HEADLINES ABOUT DRIFTLESS WATER DEFENDERS
Iowa News Now - February 3, 2025
POSTVILLE, Iowa — Agri Star Meat and Poultry, a major Iowa meatpacking facility, is facing legal action over alleged violations of the Clean Water Act, with environmental advocates accusing both the company and state regulators of failing to prevent repeated water pollution.
The Driftless Water Defenders, a local advocacy group, has issued a 60-day notice of violations and intent to sue against Agri Star Meat and Poultry in Postville, citing years of permit violations and ongoing pollution of Hecker Creek and the Yellow River…
Cedar Rapids Gazette - January 31, 2025
Clean water advocates in northeast Iowa plan to challenge a water permit for a large cattle feedlot in state court, as part of their continuing efforts to protect a prized trout stream.
The move - expected from the Driftless Water Defenders in the coming days - follows decisions by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources to approve and renew a permit for Supreme Beef near Monona. It has a capacity of about 11,600 cattle.
An administrative law judge decided last year that the DNR did not adequately consider environmental and public health effects for the permit, which allows Supreme Beef to pump about 22 million gallons from the ground annually...
Cedar Rapids Gazette - Jan 5, 2025
Iowa politicians are too deferential to those most responsible for polluting the state’s environment to make any meaningful improvements in the near future, according to Iowa City lawyer Jim Larew.
And that’s the reason why he will spend his remaining years litigating those issues in court. At 70, he is part of a new Northeast Iowa movement to improve the impaired waters of an area long known for its pristine streams…
Bleeding Heartland - October 1, 2024
The Iowa Constitution should be amended to assure that right is protected, and to guarantee that governmental actions conflicting with this right are subjected to strict judicial scrutiny.
A further constitutionally-imposed duty should be placed on state government: to affirmatively protect our precious natural resources for us, and for all future generations…
Inside Climate News - November 4, 2024
Des Moines, Iowa, is a sprawling metro area of 740,000 people surrounded by agricultural operations. In Iowa, where hogs outnumber humans 7 to 1 and corn and soybean fields seem to stretch as far as the eye can see, Des Moines is at the heart of it all.
Though very few people in Des Moines are farmers—fewer than 5% of Iowans are—the area, which is situated on the banks of the Des Moines River, is the nexus of downstream agricultural pollution. The Des Moines Water Works (DMWW), which supplies water to approximately 600,000 people, is too…
Des Moines Register - September 22, 2024
A further constitutionally-imposed duty should be placed on state government: to affirmatively protect our precious natural resources for us, and for all future generations.
The fundamental right to clean air and water was enjoyed by Iowa’s earliest settlers. Many of those early Iowans, in their letters and diaries, described their unfettered access to our state’s uncommonly pure air and water of astonishing quality and quantity…
Chris Jones’ Substack - July 14, 2025
The only thing leaving Iowa faster than Gen Z has been nitrate-nitrogen and over the past two months the exodus of the latter in Iowa streams, while predictable in this post-drought condition, has been nothing short of momentous. Using nitrate stream sensor data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Iowa, grab sample data from Iowa DNR, and stream discharge (flow volume) data from USGS, I calculate statewide loss during May was 241.4 million pounds (as N) and June, 102.4 million pounds. So, in only two months, N loss from the state totaled 343.8 million pounds. This is more than the annual loss in eight of the years since 1999. The record loss for one year is 1.25 billion pounds (2016), so we have outside chance of topping that in 2024…
Cedar Rapids Gazette - July 12, 2024
Zahren, a candidate for the Iowa House in District 64, underwent blood testing in March of this year before donating a kidney. Those tests revealed his phosphorus levels were six times the maximum amount. In some cases, that could signify kidney failure.
Zahren has a history of advocating for clean water. He "had a hypothesis" that the phosphorus levels were related to the water in his home, so he had it tested. As a result of those tests, he installed a reverse osmosis water purifying system…
Larry Stone’s Substack - July 13, 2024
In the 50 years that we’ve lived in Clayton County – as well as a decade of visits to NE Iowa before that – we’ve witnessed and lamented the gradual loss of woodlands, diverse farms, fencerows, grass waterways, and clean water.
Many fellow residents also have noticed and mourned those changes.
Nostalgia? Sure…
Progress? Is it really “progress” to see the destruction of habitat, farmland erosion, and sterile monocultures that are transforming “the Driftless?”
About 50 of my Clayton County neighbors met in Elkader recently to share their frustration about the path we seem to be on. They responded to an invitation by attorney James Larew, who’s organized Driftless Water Defenders (DWD), a nonprofit that will focus on advocating, educating, and litigating to defend Iowans’ fundamental rights to clean water.Driftless Water Defenders
Investigate Midwest - June 19, 2024
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — The cover crop that blankets Dan Voss’ farmland from late fall into the spring comforts the Eastern Iowa farmer because he knows heavy spring rain won’t wash away his topsoil. These off-season crops also soak up excess fertilizer.
But for every Dan Voss, there are a thousand U.S. farmers not growing cover crops or using other conservation practices shown to reduce runoff.
Other agricultural practices – more tile drainage, more livestock and more fertilizer – are thwarting plans to slash nitrogen and phosphorus washing down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, where excess nutrients threaten wildlife and fishing industries.
KIMT3 - June 18, 2024
Strawberry Point, IA - Rising levels of nitrate in the water of Iowa's Driftless region have prompted several environmental groups to push the EPA to intervene.
In Southeastern Minnesota’s and Northeast Iowa’s Driftless region, water is everything. The many trout streams here carve limestone bluffs through the karst geology. This special and beautiful area, and its most important resource, is also under threat, and it might just be the water you are drinking too.
Cedar Rapids Gazette - June 16, 2024
On a recent Saturday I drove 277 miles from Iowa City to the far western Iowa town of Onawa to be the keynote speaker at the Loess Hills Prairie Seminar at West Monona High School.
Onawa is perched on a hump of land between the Missouri and Little Sioux Rivers. About 12% of the city’s structures are vulnerable to flooding at least once every 100 years.
To call the Little Sioux a river here is about like calling a sewage lagoon a lake. It’s been channelized and diked and polluted into an ogre of a river so the Missouri flood plain could be cropped with corn and soybeans. I asked around if anybody uses it for recreation — no was the answer…
Chris Jones’ Substack - June 6, 2024
Does anybody out there in establishment politics and agriculture (one and the same in many cases) care about rural Iowa? I don’t think they do, at least not beyond using its imagery for propaganda. I’ve lived in urban Iowa most of my life, and my observation of its take on rural Iowa is that it has no take. People in Iowa City and Ankeny and Des Moines think about rural Iowans about as often as they think about their cell phone plan, that is, only when forced to.
I’ve done three events in Missouri with a rural advocate for that state: Jess Piper. She recently wrote in her substack how American society has been fed a banquet of angry, racist, and gun-hugging tripe about rurals, and I believe this tripe contributes to the feelings almost all of us have about national dysfunction. As Jess says, rural people aren’t all farmers…
Civil Eats - May 1, 2024
hen Jeff Broberg and his wife, Erica, moved to their 170-acre bean and grain farm in Winona, Minnesota in 1986, their well water measured at 8.6 ppm for nitrates. These nitrogen-based compounds, common in agricultural runoff, are linked to multiple cancers and health issues for those exposed. Each year, the measurement in their water kept creeping up.
In the late 1990s, Broberg decided it was time to source from elsewhere. He began hauling eight one-gallon jugs and two five-gallon jugs from his friend Mike’s house. That was his drinking water for the week…
Civil Eats - March 12, 2024
In 2017, Larry Stone heard whispers about construction taking place near his home in Clayton County, Iowa. A retired photographer, Stone pulled up to the site, located around 20 miles away from where he lives, and began taking photos.
“A guy came roaring up on his little ATV and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’” Stone recalled recently.
His curiosity eventually landed Stone a tour of the project: Walz Energy, a joint venture between a cattle-feeding operation and an energy company. The idea, the manager explained, was that Supreme Beef would run a feedlot, and Feeder Creek would supply a biodigester, a machine that would process manure and capture the resulting methane to be sold as energy…