Big Ag’s brazen entitlement and disrespect of non-farming Iowans was on full display in Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig’s April 19 opinion piece in Register. As the Des Moines Water Works operates the world’s largest nitrate removal facility almost every day now, Naig and his pals at the Agribusiness Association of Iowa are responding by offering free soil nitrogen testing in five counties upstream of Des Moines.
If testing shows your soil already has a lot of nitrogen, then you can logically apply less nitrogen fertilizer. The fact that farmers need to be paid to do the testing illustrates what many of us have known all along: that a lot of them apply too much, often at the encouragement from people selling fertilizer. Even hinting that fertilizer is applied excessively has imperiled and degraded at least a few careers over the past 40 years in Iowa.
Naig tells us the soil test can help farmers’ bottom line. Since that is the case, why should the public support such an expenditure? Soil nitrogen testing is not some exciting and emergent technology that needs to be ground-truthed through a fancy pilot program. The test was developed in 1984 and was strongly promoted here in Iowa in the 1990s. Most farmers have shunned such testing for reasons upon which we’re left to speculate. But surely one is that there have been no consequences for the nitrate pollution that results from over-application of fertilizer and manure, often done as insurance against unfavorable growing conditions…