"Health trumps politics,” said Iowa State Senator David Johnson before taking the stage at a raucous rally in Des Moines last winter to support strengthening the state’s water quality. In the marble rotunda of the state capitol, he rose to denounce the nitrogen and phosphates that have been flowing in ever-increasing quantities into Iowa’s public water supplies — and was cheered by the small crowd of family farmers, concerned mothers, and his new political allies, the legislature’s drastically outnumbered Democrats. Johnson had been one of the longest-serving Republicans in Iowa until he left the party to become an independent in 2016 after defying it repeatedly on one of the most divisive issues in Iowa — the integrity of the state’s water.
"Health trumps politics,” said Iowa State Senator David Johnson before taking the stage at a raucous rally in Des Moines last winter to support strengthening the state’s water quality. In the marble rotunda of the state capitol, he rose to denounce the nitrogen and phosphates that have been flowing in ever-increasing quantities into Iowa’s public water supplies — and was cheered by the small crowd of family farmers, concerned mothers, and his new political allies, the legislature’s drastically outnumbered Democrats. Johnson had been one of the longest-serving Republicans in Iowa until he left the party to become an independent in 2016 after defying it repeatedly on one of the most divisive issues in Iowa — the integrity of the state’s water.
Iowa’s nitrogen load has been accelerating despite more than $100 million spent by the federal and state governments to rein it in. Starting in 1999, the concentration of nitrogen in the state’s major waterways has increased almost 50 percent, according to a study from the University of Iowa, published last spring in PLOS One. The battle over Iowa’s water had long been posed as one between rural and urban interests, until Johnson, whose district is one of the most thinly populated and heavily farmed in the state, came along.
In 2002, Senator Johnson co-authored one of the state’s key water statutes, the “Master Matrix,” which was supposed to establish health and safety guidelines for CAFOs and industrial farms in Iowa. By 2012 he was seeing how the relatively lax controls he had authored were being exploited, leaving his constituents vulnerable to the health consequences of escalating pollution from agricultural runoff. Nitrate pollution increased from about 200 million pounds in 2002 to more than a billion pounds in 2016. “I helped write this law in 2002,” he says, “and it’s terribly outdated with the current conditions that we’re seeing right now.”
Read more at Yale Environment 360
Image: Iowa State Senator David Johnson has led the fight to reduce agricultural pollution of the state's waters. (Credit: CASEY BECK)
