A McDermott Farms Honey Wagon returning for a load. |
The Democrats drummed Joe Biden out, but 10 years older and infinitely more on ag questions Charles Grassley is going strong. This is no credit to the Republican Party, the Farm Bureau, Grassley himself or the rest of the superstructure that keeps him in power.
Last week 17 beaches were closed in Iowa for excess E-coli bacteria--liberally applied to Iowa fields as animal manure, from hog, dairy and poultry operations, but I thought if we just got control of Grassley, & Big Ag, the environment would recover overnight. Not so according Dan Egan, the author of The Devil's Element, who quotes David Schindler, who devoted his life to outlining the effects of Phosphorus, which it sounds like is a bigger problem than nitrogen.
On page 165 of The Devil's Element, he says: "What we better be prepare to do is make pretty draconian restrictions on phosphorus applications and on land uses that promote runoff, but then also be patient... This isn't going to happen in a few years. It's that patience factor that always stymies things, because for some reason people can spend 50 years screwing up a lake but expect to be able to fix it in a couple years. It just isn't the way it happens."
No comments:
Post a Comment