Chris Jones, Author of “The Swine Republic,” on What (and Who) Is Behind Iowa’s Water Problems

Ever since he began his blog in 2016, Chris Jones has provided a counterpoint to the farm industry’s mythologizing about the soundness of some of its practices. A research engineer in Iowa, he until recently oversaw a network of sensors that measured nitrate levels in the state’s rivers and streams — which, as tributaries of the Mississippi, have had an outsize hand in creating the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Jones understood the precarious position he was putting himself into by writing about the intractability of Iowa’s nitrogen- and phosphorus-polluted waters, calling agriculture and the politicians who prop it up to account. His blog was hosted on the website of the University of Iowa, his employer, which is funded both by the state and by agribusiness.

In April of 2023, Jones saw his blog shut down under pressure from legislators, he said, and the budget for his sensor network cut the following month by the Iowa state legislature. In between, he resigned from his university post.

You write about industry-funded science that keeps studying water issues. Is enough known about how to fix Iowa’s water problems to just do it?

When I worked at the Des Moines Water Works in the early 2000s, already Iowa Farm Bureau was saying that stream nitrate was from rotting leaves, combined sewer overflows, wildlife and golf. We knew then what the [main] problem was, but the industry’s response to these environmental things [was] deny, distract, delay. Now they’re in the delay stage, [even though] there is some recognition that they are causing the problems. A point that I make in the blogs that has not made me many friends is that academia is a big part of the problem — because we are willing to study things over and over and over again if somebody is paying us to do it. We mapped the human genome after 30 years, but after 100 years we still can’t figure out how much nitrogen to apply to corn. The reason is, the industry wants us to keep studying that stuff and parse out the minutiae…because that distracts from the real issue. And that is: that we have a problem with scale, and we have a completely unregulated system.

Are non-farmers beginning to understand more of this picture?

The number of farmers in Iowa has dropped quite dramatically [in the last few decades], like it has in the rest of the country. But we still have 85,000 [at least part-time] farmers, and almost everyone who’s grown up here knows somebody that farms; they’re all 65-year-old white guys. I call them Uncle Harold. Yeah, we know that some of what Uncle Harold does is bad for the environment. But Uncle Harold, he’s a good guy and he sent me $20 on my birthday, and I don’t want to step on him while he’s alive. But the truth of the matter is, these guys are all millionaires making way more money than the average Iowan. I think there’s some people that are [starting to understand this], but the industry knows the ropes on this very well. That’s what’s behind this rhetoric of the family farm. “If it’s a family farm, how could it be bad?”

You point out that Iowans vote for clean-water legislation that gets overridden. Are there ways to break through that block?

When I go out and give programs and presentations, inevitably somebody asks, “What can I do to make things better?” And also inevitably, somebody shouts out, “Vote!” I don’t buy that. The idea that you can vote for the Democrat and expect change, I think, is a fantasy. There’s got to be some grassroots demands. The Grange is still around. It was a grassroots farmer organization over 100 years ago that was formed to fight the monopoly the railroads had on grain. There was a National Grange with thousands of local chapters. They went to local meetings — city council, county supervisor, whatever — and they agitated for change that would beat these monopolies down. They were very effective, firstly, because all the local chapters had local control and the national chapter did not intervene. What I tell people is we need a Grange for water quality. In Iowa, we have 3,000 of what are called “drainage districts” for the organized tile drainage systems — we know tile [drainage] is a big problem. When county supervisors are meeting about the drainage district, there should be somebody agitating for water quality, asking, “How are these decisions going to affect the creek the district drains into?”

How does the agricultural history of Iowa fit into its water issues?

It’s what we call the “drunken walk” — it’s a statistical problem. When a guy leaves a bar and he’s drunk and he’s trying to walk home, he doesn’t walk in a straight line; he walks zigzag, and each step is made independently of the previous step. He gets from point A to point B, but he might not make it home. That’s what we’ve had here, the drunken walk; agricultural decisions were made to do one thing or another maybe a century ago, and those are baked in [then other decisions were layered on top].

One of the big decisions was to drain everything: We put in all this draining tile prior to 1910 to lower the water table. That’s the source of a lot of our problems, and the idea that we should straighten streams to square up fields for farming — in the ‘30s that maybe seemed reasonable to people, but now, it’s an ecological catastrophe. The other big thing in more recent times is the emergence of soybeans. We really didn’t grow many soybeans here prior to the 1960s. Then, it became an all-cash crop all the time. Soybeans did not displace corn; soybeans displaced alfalfa and oats and barley and sorghum. Some of these other crops that farmers grew were legumes like alfalfa and clover that provide nitrogen for corn; soybeans can’t do [that]. So when we brought in soybeans, not only did we displace these crops that were less environmentally degrading — we also had to bring in commercial fertilizer [for the corn]. [But] the timing of fertilizer applications does not synchronize with when the corn needs it, and as a result, we have all this nitrogen [leaching into water]. When we’re relying on legumes to provide nitrogen, then everything is in sync.

Top map courtesy of Chris Jones.