Des Moines, Iowa-The Iowa Corn Growers Association in a guest column Oct. 26 in the Des Moines Register strongly objected to the state’s agriculture being portrayed by the newspaper and Gov. Chet Culver as waterway polluters. On the contrary, insisted Dean Taylor, president of the association, Iowa farmers have made measurable progress in conservation and water quality, drastically reducing over the past 25 years the per-bushel use of nitrogen and phosphorus by as much as 50 percent since 1980. “The (Register) editorial said farmers should consider a rate of 1.2 pounds per bushel. But the fact is, in every year since 1996, Iowa’s fertilizer application rate has been less than 1.1 pounds per bushel. The most recent year’s data shows we are now down to 0.97,” Taylor emphasized in his response. He underscored how these improvements have been achieved through voluntary programs that have reduced sediment reaching Iowa’s waters by 130,947 tons per year and phosphorus by 202,312 pounds per year; reduced land use and energy needed to produce a bushel of corn by 37 percent while increasing land yields by 31.3 bushels per acre; enrolled nearly 600,000 acres in the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, which is more than any other state in the nation; and voluntarily restored more than 250,000 acres of wetlands. Between 1996 and 2006, he added, levels of 11 herbicides and insecticides were found by USGS to be on the decline in Iowa and other Corn Belt waterways. “And, perhaps more important,” Taylor wrote, “Iowa farmers through their corn check-off have invested several million dollars in research regarding nitrogen use efficiency. Over the past eight years, check-off funded researchers have been working through biotechnology to insert a gene into the corn plant that will require at least 20 percent less nitrogen per bushel.”
Transparency Across the Fertilizer Value-Chain