Three northern Iowa farmers have formed a non-profit to spread the message that cover crops and buffer strips along waterways are essential to improving Iowa’s water quality.
They call themselves “The Lobe Rangers” because they all farm in the Des Moines Lobe, some of the most fertile farmland in Iowa. Zach Smith, a fifth-generation farmer from Lake Mills, said the voluntary approach to preventing soil and nutrient runoff from farmland, the “Nutrient Reduction Strategy” state officials released in 2013, isn’t working. “I was excited. I remember going to the first rollout meetings for it. I had just adopted strip till in 2011 and was adopting cover crops in 2013 and 2014 and I thought this is great,” Smith said. “Then time went on and there were just not that many folks that followed along because it’s a voluntary program. There are no deadlines or consequences for not doing so.”
Matt Borman, a fifth-generation farmer from Algona, said the voluntary approach isn’t getting the kind of results that are needed to improve water quality statewide. “There’s a lot of farmers that are doing conservation practices that are getting fed up that we’re not seeing enough adoption and so about the fall of 2023 I started a peer group to try to get a group of farmers together that feel the same way,” Borman said. “…At some point, somebody had to take the lead.”…