Iowa’s Nutrient Reduction Strategy (NRS) is the centerpiece of the state’s efforts to curb pollution from nitrogen and phosphorus, especially from Iowa farms.
A decade after it was first adopted, farmers and landowners have added millions of acres of cover crops and installed more conservation measures to control nutrients, but the state is still far from reaching its water quality goals.
“We have so much more work to do. We have to recognize we have 24 million acres in the state of Iowa of annual row crop land, and so really we need to be doing something on all those lands to help us reduce nitrogen and phosphorus,” said Matt Helmers, director of the Iowa Nutrient Research Center at Iowa State University.
Iowa adopted a Nutrient Reduction Strategy after a U.S. EPA task force called on states throughout the Mississippi River basin to take action to shrink the Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone. Also known as the dead zone, the area covers thousands of square miles in the Gulf, where marine life is either dead or gone because nitrogen and phosphorus from the river feed an overgrowth of algae in the ocean.
Iowa’s plan was released in 2013 outlining methods the state can follow in order to cut down its share of the nitrogen and phosphorus load in the Mississippi. The ultimate goal was the same as for the rest of the river basin — reduce nutrient levels by 45%.
Moving toward that goal is important not only for the dead zone, but also locally. Cities like Des Moines battle high nitrogen levels in drinking water, in the form of nitrates. Nutrient pollution also causes toxic algae blooms that close beaches in the summertime.
The NRS presents a sort of road map. It gives a list of practices, like using cover crops or restoring wetlands, and for each one it calculates how much it improves water quality. Much of it relates to agriculture because nonpoint sources, which are unregulated sources of nutrient pollution such as fertilizer runoff from farms, contribute more than 90% of the nitrogen and 80% of the phosphorus entering Iowa waterways.
Source: iowapublicradio.org
Photo Credit: pexels-ron-lach
Categories: Iowa, General