date for
which data are available ¾ used 14 different herbicides, including 2,4-D, acetochlor, atrazine,
dicamba and glyphosate. Iowa produces about 286 million tons of manure each year, and most of that
ends up on crop fields.¹⁵

Between April and November 2008, an interdisciplinary team at Iowa State University studying runoff
from small watersheds measured cumulative sediment loads of 10.8 tons per acre and phosphorus losses
of 30 pounds per acre.¹⁶

This brew of algae, fertilizers, manure, pesticides, bacteria and mud does serious harm to streams,
lakes and rivers. The organic matter in rich topsoil, along with the nitrogen and phosphorus in
fertilizers, spawns noxious algal blooms downstream and damages fisheries. The algal blooms kill
fish by reducing the amount of oxygen in the water. Outbreaks of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria),
which release chemicals that are toxic to people and animals, are particularly
harmful.^17&18 Fields treated with manure commonly shed E. coli, a type of
bacteria that is used to indicate fecal contamination. EPA guidelines consider water to be unsafe
for swimming if there are more than 126 “colony forming units” or “cells” of E. coli in 100
milliliters (ml) of water.¹⁹ Agricultural runoff often contains much higher numbers of
E. coli. One study measured 86,645 cells per 100 ml in water running off a crop field in
Iowa.²⁰

Agricultural runoff is a major contributor to the poor scores Iowa’s streams and rivers get in a
water quality index maintained by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. In 10 years of
monitoring at 90 sites around the state, no site earned an excellent water quality rating, and only
two were ranked good. Seventeen were rated fair, 67 poor and 4 very poor.²¹

Nationwide, the impact is staggering. A small sample of documented problems in which agriculture is
thought to play an important — often the most important — role includes:

• 100 percent
  increase in drinking water violations because of nitrate contamination between 1998 and
  2008.²²
• nitrate contamination in 72 percent of 2,100 private wells sampled by
  the U.S. Geological Survey between 1991 and 2004.²³
• 104,321 miles of rivers and
  streams rated as impaired.²⁴
• 1,579,540 acres of impaired lakes, reservoirs and
  ponds. ²⁵
• 2,885 square miles of impaired bays and estuaries.²⁶
• 383,822 acres of impaired wetlands.²⁷

The damage continues downstream to
the Gulf of Mexico contributing to the largest dead zone in U.S. coastal waters and the second
largest in the world.²⁸ The Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task
Force set a goal of reducing the size of the dead zone to less than 1,900 square miles. The dead
zone has been larger than that every year since 1990, except for 2000. The five-year average
(2003-2007) size of the dead zone was 5,600 square miles, more than twice the goal.²⁹

In 2010 the dead zone swelled to 7,722 square miles, about the size of New Jersey.³⁰

Put a Box Around 10-pt copy below

Do Farmers and Landowners Really See What Is Happening?

Iowa is getting more precipitation, more frequent rains, and heavier rainfalls then when I was a
farm boy in the 1950s and 1960s. Even then I knew if we tilled through a swale that should have been
kept in sod we would watch that soil wash away the rest of the year. It was very predictable then
that concentrated runoff would carry the soil downstream, and it is even more predictable with the
weather we have now. Some of the worst soil erosion now comes from heavy rains in late winter after
freeze-thaw cycles have loosened the soil.

Each spring too many farmers still use their tillage equipment to fill in ephemeral gullies so they
can plant through them another year. I wonder if the landowners are not watching, don’t understand,
or just don’t care. Most of Iowa’s farmland is rented; about half was inherited or purchased for
investment; and about one-third of landlords live out of state or far away from the farm.

Iowa’s weather is changing and so is farmland ownership. Society can no longer assume that
landowners see or comprehend what is happening with their precious land and with our priceless
waters. Government needs to step up enforcement of soil conservation laws, especially with absentee
landlords who are not around to see and be responsible for what is happening.

Duane Sand

Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation

Des Moines, Iowa

“Sustainable” Soil Erosion

Conventional wisdom holds that there is some rate of soil erosion that can be tolerated before the
productivity of the soil is damaged. This so-called “Soil Loss Tolerance Level” or “T value” is
expressed as a number from one to five, representing an estimate of how many tons of soil can be
lost per acre in a year without diminishing the land’s productivity. The rate of reduction in soil
depth reflected by the T value supposedly matches the offsetting growth in soil depth through
natural processes of soil formation.

NRCS establishes T values based on information from soil surveys. T values are higher, meaning more
soil erosion can be tolerated, on deeper soils. In Iowa, T values range from 1 to 5 tons per acre
per year. About 70 percent of Iowa soils have a T value of 5 tons. Less than 1 percent are assigned
T values of less than 2 tons per acre per year (Figure 10).

Figure 10: Most Iowa Soils Have T Values of 5 Tons Per Acre Per Year

However, the very notion of tolerable rates of soil erosion has been seriously questioned for
decades. In 1987, retired soil conservation specialist L. C. Johnson, formerly with the USDA’s
Cooperative Extension Service, wrote in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation: “The concept of
tolerable soil loss, as now applied in soil conservation programs, does not serve the long-term
interest of mankind in assuring the indefinite productive capability of cropland. Why? Because soil
loss tolerances — T values — presently assigned to cropland soils are based on faulty premises
concerning rates of topsoil development and mineral weathering processes.”³¹

How to put specific values on tolerable rates of soil erosion has been even more hotly debated, and
today most scientists have concluded that current T values far exceed actual soil formation rates.
In a 1982 paper published in an American Society of Agronomy publication, T. J. Logan estimated that
most soil formation occurs at rates of less than 0.2 tons per acre per year.³² A T value
of 5 tons per acre per year is 25 times greater than that.

Moreover, T values say nothing about the impact of soil erosion on water pollution and other
environmental consequences. Five tons of soil would fall just short of filling the bed of a single
axle dump truck. A 160-acre crop field losing soil at far less than 5 tons per acre can deliver
large amounts of sediment — mud that used to be soil and that smothers aquatic life — to streams,
lakes and rivers. Attached to the mud particles are many of the chemicals commonly applied each year
to crop fields. And T values tell us nothing at all about the large volumes of polluted water
running off crop fields.

T values, unfortunately, are the only commonly used standards available for soil erosion
calculations, so EWG uses them in this report. We present most of the data in relation to the most
common T value applied to Iowa soils — 5 tons per acre per year — despite convincing evidence that
this standard does not protect the long-term health of soils or of lakes, streams and rivers.

Our detailed analyses of soil erosion reveal that, far too often, soil is likely eroding at rates
much greater than five tons per acre — the allegedly “sustainable” rate for most Iowa soils.

FOOLING OURSELVES

We are fooling ourselves if we let the superficially reassuring national, regional, or statewide
averages of soil erosion obscure the real damage that is occurring on our agricultural land.
Averaging soil erosion over states, regions or the nation obscures more than it reveals because
erosion and polluted runoff do not occur “on average.” They occur when it rains. How much rain
falls, how fast it falls, how wet the soil was before it started raining, how steeply the field
slopes, how prone it is to gullies, how much the soil is covered by a growing crop or crop residue
and how well the field and adjacent streams are protected by conservation practices – all these
factors determine how much damage is done by any one storm.

IDEP estimates of soil erosion occurring after each storm clearly demonstrate the danger of looking
to statewide, regional or national average annual estimates as measures of how well the soil is
protected from erosion and our streams and lakes from pollution. There is every reason expect that
applying the Iowa project’s methods to other states would reveal the same disturbing picture.

These new data produce a far more detailed picture of the toll that erosion takes on our soil and
water and make it clear that farmers and policy makers must do much more to protect agricultural
land from this old enemy.

SIMPLE PRACTICES… BIG IMPROVEMENT

The destruction year-after-year on poorly protected land is made more intolerable because simple
conservation practices would make a big difference. Perhaps the most simple, but highly effective
practice is to place strips of grass or trees strategically in or at the edge of crop fields. Grass
strips are called filter strips because they filter out sediment and pollutants running off the edge
of the field. Strips of grass or trees planted next to a stream are called riparian buffers.
Riparian buffers are a last line of defense—filtering runoff water just before it enters a stream or
ditch. Other types of strips can be planted within a crop field. Contour strips are planted, as the
name implies, along the contours of a sloping field. Contour strips slow down and reduce the amount
of runoff and also filter mud and pollutants out of the water as it flows across. Vegetative
barriers are very narrow strips of stiff-stemmed vegetation planted across a sloping field that slow
the water running down slope, allowing mud and other pollutants to settle out. All of these
practices help reduce soil erosion, polluted runoff and gully erosion.

Grass waterways are specifically designed to prevent ephemeral gullies from forming. As the name
implies, these strips of grass are planted along the spots in a crop field where water tends to
collect and begin flowing downhill in a concentrated channel. Planting grass where those channels
tend to form stops the water from cutting a gully and helps filter out pollutants.

Figure 11: Strategically placed strips of grass or trees can dramatically reduce
soil erosion and polluted runoff from agricultural fields.

These simple practices can be highly effective. A review of published studies found that properly
designed and placed buffers reduce the speed and volume of runoff and trap, assimilate or transform
pollutants that would otherwise end up in streams, lakes and rivers.³³ The review found
that buffers trapped:

• 41-to-100 percent of the sediment
• 9-to-100 percent of the
  runoff water,
• 27–to-96 percent of the phosphorus, and
• 7-to-100 percent of the
  nitrate.

A project currently underway in Iowa provides additional, compelling and very
encouraging evidence that small amounts of cropland devoted to strategically placed strips would
make a big difference.³⁴ The project puts 10 percent of the cropland in a small watershed
into strategically placed grass strips and compares the amount of runoff water, sediment, phosphorus
and nitrogen coming off the stripped fields to the amount coming off corn and soybean fields without
strips.

Two different arrangements of strips are being tested. One places 10 percent of the cropland into a
grass strip placed at the bottom of sloping fields. The second puts 10 percent of the cropland into
contour grass strips.

The first two years of results were stunning.

In first year of the project (2008), rainfall was more than three times the normal amount, and Iowa
suffered devastating floods, with 85 of Iowa’s 99 counties declared disaster areas.³⁵ But
even in such a dangerous year, the strips provided an encouraging amount of protection:

• strips at the bottom of sloping fields reduced runoff by 64 percent, sediment by 63 percent,
  total phosphorus by 93 percent and total nitrogen by 90 percent.
• contour strips reduced
  runoff by 20 percent, sediment by 40 percent, total phosphorus by 90 percent and total nitrogen by
  85 percent.

In the second year (2009), rainfall was about normal. That year:

• strips at the bottom of sloping fields reduced runoff by 69 percent, sediment by 97 percent,
  total phosphorus by 94 percent and total nitrogen by 92 percent.
• contour strips reduced
  runoff by 45 percent, sediment by 96 percent, total phosphorus by 93 percent and total nitrogen by
  85 percent.

Grass or forest strips planted along stream banks have been shown to not only
filter out pollutants but also reduce pollution caused by collapse or erosion of the stream bank
itself. A Minnesota study found that slumping stream banks contributed 31-to-44 percent of total
sediment dissolved in the Blue Earth River in Minnesota.³⁶ Two studies of Walnut Creek in
Iowa found that eroding stream banks contributed 50-to-80 percent of the sediment
load.^37&38

A long-term project in Iowa’s Bear Creek found that stream banks bordered by row crops — a common
sight — suffered the most stream bank erosion and total soil loss. Buffering the stream banks with
strips of grass and/or trees cut stream bank erosion by 80 percent.³⁹

Reducing the number of times a crop field is tilled and leaving more crop residue on the soil has
been promoted for decades. An exhaustive review of the peer-reviewed scientific literature,
completed in 2006, found that no-till practices that leave the maximum amount of residue on the
field can reduce erosion by as much as 100 percent and runoff by as much as 99 percent, depending on
the site and the amount of soil covered by residue.⁴⁰

The erosion and runoff problem is complicated in large areas of Iowa and the Corn Belt where miles
and miles of pipes, generally called “tiles,” are buried three or four feet below the soil surface.
These tiles drain water from the soil and send it to larger and larger pipes that eventually outlet
to surface water in a stream or ditch. Tile drainage has turned millions of acres of poorly drained
soil into some of the most productive corn and soybean growing land in the world, but it
short-circuits the normal filtering process that occurs when water percolates through the soil. As a
result, the water can carry off very large amounts of pollutants, including fertilizers, pesticides
and bacteria.⁴¹

Most important, tile drains can defeat some of the pollutant filtering benefits of buffers by
sending runoff water beneath, rather than over and through the strips.⁴² The problems
caused by tile drainage have received a great deal of well-deserved attention, particularly in
regard to the delivery of nitrogen that contributes to the dead zone in the Gulf of
Mexico.⁴³

Sometimes lost in a conversation that has focused so intently on the special problems of tile
drainage is the still profound role that surface runoff and erosion play in degrading streams,
lakes, and rivers in the Corn Belt. Water that falls on cropland has only two places to go. It can
percolate into the soil or run over the soil surface. In big storms that produce intense rainfall
much or most of the rainfall flows over the soil, even on cropland underlain with tile drainage
systems. And it is such intense storms that seriously erode soil, deliver huge volumes of polluted
runoff to our lakes, streams, and rivers, and cause lasting damage to agricultural watersheds.

Unprotected cropland and unbuffered streams deliver a one-two punch to the soil, to watersheds and
waterways. The scientific literature and practical experience make it clear that simple, sound and
highly effective practices are available today that would make a big difference in gaining ground in
the fight to reduce soil erosion, polluted runoff and watershed degradation.

The problem is not primarily a technical one. It is a problem of poor policy and institutional
inertia.

Put a Box Around 10-pt copy below

Filter Strips for Clean Water and Wildlife

Today’s farming practices have helped reduce soil erosion with tillage practices that leave more
cover on large, modern-day crop fields. In the first half of the 1900s, every farmer had livestock
that required pastures, hayland, and fences around all fields. These fences acted like terraces, and
the forage crops helped hold the water on the land. Now, fences and small fields are obsolete; large
fields are the norm, creating serious soil erosion possibilities.

What can we as farmers do about lessening this possible catastrophe? There are a number of
appropriate conservation practices that we can use, but filter strips along waterways, whether big
or small, are absolutely essential, in my mind. Such strips are a wonderful way to control the speed
of water as it leaves a field, and the water is filtered before it enters our creeks and larger
waterways. These grassy strips are also very advantageous for wildlife, which is searching for just
such a place to live and rear its young. It is critical that we maintain and increase the number of
these filter strips in our rural areas, and it is also critical that our federal and state
governmental agencies make it economically feasible for farmers and others who own the affected
agricultural properties to use the practice.

Ted Schutte, Sibley, Iowa Farmer

MAKING IT RIGHT

In 1997, after a decade of historic progress cutting soil erosion and polluted runoff from farmers’
fields, things were looking up for America’s soil, streams, lakes and rivers.

That historic achievement was driven by a 1985 federal law that required farmers to put conservation
practices in place on their most vulnerable cropland in return for the billions of dollars of income
and insurance subsidies they were getting from taxpayers. The “Highly Erodible Land Conservation”
provisions of the 1985 Food Security Act required farmers to fully implement an approved soil
conservation plan by 1995 on cropland that was determined to be “highly erodible.” USDA’s Economic
Research Service (ERS) completed a comprehensive evaluation of the effect of those so-called
conservation compliance provisions in 2004. ERS concluded that conservation compliance reduced soil
erosion on highly erodible cropland by 331 million tons a year ¾ a 40 percent reduction between 1982
and 1997.⁴⁴

Unfortunately, these gains were short-lived. Enforcement of conservation requirements weakened and
in 1996 went off the rails altogether when Congress made an abortive push to phase out farm
subsidies — and with them the conservation requirements. The phase-out of farm subsidies turned out
to be a mirage, and Congress immediately returned to its old habits — plowing billions into farmers’
hands through ad hoc disaster payments and bringing all the farm subsidies back with a vengeance in
the 2002 farm bill.

The only thing that turned out to be real was the phase-out of enforcement. The result has been a
decade of lost progress and growing problems.

Driving Fence-row to Fence-Row Production… Again

From 1997 to 2009 the federal government paid out $51.2 billion in income, production and insurance
subsidies to farmers in the five Corn Belt states. Iowa alone got $16.8 billion.⁴⁵

On top of that, taxpayers shelled out another $18.9 billion dollars to subsidize expansion of the
corn ethanol industry over the same period.⁴⁶ And in 2007 Congress went even further,
passing a misguided energy bill that in effect mandates production of more and more corn ethanol —
topping out at 15 billion gallons a year by 2022 — more than tripling the amount produced in 2006.

Federal policy now is driving fence-row-to-fence-row farming again — just as it did in the 1970s —
with the same perverse incentives that the 1985 conservation compliance law sought to blunt. Those
incentives are even more dangerous now as damaging storms become more and more frequent in the Corn
Belt.

It doesn’t help that most of Iowa’s cropland is farmed by people who don’t own it. As renters, they
have less ability to add conservation practices to land they don’t own and less reason to care about
the long-term health of the land. In 2009, about 53 percent of Iowa’s cropland was rented and the
percentage is even higher in some other Corn Belt states. Out-of-state ownership has increased from
6 percent in 1982 to 21 percent in 2007. Almost half (48 percent) of farmland in Iowa is operated by
only 20 percent of the all the farmers in Iowa, and between 50 and 99 percent of that land is rented
each year.⁴⁷ Moreover, in 2009 Iowa farmers paid about $2.5 billion to rent 13 million
acres of cropland.⁴⁸ This means that most of the cropland is farmed by people who don’t
own it. They rent it instead, often from out-of-state owners, and must push the land as hard as they
can to make money in the face of escalating rental rates.

A Bountiful Harvest of Crops and Cash

If the goal of federal farm policy since 1997 has been to extract every last bushel from every acre,
then it has succeeded. Iowa’s corn production increased from 1.66 billion bushels to 2.44 billion
bushels in 2009 — 47 percent. In the Corn Belt as a whole, corn production grew by 40 percent.

For farmers, it has been a bountiful harvest — of crops and cash. Farm household income has been
above average U.S. household income every year since 1996. The five best years ever for farm income
have all come since 2003.⁴⁹

It has also been a bountiful harvest of taxpayers’ cash, with most of it going to farm households
that are doing far better than the average American family. The average household income of farms
that received $30,000 or more in government payments in 2008 was above $210,000 — more than three
times the average of all households ($68,424). Farms with household incomes of $110,000 received
between $10,000 and $29,999 on average in government payments.⁵⁰

Voluntary Programs Plowed Under

Meanwhile, a few chronically underfunded conservation programs are inadequate to blunt the damage
caused by federal policies that push farmers to plant their crops fence-row to fence-row. Between
1997 and 2009, the government paid Iowa farmers $2.76 billion to put conservation practices in
place. It paid out six times as much — $16.8 billion — in income, production and insurance
subsidies that encouraged maximum intensity planting, not conservation. Across the Corn Belt, the
gap was even greater — $7.0 billion for conservation and $51.2 billion for income, production and
insurance subsidies.⁵¹

In 2008 alone, the two most important programs — the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and the
Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) — spent $208.8 million and $19.6 million in Iowa to
help farmers implement good conservation practices. They got 4.5 times more ¾ $1.03 billion in
subsidies. The same imbalance holds true across the Corn Belt. The region’s farmers got $3.1 billion
in subsidies in 2008 — 5.3 times as much as the $522.7 million in CRP assistance and the $69.6
million in EQIP payments.⁵²

Congressional promises to increase funding for conservation have never been kept. These programs
have been funded below the authorized levels every year since 2002. From 2002 to 2010, Congress fell
$2.55 billion short of the conservation commitments made in the 2002 and 2008 Farm Bills. If funding
cuts planned for 2011 go through, the appropriations will be more than $1 billion
short.⁵³

Not coincidentally, there have been significant cuts in the NRCS staff that provides the technical
expertise needed to produce effective conservation plans and ensure that the prescribed practices
are properly implemented and maintained. Agency staffing declined by 8 percent between 1995 and 2009
despite a dramatic increase in the number, size and complexity of programs.⁵⁴

Back to Basics

Voluntary programs and technical help from government technicians and scientists cannot hold soil
and water together in the face of the pressure to push the land harder and harder. The pressure for
all-out production is intensified by the profound changes in land ownership. Meanwhile conservation
programs are being overwhelmed by misguided farm and biofuel policies that magnify the perverse
incentives of a marketplace that turns a blind eye toward soil degradation and water pollution.

It is time to make sure that the most basic, simple and traditional conservation practices that hold
our soil and watersheds together are in place everywhere they are needed. Science tells us that such
practices would result in a big improvement in protection of our environment and in sustaining
agricultural production in an increasingly dangerous climate. These conventional practices will not
solve all the problems we confront, but they will go a long way to building the foundation on which
more targeted efforts can be placed.

It is also time to go back to what works—requiring farmers to protect soil and water in return for
the billions in income, production and insurance subsidies that taxpayers put up each year. It was
good policy in 1985 and it is even more so now.

The first step is to get back to full enforcement of the law. NRCS must intensify its annual
inspections to determine whether farmers are controlling soil erosion and runoff, and the Farm
Service Agency (FSA) must make full use of its authority to impose graduated penalties on farmers
and landlords who fail to comply with conservation requirements.

Figure 12: Both of these gullied fields are designated as “highly erodible
cropland” and by law should have conservation practices in place to reduce soil erosion.

But more needs to be done. It has been 20 years since farmers were first asked to write conservation
plans. It is only reasonable that they now be asked to meet today’s challenges in return for a
continuing flow of income, production and insurance subsidies. Therefore, the Environmental Working
Group calls on Congress to:

• Reopen and revise all legacy soil conservation plans (those
  approved and implemented before July 3, 1996). Practices prescribed in the revised plans must reduce
  soil erosion to the land’s T value and prevent ephemeral gully erosion on highly erodible
  cropland.
• Require treatment and/or prevention of ephemeral gully erosion on all
  agricultural land — not just highly erodible land — owned by producers or landlords receiving
  income, production, insurance and conservation subsidies.
• Require a vegetative buffer at
  least 35 feet wide between row crops and waterways.
• Reattach conservation compliance
  requirements to all existing and new crop and revenue insurance programs.
• Ensure that
  producers who convert native prairie or rangeland to row crops do not receive income, production,
  insurance or conservation subsidies on those acres.
• Use a portion of the funding provided
  for income, production, insurance and conservation programs to pay for the technical staff needed to
  develop and implement conservation plans and to complete annual inspections to certify that plans
  are in place.

Put a Box Around 10-pt copy below

Enforcement of Conservation Compliance Is Critical

To be eligible for government farm payments, the 1985 farm bill required all producers with highly
erodible land to have a conservation plan. It further required farmers to remain in compliance with
those plans. Farmers found to be out of compliance could not receive U.S. Department of Agriculture
program payments.

At that time, I served as a county commissioner and as a state soil conservation commissioner.
Farmers in the early years of the law really did follow their farm plans and were in compliance. In
1996 a new farm bill was enacted called Freedom to Farm. Compliance has been downhill ever since
then. Farmers have not followed their conservation plans, and each year we see many producers out of
compliance. Fall cultivation has been on the increase. In my area of southwestern Iowa, we have
steep slopes and highly erodible soils. Big machinery is used to plant in soils with little or no
surface residue and multiple end rows; plus, many farmers have eliminated contour practices. This is
a formula for severe soil erosion. Heavy rain prior to closure of the corn and soybean crop canopy
is when we see unbelievable soil loss. My guess is that more than 50 percent of the farmers in our
area are out of compliance, and very few of them are ever penalized.

Soil erosion can be held to a minimum with the use of terraces, no-till planting, the elimination of
end rows, and use of filter strips and field borders. Heavy erosion not only moves soil, but reduces
soil fertility and organic matter. And with soil erosion comes increased pollution of our streams
and lakes.

I think soil erosion in the Corn Belt is the worst I have ever observed. Our present cropping
methods used to grow corn and soybeans are not sustainable or environmentally friendly.

Aldo Leopold provided a blue print for the conservation of our land. In his essays in A Sand
County Almanac, he eloquently commented on land as a community, not as a commodity. I fear
today we do treat land as a commodity, when we should view it as a community of people living in
harmony with nature.

Dave Williams, Villisca, Iowa Farmer¾active in the work of
the Iowa Environmental Council and the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

¹⁸ Heartland Regional Water Coordination Initiative. 2006. Agricultural Nitrogen
Management for Water Quality Protection in the Midwest. University of Nebraska.
http://www.ksre.ksu.edu/waterquality/nitrogen pub.pdf

¹⁹ Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Beach Monitoring: http://www
.igsb.uiowa.edu/wqm/activities/beach/FAQ.htm

²⁰ Tomer. M.D., C.G. Wilson, T.B. Moorman, K.J. Cole, D. Heer and T.M. Isenhart. 2010.
Source-Pathway Separation of Multiple Contaminants during a Rainfall-Runoff Event in an Artificially
Drained Agricultural Watershed. Journal of Environmental Quality 39:882-895.

²¹ Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Watershed Monitoring and Assessment. Water
Quality Index. http://www.igsb.uiowa.
edu/wqm/wqi/wqi.asp

²² State-EPA Nutrient Innovations Task Group. 2009. An Urgent Call to Action. http://water.epa.gov/
scitech/swguidance/waterquality/standards/criteria/aqlife/pollutants/
nutrient/upload/2009_08_27_criteria_nutrient_nitgreport.pdf

²³ State-EPA Nutrient Innovations Task Group. 2009. An Urgent Call to Action. http://water.epa.gov/
scitech/swguidance/waterquality/standards/criteria/aqlife/pollutants/
nutrient/upload/2009_08_27_criteria_nutrient_nitgreport.pdf

²⁴ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Watershed Assessment, Tracking &
Environmental Results. National Probable Sources Contribution to Impairments. http://iaspub.epa.gov/waters10/attains_nation_cy.control – prob_source

²⁵ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Watershed Assessment, Tracking &
Environmental Results. National Probable Sources Contribution to Impairments. http://iaspub.epa.gov/waters10/attains_nation_cy.control – prob_source

²⁶ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Watershed Assessment, Tracking &
Environmental Results. National Probable Sources Contribution to Impairments. http://iaspub.epa.gov/waters10/attains_nation_cy.control – prob_source

²⁷ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Watershed Assessment, Tracking &
Environmental Results. National Probable Sources Contribution to Impairments. http://iaspub.epa.gov/waters10/attains_nation_cy.control – prob_source

²⁸ Committee on Environment and Natural Resources. 2010. Scientific Assessment of Hypoxia
in U.S. Coastal Waters. Interagency Working Group on Harmful Algal Blooms, Hypoxia, and Human Health
of the Joint Subcommittee on Ocean Science and Technology, Washington, DC. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/
microsites/ostp/hypoxia-report.pdf

²⁹ Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force. 2008. Gulf Hypoxia
Action Plan. >http://water.epa.gov/type/watersheds/named/msbasin/actionplan.cfm

³⁰ Rabelais, N. and R.E. Turner. 2010. 2010 Dead Zone—One of the Largest Ever. http://www.gulfhypoxia.net/Research/Shelfwide
Cruises/2010/PressRelease2010.pdf

³¹ Johnson, L.C. 1987. Soil loss tolerance: Fact or myth? Journal of Soil and Water
Conservation 42(3):155-160.

³² Logan, T. 1982. Improved criteria for developing soil loss tolerance levels for
cropland. In Determinants of Soil Loss Tolerance. Special Publication No. 45. American Society of
Agronomy, Madison, Wisconsin.

³³ Helmers, M.J., T.M. Isenhart, M.G. Dosskey, S.M. Dabney, and J.S. Strock. 2008.
Buffers and Vegetative Filter Strips. Chapter 4 in Upper Mississippi River Sub-basin Hypoxia
Nutrient Committee Final Report: Gulf Hypoxia and Local Water Quality Concerns Workshop. American
Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan.

³⁴ Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie (STRIPs) Project. Iowa State
University. http://www.nrem.iastate.edu/research/ STRIPs/news/docs/field day
handout neal smith 09.pdf

³⁵ Baldwin, J. 2008. ‘Worst natural disaster in state history.’ Iowa.com http://iowa.com/ilive/flood- of-2008/

³⁶ Sekely, A.C., D.J. Mulla, and D.W. Bauer. 2002. Streambank slumping and its
contribution to the phosphorus and suspended sediment loads of the Blue Earth River, Minnesota.
Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 57(5):243-250.

³⁷ Schilling, K.E. and C.F. Wolter. 2000. Application of GPS and GIS to map channel
features in Walnut Creek, Iowa. Journal of the American Water Resources Association:
36(6):1423-1434.

³⁸ Wilson, C.G., D.D. Bosch, J.L. Steiner, P.J. Starks, M.D. Tomer, and G.V. Wilson.
2008. Quantifying relative contributions from sediment sources in Conservation Effects Assessment
Project watersheds. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 63(6):523-532.

³⁹ Lowrance, R., T.M. Isenhart, W.J. Gburek, F.D. Shields, Jr., P.J. Wigington, and S.M.
Dabney. 2006. Landscape Management Practices. Chapter 7 in M. Schnepf and C. Cox (eds) Environmental
Benefits of Cropland Conservation: The Status of Our Knowledge. Soil and Water Conservation Society,
Ankeny, Iowa. 269-317.

⁴⁰ Reeder R. and D. Westermann. 2006. Soil Management Practices. Chapter 1 in M. Schnepf
and C. Cox (eds) Environmental Benefits of Cropland Conservation: The Status of Our Knowledge. Soil
and Water Conservation Society, Ankeny, Iowa. 1-89.

⁴¹ Tomer. M.D., C.G. Wilson, T.B. Moorman, K.J. Cole, D. Heer and T.M. Isenhart. 2010.
Source-Pathway Separation of Multiple Contaminants during a Rainfall-Runoff Event in an Artificially
Drained Agricultural Watershed. Journal of Environmental Quality 39:882-895.

⁴² Helmers, M.J., T.M. Isenhart, M.G. Dosskey, S.M. Dabney, and J.S. Strock. 2008.
Buffers and Vegetative Filter Strips. Chapter 4 in Upper Mississippi River Sub-basin Hypoxia
Nutrient Committee Final Report: Gulf Hypoxia and Local Water Quality Concerns Workshop. American
Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan.

⁴³ Randall, G.W. and M.J. Goss. 2008. Nitrate Losses to Surface Water Through Subsurface,
Tile Drainage. Chapter 6 in J.L. Hatfield and R.F Follett (Eds) Nitrogen in the Environment:
Sources, Problems, and Management, pps 145-174. Elsevier, Inc. http://
www.sciencedirect.com/science/book/9780123743473

⁴⁴ Claassen, R., V. Breneman, S. Bucholtz, A. Cattaneo, R. Johansson, and M. Morehart.
2004. Environmental Compliance in U.S. Agricultural Policy: Past Performance and Future Potential.
Agricultural Economic Report No. 832. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service,
June 2004. http://www.ers.usda.
gov/Publications/AER832/

⁴⁵ Environmental Working Group. Farm Subsidy Database. https://farm.ewg.org/ index.php?key=nosign

⁴⁶ Derived from data on ethanol production from the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA).

⁴⁷ Duffy, M. 2010. Farmland ownership: What are the implications for conservation, the
next generation? Summer 2010 Leopold Letter. Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Iowa State
University. http://
leopold.iastate.edu/pubs/nwl/2010/2010-2-leoletter

⁴⁸ Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll. 2010. Rented Land In Iowa: Social and Environmental
Dimensions. Iowa State University Extension, PMR 1006, January 2010. http://
www.soc.iastate.edu/extension/farmpoll/PMR1006.pdf

⁴⁹ DeGennaro, D. 2010. Farm Income Data Debunks Subsidy Myths. Environmental Working
Group. https://www.ewg.org/agmag/2010/05/farm-income-data-debunks- subsidy-myths/

⁵⁰ DeGennaro, D. 2010. Farm Income Data Debunks Subsidy Myths. Environmental Working
Group. https://www.ewg.org/agmag/2010/05/farm-income-data-debunks- subsidy-myths/

⁵¹ Environmental Working Group. Farm Subsidy Database. https://farm.ewg.org/ index.php?key=nosign

⁵² Environmental Working Group. Farm Subsidy Database. https://farm.ewg.org/ index.php?key=nosign

⁵³ Cox, C. and N. Bruzelius. 2010. The Other National Debt. Environmental Working Group.
http://
www.ewg.org/agmag/2010/03/the-other-national-debt/

⁵⁴ Derived from data presented in U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources
Conservation Service annual budget documents.