Throughout the US, agricultural and livestock runoff are some of the largest contributors to drinking water pollution, especially in heavily farmed states like California and Iowa. Pesticides and fertilizers which, without strategies like cover cropping, can enter the water stream, leading to elevated levels of dissolved nitrates and phosphorus and causing toxic algal blooms. Listen to Jennifer Terry, external affairs manager for Des Moines Water Works, Iowa's largest water treatment utility, about their solutions for reducing agricultural pollutants in water stream. For a transcript, please visit https://climatebreak.org/how-to-protect-water-supply-from-agricultural-pollutants-with-des-moines-water-works/
For a transcript, please visit https://climatebreak.org/how-to-protect-water-supply-from-agricultural-pollutants-with-des-moines-water-works/
Terry: Nitrogen and phosphorus are generally the contaminants that we struggle with in terms of agricultural production. And those are also the nutrients that feed things like harmful algal blooms. And nutrify the water in the rivers when it comes downstream to us.
Ethan: I'm Ethan Elkind, and you're listening to Climate Break. You just heard Jennifer Terry, external affairs manager for Des Moines Water Works, Iowa's largest water treatment utility. She tells us that agricultural pollution in the Des Moines water supply is getting worse with climate change-induced droughts. In the absence of strong federal and state regulations, her utility is collaborating with farmers to help them plant cover crops to reduce polluted runoff.
Terry: There's. Collaboration there's litigation there's regulation, or there's a combination of all those when you're trying to reduce nutrient pollution from agriculture. So If we don't have. Laws in our favor for that. If we don't have a lawsuit in our back pocket then we're left with collaboration.
For example, we partnered with a group called the practical farmers of Iowa and put together some money and purchased kind of a revolutionary concept. Purchased a cover crop Cedar, and it's a John Deere $600,000 cover crop Cedar. and now we are enlisting the help of an agricultural retailer Heartland cooperative to go out and of sell these services to farmers and one of our little source watersheds.
If you use cover crops, it's going to build the organic matter in your soil, and it's going to keep the soil in place and keep those pollutants from leaving your property.
And so is that project over the next four years going to clean up our rivers? No, but what it's going to do is demonstrate a scalable model of how municipalities and private industry can come together and hopefully make it win-win-win.
Ethan: To learn more about Des Moines Water Works and