Below is a response to the article http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013312050037&nclick_check=1 that was published on December 5th. The piece was submitted but not published. It was written in collaboration with staff from Pesticide Action Network:

Contrary to Mr. Lehr’s inflammatory remarks to the recent Iowa Farm Bureau Federation annual meeting, the trend of Iowans paying attention to agricultural practices is a far cry from the state rejecting farming. Iowans have a deep appreciation for agriculture. They want what is best for food production, and for the state... A healthy dialog about farming practices isn’t something to fear – it can help make Iowa a healthier and more economically secure place to live. 

The U.S. House adjourned for the rest of 2013 yesterday after approving several major bills. By a surprisingly large 332 to 94 majority (roll call), representatives approved The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, a federal budget compromise worked out by Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray and House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan. Most of the House GOP caucus supported the budget deal, including Tom Latham (IA-03). Bruce Braley (IA-01) and Dave Loebsack (IA-02) were among the 163 Democrats who voted for the budget deal. Steve King (IA-04) was one of the 62 Republicans who voted no because the agreement increased domestic discretionary spending. The 32 House Democrats who opposed the deal objected to the fact that it did not include an extension of unemployment benefits, did not reverse more of the “sequester” federal spending cuts, and increased federal worker contributions to their pensions.

Also yesterday, House members passed by voice vote a one-month extension to most federal agricultural programs, giving a conference committee more time to work out a deal on a long-term Farm Bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said the upper chamber won’t pass any more short-term farm bill extensions, but he’ll probably have to backtrack now to prevent farm programs from expiring on January 1.

Finally, the House approved by 350 votes to 69 a compromise on the defense authorization bill. All four Iowans voted for the National Defense Authorization Act, negotiated informally by House and Senate Armed Services Committee leaders after the Senate Republicans blocked a vote on the defense authorization bill before Thanksgiving. I need more time to read up on what’s in the final compromise, so will cover the details of the defense authorization bill in a future post.

After the jump I’ve enclosed comments on yesterday’s votes from the Iowans in Congress and some of the candidates for U.S. House and Senate, where available. UPDATE: Added more comments below. However, Steve King has uncharacteristically not released a statement explaining his vote on the budget compromise. His office did not respond to my request for comment or to the Sioux City Journal’s Bret Hayworth.

Last month Iowa politicians from both parties expressed outrage after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal to alter the Renewable Fuel Standard on how much ethanol must be blended into gasoline. At an EPA hearing in Washington today, Representative Bruce Braley (a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee) and Governor Terry Branstad both testified against reducing the Renewable Fuel Standard. Several Iowa farmers and representatives of corn and soybeans growers also spoke and met with EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy afterwards.

After the jump I’ve posted a statement from Braley’s office containing highlights from his remarks and a link to the video. Branstad warned that reducing the RFS could lead to another farm crisis like the one Iowa experienced during the 1980s. I will add more details from his testimony if they become available. I expect both Braley and Branstad to feature their advocacy for ethanol and biodiesel in their campaigns for the U.S. Senate and governor next year.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that last month, Branstad’s re-election campaign created a “Protect the Renewable Fuel Standard” website. I’ve added more details on that effort below. Like the pro-Olympic wrestling site the campaign launched earlier this year, ProtectTheRFS.com presents as a petition supporting a popular cause in Iowa, doubling as a way to build the Branstad campaign’s contact list.

The progressive 501(c)4 group Americans United for Change announced today that it will run a commercial on Des Moines-based television stations to support the Renewable Fuels Standard. Scroll to the end of this post for the video and transcript. The ad encourages viewers to send their comments to the EPA by visiting a website called SavetheRFS.com (a list-building effort like the one Branstad’s campaign created). The veterans political action committee VoteVets.org, which is part of the Americans United for Change coalition, operates SavetheRFS.com.

SECOND UPDATE: Added more comments from Branstad below.

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread. Here are a few links to get a conversation started.

A Polk County district court ruling related to one of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz’s pet projects called attention to the fact that Schultz was in Switzerland for the American Swiss Foundation’s 24th annual Young Leaders Conference, a weeklong event. Whether the secretary of state should attend a foreign junket like this at any time is debatable. But it’s ridiculous for him to have planned to be out of town when Iowa’s 99 county auditors were gathering in Des Moines to discuss election-related issues. The Iowa Democratic Party and the only declared Democratic candidate for secretary of state blasted Schultz. I’ve posted their comments below, along with the official defense from the Iowa Secretary of State’s spokesman.

Speaking of Schultz’s pet projects, here’s some important news from last month: the federal judge who wrote a key ruling upholding Indiana’s voter ID law now believes he got that case wrong.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced on Friday that it is proposing to alter the Renewable Fuel Standard on how much ethanol must be blended into gasoline. The announcement upset Iowa elected officials from both parties. After the jump I’ve posted statements from Governor Terry Branstad, Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds, and all of the Iowans in Congress except for Representative Tom Latham (R, IA-03), who has not commented on this issue to my knowledge.

The Associated Press reported this week on how the push to produce corn-based ethanol has damaged the environment in Iowa and elsewhere.

One last outrage: Will Potter reported for Mother Jones about a case that “could make it harder for journalists and academics to keep tabs on government agencies.” The FBI is going to court to prevent its “most prolific” Freedom of Information Act requester from accessing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.

Polk County Soil and Water Commissioner Sherrie Taha announced her candidacy for Iowa secretary of agriculture last month and has been appearing at Democratic events around the state in recent weeks. Her campaign is on Facebook here. To my knowledge, there isn’t a campaign website yet.

Taha’s central message is simple: “A healthy Iowa begins with healthy soil.” Protecting that soil will reduce input costs for farmers while producing cleaner water in Iowa and downstream. That basic truth seems to be lost on the incumbent Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey. Despite evidence that Iowa’s world-class topsoil, a non-renewable resource, is “floating away” at an alarming rate, Northey has resisted any regulation aimed at reducing runoff into waterways. Instead, Northey promotes voluntary efforts, which may not be applied where they are most needed to keep topsoil in place. The incumbent also opposes any numeric standards which would indicate whether the state’s strategy to reduce water pollution from farms is working.

Taha will have an uphill battle against Northey, who was narrowly elected in 2006 and easily re-elected in 2010. The incumbent will have strong financial backing from interest groups that profit from current conventional agricultural practices. A far larger group of Iowans would benefit from Taha’s plan to do more to protect farmland and clean water. After the jump I’ve posted the introductory piece of literature from her campaign, which highlights her priorities and provides a short bio.

Today members of the U.S. House and Senate began conference committee negotiations on the farm bill. The last five-year farm bill expired in 2012, and the latest extension of most federal farm programs (except for some related to conservation and sustainable agriculture) lapsed on September 30. Two Iowans are on the 41-member conference committee: Democratic Senator Tom Harkin and Republican Representative Steve King (IA-04).

One issue is likely to dominate the Congressional talks: funding levels for nutrition programs, especially the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. This summer, both Harkin and Republican Senator Chuck Grassley voted for the Senate farm bill, which cut SNAP by about $4 billion over 10 years. Iowa’s four U.S. House members split along party lines when the House approved a Republican bill with $39 billion in cuts over the same time frame. Keep in mind that regardless of what happens in the farm bill talks, all SNAP recipients–including an estimated 1 million veterans and approximately 421,000 Iowans–will see their food assistance reduced as of November 1. Click here for a detailed report on those cuts, which will occur as extra funding from the 2009 federal stimulus bill runs out.

After the jump I’ve posted the latest comments about the farm bill from Iowa politicians.

UPDATE: Added King’s opening statement from the conference committee meeting below.

SECOND UPDATE: Added new comments from Harkin.

As a member of the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), I have been asked by consumers how the rules recently got changed in the National Organic Program (NOP) to make it easier for synthetic materials on the National List of Approved Materials to be relisted when they sunset after five years (as required by law).  To clarify, any synthetic materials approved for use in organic production and handling must be approved by the NOSB by a two-thirds majority vote.  And, by law, those materials sunset in five years and must be re-approved by the NOSB to remain on the National List.  

The recent rule change — made by USDA without consultation with the NOSB — turns the voting upside down, changing the voting for sunseting materials from a former two-thirds majority to re-approve a sunseting material to two-thirds majority to de-list a sunseting material.  As Jim Riddle, long-time leader in the organic community and former Chair of the NOSB points out below in a letter to the Organic Trade Association (who supports the rule change), that is a huge change.  

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread.

I’ve been catching up on news related to the Iowa Supreme Court. On October 9 the seven justices heard oral arguments in two cases at the Fort Dodge Middle School auditorium. One of those cases was Iowa Farm Bureau, et al. v. Environmental Protection Commission, et al. Interest groups representing major water polluting industries in Iowa are seeking to overturn one of the most significant water quality protection rules this state has adopted during my lifetime. In March 2012, a Polk County District Court judge declared the legal challenge to the rule “without merit.” The Farm Bureau quickly signaled its intent to appeal, claiming the case was about “good government” rather than water quality.

The Iowa Supreme Court will likely announce a decision in this case sometime early next year. Ryan Koopmans noted recently at the On Brief blog that the justices have cleared what used to be a major backlog and are running an efficient operation.

On average, the Court issues a decision 112 days after final submission (which is usually triggered by oral argument).  But even that figure understates the Court’s efficiency.   There is a small subset of cases that, because of their complexity or other unusual factors, skew the average, which means that the median might give a better picture of the Court’s timeliness.  That’s 87 days between final submission and decision, which is relatively fast.

The Court is even faster when the situation calls for it.  In February, the Court issued a decision in In re Whalen-a case about a burial location- just 29 days after the scheduled oral argument.  And the  Court has made it a priority to respond quickly to certified questions from federal district courts.

Incidentally, last week’s session in Fort Dodge is part of the Iowa Supreme Court’s relatively new commitment to hear cases outside its chambers in Des Moines periodically. The effort was one response to the 2010 retention elections, the first ever in which voters chose not to retain Iowa Supreme Court justices. University of Iowa College of Law professor Todd Pettys cited those hearings around the state as one among many reasons that the 2012 vote to retain Justice David Wiggins turned out differently from the elections two years earlier. You can download Pettys’ paper for the Journal of Appellate Practice and Process here. While it’s probably healthy for the justices to work in other cities from time to time, I think the other factors Pettys discusses were far more important in 2012 than the court’s statewide tour.

At the end of Pettys’ paper, he discusses the future for the Varnum v Brien ruling, which cleared the way for same-sex marriages in Iowa in 2009. Commenting on a somewhat surprising “special concurrence” by Justices Edward Mansfield and Thomas Waterman in a different case related to marriage equality, Pettys suggests that perhaps “the Iowa Supreme Court is no longer of one mind about whether the Varnum Court was right to hold that the Iowa Constitution grants same-sex couples the right to marry.”

The 2014 fiscal year began at midnight. Congress is ringing in the occasion with the first partial federal government shutdown since the mid-1990s. The U.S. House and Senate have been unable to agree on a continuing spending resolution, because most House Republicans insist on defunding or delaying the 2010 health care reform law as a condition of funding most government operations.

Details on Iowa Congressional votes on budget resolutions are after the jump, along with comments from all the Iowans in Congress and many of the candidates for U.S. House or Senate.

Authorization for most federal agricultural programs also expired at midnight, and it’s not clear when Congress will be able to agree on a short-term extension or a new five-year farm bill. Toward the end of this post I’ve enclosed some comments on the failure to pass a farm bill.

The U.S. House voted mostly along party lines on September 19 to cut the leading federal food assistance program by $39 billion over the next decade. Iowa’s four representatives split in the expected way: Republicans Tom Latham (IA-03) and Steve King (IA-04) supported the “Nutrition Reform and Work Opportunity Act,” while Democrats Bruce Braley (IA-01) and Dave Loebsack (IA-02) voted no. In fact, the roll call shows that not even the bluest Blue Dog Democrat supported this bill.

After the jump I’ve posted comments on this vote from some of the Iowans in Congress, along with the latest Iowa and national figures on food insecurity and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as “food stamps.”

Some potentially good news for Iowa waterways: after months of delays, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finally signed a work plan on new procedures for permitting and inspecting large livestock farms.

Iowa’s confined animal feeding operations create more untreated manure annually than the total sewage output of the U.S. population. An EPA report published last summer concluded that the DNR’s CAFO permitting and inspection protocols did not conform to the Clean Water Act.

Federal and state officials negotiated a draft work plan to address these problems last fall, and the plan was ready to be signed in January of this year. However, the DNR requested changes to the plan based on feedback from the Iowa Farm Bureau, which tries to protect corporate agriculture from effective public oversight. Governor Terry Branstad tried to intervene with EPA officials to reduce inspections of factory farms. (Click here to read the correspondence.) To the dismay of some environmentalists, the governor also insisted that EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy meet with industry representatives to discuss the CAFO inspection regime.

Although the final work plan isn’t ideal and provides for fewer in-person inspections than the earlier draft, the agreement looks like a big improvement on the status quo at the DNR. After the jump I’ve posted statements on today’s news from the DNR and environmental organizations that have been involved with this process. I also posted the seven-page work plan for inspecting thousands of CAFOs over the next five years. For more background, check out the EPA Region 7’s website and the Sierra Club Iowa chapter’s documents on CAFOs.

It will take a lot of follow through to make sure the DNR implements this plan. The agency indicated last fall that it would need thirteen new livestock inspector positions to meet Clean Water Act goals. Then DNR Director Chuck Gipp formally asked for eleven new positions in the 2014 budget, but Governor Branstad requested funding for only five new inspectors. Iowa Senate Democrats approved funding for thirteen new inspectors, but Iowa House Republicans supported the governor, and final budget for fiscal year 2014 included funding for just seven new DNR positions in this area.

Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey announced yesterday that he has hired Mike Naig as the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship’s new deputy secretary. In the press release I’ve posted after the jump, Northey praised Naig as a “tremendous asset” and a “natural fit” for IDALS. Naig has spent the last 13 years working for Big Ag companies or trade associations, most recently as a state lobbyist for Monsanto.

While Naig helps the agriculture department be “accessible to Iowans by traveling regularly” to meetings, and assists in managing the IDALS budget and personnel, Northey will continue to ignore some big problems facing Iowa farmers. Research has implicated Monsanto’s genetically-modified “Roundup ready” seeds and/or glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide, in the following trends:

• the accelerated evolution of herbicide-resistant weeds;

• “sudden death syndrome,” a crop disease affecting soybeans;

• “harmful changes in soil” and possibly a “fungal root disease” in conventional crops;

• digestive problems in hogs fed a diet of GM crops;

• other diseases and reproductive problems observed in swine and cattle fed a diet containing Roundup ready corn and soybeans.

But never mind all that.

Speaking of government officials with their heads in the sand, you won’t hear anything from the Iowa Department of Public Health about the risks of glyphosate exposure in humans. Nevertheless, research has linked the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide to breast cancer, birth defects, obesity and other “diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet.”  

Public policy has been slow to make a dent in the obesity epidemic, which turns out to be “a lot more deadly than previously thought.” But a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control shows that Iowa is one of eighteen states where obesity among low-income preschoolers declined by a statistically significant amount from 2008 through 2011. An estimated 14.4 percent of low-income two- to four-year-olds in Iowa were obese in 2011. Iowa Department of Public Health officials credited several programs with helping to reverse the trend.

Adult obesity is still a major health problem, according to the latest “F as in Fat” report by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Iowa had the twelfth-highest adult obesity rate in the country at 30.4 percent in 2012. The sort-of good news was that for the first time in decades, obesity rates held steady in most states. But it’s depressing to see that the adult obesity rate exceeds 20 percent in even the “healthiest” state of Colorado now. As recently as 1991, not a single state had an obesity rate that high.

Speaking to Radio Iowa about the new obesity estimates, Iowa Department of Public Health Director Mariannette Miller-Meeks had sensible advice:

“People don’t have to go out and do a programmed physical aerobics program for 30 minutes or an hour or two hours a day. […] Just eating less, a plant slant to your diet, and trying to get in 30 minutes of exercise a day.”

Mark my words: the Iowa Farm Bureau and other groups representing industrial agriculture will go nuts over Dr. Miller-Meeks encouraging Iowans to bring “a plant slant” to their diet, especially if she runs for Congress a third time in Iowa’s second district. But here’s an inconvenient truth for Big Ag: peer-reviewed research shows that “meat consumption is associated with obesity” in U.S. adults.

Here’s the second inconvenient truth: even if everyone ate responsibly and exercised regularly, Americans would be more prone to obesity because of exposure to certain chemicals, such as the endocrine disruptors Bisphenol-A (BPA) and phthalates, and some organotins used in pesticides. Long-term, low-level exposure to the prevalent herbicide atrazine can cause insulin resistance and obesity too (click here for an explanation of that research in layman’s terms).

Three years ago, a White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity called on federal and state agencies to “prioritize research into the effects of possibly obesogenic chemicals.” That won’t happen in my lifetime, at least not in Iowa.

P.S.- For anyone wondering, Iowa Department of Public Health Medical Director Dr. Patricia Quinlisk warns against ingesting a tapeworm as a weight-loss method.

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? I’ve been thinking about some high-tech failures. For instance, genetically-modified seeds were supposed to solve farmers’ weed problems. Yet weeds resistant to glyphosate (the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide) are “gaining ground” across Iowa. The problem is worse on farms where Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds have been planted the longest.

Rootworms “resistant to one type of genetically engineered corn” are also a growing problem. Genetically-modified seed was supposed to make corn plants poisonous to rootworm, but now farmers are “deploying more chemical pesticides than before.” The outcome was predictable.

On a related note, research shows that nitrogen enrichment through added fertilizers can hurt plant diversity and productivity of grasslands in the long term.

Some Midwestern cities and towns “are absorbing a financial beating after betting big on an innovative coal-fired power plant” during the last decade. “Clean coal” was always a boondoggle.

Speaking of costly investments, the state of Iowa continues to shovel tax credits to Orascom for a fertilizer plant project that would have been built in Iowa anyway. But hey, what’s another $25 million?

This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

Catching up on news from the weekend, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey held his seventh annual “BBQ bash” at the State Fairgrounds in Des Moines on July 13. Speaking to the crowd, Northey confirmed that he will seek a third term in 2014 and said he had raised at least $100,000 for his re-election campaign at the event. Ever since Northey ruled out running for the U.S. Senate in early May, it’s been clear that he would go for another four years in the job he loves.

I’ve been disappointed in Northey as secretary of agriculture. He never followed through on the farmland protection initiative he announced in 2008, even though Iowa continues to lose some of the world’s most productive agricultural land at an alarming rate. He has insisted on a solely voluntary approach to reducing nutrient pollution in Iowa waterways despite ample evidence that approach will fail. Record nitrate levels have been reported this spring and summer in major Iowa rivers, and the Des Moines Water Works is facing huge extra costs to make water drinkable for 15 percent of Iowa’s population. Not only is Northey not part of the solution, he’s digging in his heels to perpetuate the problem.

Any comments about next year’s campaign for secretary of agriculture are welcome in this thread. I haven’t heard yet of any Democrats planning to challenge Northey. Dusky Terry, who narrowly lost the Democratic primary for this office in 2006, could be a credible candidate. He is currently mayor of Earlham,  a small town in Dallas County.  

After last month’s embarrassing failure to pass a five-year Farm Bill in the U.S. House, Republicans moved new legislation yesterday that included funding for agricultural programs but excluded the nutrition programs that have been embedded in farm bills for decades.

After Democrats forced a long slog through procedural votes, the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act barely passed by 216 votes to 208. Every Democrat present voted against the bill, as did twelve Republicans. The rest of the GOP caucus voted yes, including Representatives Tom Latham (IA-03) and Steve King (IA-04). Last month, King tried but failed to muster sufficient conservative support for a farm bill including big cuts in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (more commonly known as food stamps). Iowa Democrats Bruce Braley (IA-01) and Dave Loebsack (IA-02) rejected yesterday’s bill. They were among the small group of House Democrats to support the previous version of the farm bill despite cuts in nutrition programs that drove away most of their caucus.

Comments from Senator Tom Harkin and most of Iowa’s House delegation are after the jump. I will update this post as needed with more comments from Iowa candidates or elected officials. At this writing, I don’t see anything about yesterday’s vote on Latham’s Congressional website. According to Radio Iowa, Latham “said he was disappointed with the process, but pleased the House was ‘at least able to pass the agriculture portion.'”

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread.

I’ve been thinking about how bad assumptions produce flawed theories and poor decisions. Steve Denning wrote an excellent piece for Forbes about Milton Friedman and the origin of “the world’s dumbest idea”: “that the sole purpose of a firm is to make money for its shareholders.”

Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for the conservative website RealClearPolitics, recently spun some rosy scenarios for Republicans worried about their party’s over-reliance on white voters. GOP candidates would be extremely foolish to count on his “racial polarization” scenario panning out. His “full Rubio” and “modest Republican outreach toward Hispanics” scenarios seem too optimistic to me as well.

High nitrate levels in Iowa waterways continue to make news, as they have for the last two months. I enjoyed this Des Moines Register editorial from Saturday’s paper. Excerpt:

During a meeting with The Des Moines Register’s editorial board earlier this year, House Speaker Kraig Paulsen made the claim that Iowa’s rivers are actually cleaner today than they were in the past. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. But Paulsen’s comment speaks to a troubling mentality that permeates the Iowa Legislature: If you just tell Iowans the water is OK often enough, maybe they will believe you and will think the lake they are swimming in doesn’t really smell like a toilet.

I don’t take my kids swimming in any Iowa lakes, and I won’t feel a bit sorry for Paulsen if he runs for Congress and loses the Republican primary, as I expect.

David Osterberg stepped down yesterday as executive director of the Iowa Policy Project, Iowa’s leading think tank. A legendary figure in this state’s environmental community, Osterberg served six terms in the Iowa House, chairing the Agriculture Committee for four years and the Energy and Environmental Protection Committee for two years. He has received honors and awards from many non-profit organizations and was the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate against Chuck Grassley in 1998.

In 2001, Osterberg created the Iowa Policy Project “to bring a fact-based focus to public policy issues affecting Iowa families.” The organization’s research reports and Iowa Policy Points blog are must-reads for anyone interested in state policy. In conjunction with the Des Moines-based Child and Family Policy Center, the Iowa Policy Project also publishes valuable research on the Iowa Fiscal Partnership website. The latest Iowa Fiscal Partnership report shows how food assistance programs in the Farm Bill affect thousands of Iowans.

I was pleased to read in the statement enclosed below that Osterberg will keep working with the Iowa Policy Project on energy and environment research, and longtime assistant director Mike Owen will take over as executive director.  

The future of most U.S. farm programs is in question today, as the House of Representatives voted down a new five-year farm bill that had bipartisan support in the House Agriculture Committee. Background, details on today’s vote, and some Iowa reaction are after the jump.

A new study in a peer-reviewed journal indicates that pigs fed a diet containing genetically-modified corn and soy had more severe stomach inflammation and (in females) heavier uteri than pigs fed an equivalent diet in conventionally raised corn and soy that was not genetically-modified. You can read the full article describing research on an Iowa farm here (pdf). For a summary of key findings, click here or here. The pigs “were reared under identical housing and feeding conditions.”

These results are disturbing, considering that more than 90 percent of the corn and soybeans grown in Iowa are now “Roundup Ready” biotech varieties, sprayed with glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide. Many anecdotal reports have linked animal health problems to genetically-modified feed. At the 1000 Friends of Iowa annual meeting on June 8, large-animal veterinarian Arthur Dunham described nutritional deficiencies, fertility problems, and unexplained deaths that he has seen increasingly in the cattle and swine herds of his clients. Dunham has been in practice for nearly 40 years and presented data about lower levels of certain vitamins and minerals (including B-12, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, manganese, and iron) in feed made from genetically-modified crops.

Monsanto and its allies dismiss such data as anecdotes and cite their own corporate-funded studies, which allegedly show the safety of GM crops. The new scholarly article describes the limitations of earlier research and calls for further studies on the subject. (Very few studies have been conducted over a time period longer than 90 days, for instance.) One Danish hog farmer saw big improvements after switching from genetically-modified feed, but Roundup crops are so dominant in this country that it can be hard for farmers to source animal feed that hasn’t been sprayed with glyphosate.

This year’s cool, wet spring was a blessing at first, reducing drought conditions substantially across Iowa. But now that the state has chalked up the wettest spring in 141 years of record-keeping, many communities are dealing with major flooding again. Flooding forced the closure of Highway 14 north of Marshalltown and prompted emergency sandbagging in downtown Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. You can see high water threatening downtown Cedar Rapids on Friday, and today the basement of the rebuilt city hall flooded. Water was pumped across some lanes of Highway 30. The lack of rain on Friday may have prevented the worst-case scenario in some cities.

At the downtown Des Moines Farmers Market this morning, several vendors told me they have “more water than they need” but not a devastating amount of moisture–yet. Farmers in many parts of the state haven’t been so lucky. Either rains have prevented them from planting, or floodwaters are washing away recently-planted crops.

Governor Terry Branstad was on vacation for most of the past week but has issued disaster emergency proclamations for 47 Iowa counties. He and Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds plan to tour flood-affected areas in eastern Iowa on Monday.

Any news or comments about the Iowa flooding are welcome in this thread.

JUNE 3 UPDATE: Dry weather over the weekend helped mitigate the flooding in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, but Coralville Lake is not expected to crest until June 7.

Speaking to reporters in Des Moines on June 3,

Branstad resisted the notion that this year’s floods or last year’s drought conditions could be linked to climate change or that the state could do anything to prevent such events from happening.

“Weather is always going to change,” said Branstad, who’s serving his fifth term as Iowa’s governor. “I’ve been governor during droughts and floods and we just went from a drought to a flood.

Time for another discussion thread on the race for Iowa’s open U.S. Senate seat. Recent news on the campaign is after the jump.

cross-posted with permission from State Representative Mary Wolfe’s blog

There have been many questions/concerns raised by the Iowa Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Sallee v. Stewart, in which the Court was asked to interpret Iowa’s Recreational Land Use Immunity doctrine. Like most of my colleagues, I’ve read the relevant court cases and studied the applicable statutes, and I’ve reviewed House File 605, the Farm Bureau’s proposed bill intended to fix the “crisis” allegedly created by the Sallee ruling – and like many others, I’ve concluded that the actual impact of the Sallee ruling on Iowa’s recreational land use immunity doctrine is minimal, and that the Farm Bureau’s proposed legislation is an over-reaction to Sallee‘s extremely narrow holding.

The Des Moines Water Works provides drinking water for roughly 500,000 people in central Iowa, about one-sixth of the state’s population. The utility owns the world’s largest nitrate-removal system, larger than those operated by cities ten times the size of the Des Moines metro area. Last Friday, that facility was switched on for the first time in nearly six years when “levels of health-threatening nitrates hit records in both the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers.”

The news should be a wake-up call to state leaders: Iowa needs more than a voluntary strategy to reduce nutrients in our waterways. Not only are many of our rivers too polluted to support aquatic life, they are becoming more difficult and expensive to purify for drinking water. Nitrate levels are high in other parts of Iowa too, not only in the Des Moines area.

Factory farm advocates failed in 2009 to circumvent the Iowa DNR’s rulemaking on applying manure over frozen and snow-covered ground. Then they failed in 2010 to win passage of a bill designed to weaken Iowa’s newly-adopted regulations on manure storage and application.

But this year, the Iowa Pork Producers Association succeeded in convincing state lawmakers to relax requirements for CAFO operators to be able to store their own manure properly. All they had to do was dress up their effort as an attempt to help families with aspiring young farmers.

Shortly after Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds ruled out running for U.S. Senate next year, Republican State Senator Joni Ernst posted on Facebook, “I will be considering a run for US Senate.”

Today Ernst and Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey discussed the factors influencing their decision on whether to run for Senate.

What’s on your mind this Earth Day, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

Today I had the pleasure of watching my friend and personal hero, 1000 Friends of Iowa co-founder LaVon Griffieon, educate groups of elementary school students about soil conservation. She carved up an apple to illustrate how little of the earth’s surface is arable land, and by extension why we need to preserve our farmland. Several versions of this “apple earth” demo are available on YouTube. I’ve posted a couple of examples after the jump.

Speaking of our priceless Iowa farmground, Iowa State University is collecting data on soil erosion here. The researchers are interested in photographs of farm fields that have “experienced substantial soil movement or loss” due to spring rainstorms. You can submit photos to the Iowa Daily Erosion Project in the ISU Department of Agronomy.

In an ideal world, evidence that more than half of Midwest rivers and streams can’t support aquatic life would inspire policy-makers to clean up our waterways. Rivers that are suitable for swimming, fishing, and other recreation can be a huge economic engine for Iowa communities.

We live in Iowa, where most of our lawmakers take the Patty Judge view: “Iowa is an agricultural state and anyone who doesn’t like it can leave in any of four directions.”

Yesterday the Iowa House approved a bill to relax manure storage regulations for large confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). All of the House Republicans and two-thirds of the Democrats supported this bad legislation. Details on the bill and the House vote are below.

After testing waterways at about 2,000 sites during 2008 and 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that 55 percent of rivers and streams in the country are “in poor condition for aquatic life.” One of the biggest problems was nutrient pollution from excessive levels of nitrogen and phosphorus. Reduced vegetation cover near streams also contributed to poor water quality. Only 21 percent of U.S. river and stream length was judged to be in “good” condition, with another 23 percent in “fair” condition.

Compared to an EPA survey conducted in 2004, the latest data show a smaller percentage of rivers and streams in good condition and a higher percentage in poor condition.

An EPA summary of the key findings is after the jump. You can find more data on the National Aquatic Resource Surveys here, including this two-page fact sheet (pdf) and the full draft report (pdf). Iowa is part of the “temperate plains” region, discussed on pages 78 through 80 of that report. I’ve posted an excerpt below. Only 15 percent of rivers and streams in the temperate plains region were judged to be in good condition; 55 percent were in poor condition.

Iowa should reject the all-voluntary nutrient reduction strategy favored by agricultural interest groups. Given the awful state of our rivers and streams, we need some mandatory steps to reduce nutrient pollution, including numeric standards for nitrogen and phosphorus. Both EPA staff and environmental advocates in Iowa have called for strengthening the nutrient reduction strategy. Unfortunately, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey has a firmly closed mind.  

This week Congress approved a continuing spending resolution to fund the federal government through the end of the current fiscal year on September 30. Iowa’s delegation split on this compromise, but not strictly along party lines. Details on the budget compromise and how the Iowans voted are after the jump.

March 14 is the International Day of Action for Rivers. These stories about water pollution and the economic potential of healthy rivers are worth a read.

Contrary to what agribusiness industry lobbyists would have you believe, a majority of Iowa farmers “support expanding conservation requirements for soil erosion and the control of nitrogen and phosphorous runoff.”

Iowa’s confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs or factory livestock farms) create more untreated manure annually than the total sewage output of the U.S. population.

Aging sewer systems in urban areas also allow too much sewage to leak into watersheds. The I-JOBS infrastructure bonding initiative (signed into law by Governor Chet Culver) included some money to improve sewer systems in Iowa, but we need to do much more on this front.

Iowa Rivers Revival Executive Director Rosalyn Lehman recently published a call to revive Iowa’s rivers in the Des Moines Register. I’ve posted excerpts from her guest editorial after the jump.

The Metro Waste Authority has created an Adopt a Stream website, with “resources to help you organize a stream cleanup in the Greater Des Moines area.”

Dam removal as part of a river restoration project supports local economic activity as well as the environment.

Governor Terry Branstad announced a long list of appointees to state boards and commissions today. I’ve posted the full press release after the jump, along with background on some of the most newsworthy nominations. The governor tapped several former state lawmakers or candidates for the legislature, as well as his younger son, Marcus Branstad.

The future of Iowa’s Congressional representation is not encouraging, judging from the latest League of Conservation Voters’ scorecard.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack may be thinking about running for Iowa governor again in 2014, according to one of his longtime friends.

UPDATE: Vilsack stopped by the Iowa capitol on February 19 to meet with statehouse Democrats. According to State Representative Marti Anderson, he came to “talk about the looming sequester in DC. and other Food, Farm, and Jobs issues from USDA.”

Yesterday Senator Tom Harkin withdrew his offer to donate his papers to Iowa State University, in effect dooming the Harkin Institute of Public Policy created there in 2011.

About an hour ago, President Barack Obama finished speaking to a Nevada audience about basic principles for comprehensive immigration reform. Yesterday four Democratic and four Republican U.S. senators unveiled a framework for a new immigration reform bill. Links and details about those proposals are after the jump, along with recent comments about immigration by some of the Iowans in Congress. I will update this post as needed with further reaction.

We have been hearing a lot of hype from Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey about how the voluntary approach to changing agricultural practices to improve water quality — as proposed in the Nutrient Reduction Strategy (NRS) — will be effective.  However, my experience in over 25 years of work on water quality tells me that this is very naive thinking at best, and deceptive to the public at worst.  Below are the comments on the NRS that I submitted a few days ago.

The public comment period on Iowa’s draft strategy to reduce nitrogen and phosphorous pollution in waterways ended on January 18. Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey indicated this week that policy-makers aren’t open to key changes suggested by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and advocates for cleaner water.

Multiple news sources are reporting today that as expected, Tom Vilsack will stay in President Barack Obama’s cabinet as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.

The USDA has a budget of about $150 billion and is the third-biggest cabinet agency in spending after Defense and Health and Human Services. Food stamps for needy families account for about half of the department’s spending, with the remainder taken up by other nutrition programs and subsidies for farmers such as insurance for crops including corn, wheat and cotton.

Working on a new long-term farm bill will be a major task for Congress this year. The “fiscal cliff” deal extended some but not all important farm programs temporarily.

Vilsack may tangle with Representative Steve King, who just became chairman of the House Agriculture subcommittee on Department Operations, Oversight, and Nutrition.

Any relevant comments are welcome in this thread. In other Obama cabinet news, Janet Napolitano will keep her job as head of the Department of Homeland Security.

UPDATE: Interesting trivia courtesy of Alan Bjerga: “Should he serve until 2017, the former Iowa governor would be the first person to head the Department of Agriculture for two terms since Orville Freeman led the agency under presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.”

SECOND UPDATE: Added a statement from Vilsack after the jump.

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread.

After the jump I’ve posted a bunch of links about finances and spending, large and small.