The League of Women Voters of Linn County hosted their annual meeting May 22 at Coe College.
At the event, the Jean R. Oxley Award for community service was awarded to Anne Dugger, who works as the director of Refugee and Immigration Services at the Catherine McAuley Center.
Dugger said that she said that she didn’t view her work as community service, she has always just focused on creating the community she wants to live in. Her advice to others was to make sure the people you interact with are treated as the most important people in the world for you at that moment.
During the keynote address, Chris Jones of the University of Iowa was the speaker.
Jones works as IIHR Research Engineer for the hydroscience and engineering department. He has published 55 papers and journal articles and most recently “The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality” which was just named by the Library of Congress as Iowa’s most important book this year.
Jones grew up in Burlington and Ankeny.
“Ankeny when I grew up there had a population of 6,000,” Jones said. “That city has now grown to the fourth largest city in Iowa.”
Jones joined the University of Iowa in 2015, and hosted a blog about the work he was doing with the hydroscience and engineering department, which focused on issues of water quality in the state.
Jones said there always seems to be a bit of self-censorship when it comes to farming practices in the State of Iowa.
Jones said that he had hosted his blog on his University of Iowa page until March 2023, when a few of his posts were pointed out as problematic by a lobbyist.
Jones took that blog to the Substack platform itself, and shortly after a bill was passed by legislature that impacted the work that Jones was doing on monitoring nitrate levels in Iowa’s waterways.
Jones said that the water in this state has been bad his entire life.
“If we all believe the credo ‘we want clean water’ we would have it because we’d pass actions to have this,” Jones said.
Jones said addressing water quality is something that the state needs to do, as there are consequences for the state.
Jones said that Iowa having the second highest cancer rate in the United States and showing growth of cancers, as well as more than 7,000 private wells having higher than allowable nitrate levels in their drinking water indicate issues that could be corrected.
Jones said that while there are thousands of farmers in the state, there are 3.8 million other citizens who are impacted by the decisions that are made because of the billion dollar industry.
“We need laws in this state that give us the environmental outcomes we want,” Jones said. “And even if those laws are not passed, we need to have legislators challenged on why they are defending the indefensible?”
Jones said things like allowing crops to grow right up to the edge of a stream as opposed to preventing the infiltration of nitrates into the waterways.
Jones is also not a fan of ethanol as a product, as it doesn’t reduce costs of gasoline, impacts the lifespan of vehicles and drives the crops raised in this state.
“Sixty percent of the corn we grow in the state goes to ethanol fuel,” Jones said. “It guarantees a market for corn.”
Jones said that the cost of land in the state also prohibit younger farmers to be able to break into farming.
Jones said more work needs to go into land reform in the state, encouraging the use of cover crops, no till farming practices and laws that will help protect watersheds.
To do that, Jones noted voting for candidates who check the right boxes will not solve the problem overall, there also needs to be continued grassroots support and involvement on the issue.
“That gets tougher when you’re trying to organize people to be motivated against their fifth most important issue in our state,” Jones said.
A questioner asked if Iowa grows any food. Jones said that there’s a good deal of feed that is grown that helps livestock in the state, but with the heavy reliance on corn, Iowa has moved away from crops it used to raise the most of like oats, apples and sorghum.
When it came to ethanol, Jones said that finding fuel without ethanol is more likely in rural areas of the state.
Jones said that the water quality issues have robbed many Iowans the ability to enjoy nature and the natural land.
When it comes to enforcing any issues that impact water quality, Jones said that they need more in the enforcement division of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. With more than 8,000 farms and only 50 officers, that is hard to do.
Senator Art Staed asked about the changes implemented by reduction standards for nitrates the legislature tried to enforce.
“That would have been great in the 1980s,” Jones said. “When we’re trying to get those enacted in 2012, and especially as voluntary, it’s much harder because we need volunteers who participate in the program.”