Growing up, I learned to canoe in my backyard.
No, I didn’t have the good fortune of riverfront access or a stately pond out the backdoor. Like a lot of Iowans, I had a cornfield.
The field has a gentle valley descending towards our yard, and when we got a decent enough rainfall – I wasn’t watching the precip totals back then, but it happened a couple times every year – we’d get a gently running stream, maybe 10-15’ wide and 6-12” deep flowing through.
I’d excitedly run down to the barn, flip the canoe, and start paddling up and down the ~100 yard stretch we owned, my own little canoe slalom course, catching toads and practicing the art of solo canoeing.
Sometime in high school, the cornfield changed tenants. The new farmers planted the basin around our yard to hay, and I never got to paddle my backyard again.
Shortly before I moved back home in 2015, it changed hands again. The new tenant not only planted the hillside to corn again, he resurveyed the property and added few tenths of an acre to his 450 acre field, and planted that to corn, too. My folks had thought it was part of our property for 25 years; it was a magnificent jungle of ragweed and mulberry, black raspberries, and some crumbled concrete from an old foundation.
I’d gone back there to catch crickets and fireflies. I remember as a child my mom telling me I could catch songbirds by hand if I could “sprinkle salt on their tails,” and I spent hours crouched in the tall weeds with a salt shaker, waiting for cardinals to get close enough. The salt never seemed to work though.
Only years later would she tell me, “the point was if you got that close to just grab them.”
So many hours wasted.
But now those couple hundred square feet of my own private wilderness is gone, and the ephemeral river returned. No longer fit for paddling, though; the river ran through tall corn stalks or stubble, flooding almost every year. It no longer disappeared a day or two after the rain. It stuck around, sometimes for a week or more, becoming fetid and mosquito laden.
Two years ago, the farmer installed more drain tile. The county spent thousands of dollars replacing a culvert at the end of the valley, installing a bigger culvert that could move the water out faster. Faster, to silver creek, a small stream with no riparian buffer, that I’d have to drive past if I wanted to go catch creek chubs or crawdads because silver creek had none.
Nearly every year, the waterway that got converted to more corn, produced none. Thankfully, after thousands of dollars, that pesky necessary-ingredient-for-all-living-things is rapidly sent packing
A lot of ink has been spilled about Iowa’s water quality, on both sides. You have agricultural interests touting the nutrient reduction strategy, the increases in conservation practices like no-till, cover crops, terraces, bioswales, prairie strips, and more – proven tools in the kit for improving Iowa’s water quality without sacrificing farmers’ livelihoods.
That is objectively true; despite the fact that the nutrient reduction plan is entirely voluntary, we have more of those practices on the ground than ever before.
On the other side lies another objective truth; our problems are getting worse. In the decade following the publication of the (totally voluntary and not at all legally binding) nutrient reduction strategy, more of Iowa’s waterways have fallen onto the “impaired” list. The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico appears mostly unchanged, if not larger than it was before the NRS.
Our topsoil, some of the richest most productive soil on earth, is more than 1/3rd gone. Most of it is at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, a lot of it is slowly making its way there by stream, choking fish and aquatic invertebrates along the way, homogenizing streambeds that once had riffles and gravel bottoms and log jams and meanders long ago straightened to drain floodplains.
Our main water pollutants – soil, nitrogen, and phosphorous – have increased instead of decreased. Toxic algae blooms stemming from those excess nutrients create regular closures of public beaches during high summer, when we’d like them most.
Our well water is contaminated with known cancer-causing poisons leached from ag fields. People get E. Coli by visiting public beaches. Toxins produced by blue-green algae can quickly kill dogs who dare jump out of a canoe for a drink.
Environmentalists and conservationists, hunters and anglers, and yes, lots and lots and LOTS of farmers, hate that this is happening. In fact, I would struggle to think of anyone who takes pride in the way we’ve sacrificed a fundamental element of life in the name of more high-fructose corn syrup.
So what gives? Why is it getting worse when we know how to make it better? Those new-fangled conservation practices laid out in the NRS really do work, and there really are more of them than ever before, so why aren’t they… ya know… working?
We can find the answer in my childhood backyard, a story echoed all over the state. For every one step forward we take – like converting an unproductive section of field to something more sustainable – we take two steps back, or three, or four.
All over, those little nicks and cuts – removing a fence for another row here, a little anhydrous overapplied there, another barn to house a few more hogs and their excrement – it all keeps happening faster than the mitigations are implemented.
It's not just farmers, either. Less than a mile from my parents’ house, there used to be a horse pasture. Now it’s pavement, with cookie-cutter houses and fertilized lawns mowed short. Around the corner is a new storage facility, with steel roofs and a large parking lot. More water, shunted off the landscape and swept ASAP to silver creek.
No one person, no one group, is doing any of this maliciously, or irrationally. They’re all doing it to better their position in life, understandably so. Indeed, this is such a fundamental part of human nature there’s even a framework for describing it.
Iowa’s water quality issues are a natural consequence of an all-carrot, no-stick approach to land use.
Well, maybe not quite. The problem is only a few people get the carrot – the prosperity of using the commons – but every one of us gets the stick. We get whacked when an old fishing hole fills in with silt. We get whacked when our Memorial Day weekend plans get sacked because of a beach closure due to harmful algae blooms.
So it’s obvious that simply asking people to do the right thing will not get us out of this mess. Most producers cannot afford to change their whole operation just because they know they “should.” I know I should go to the dentist more often, but here we are.
A bigger stick probably isn’t fair, either. Who do you punish for the state of the Turkey River, a million-acre watershed with thousands of landowners, many of which are absentee owners renting out their ground? Do you pro-rate a fine to every landowner based on their acreage? That’s absurd, of course.
We need some sticks, obviously, and they need to be bigger than, say, fining a $9 billion-a-year company $8,000 for failing to even keep track of their wastewater for two years. If I make $50,000 a year, and I get fined less than a nickel for burning tires in my yard, I’ll probably keep doing it since it’s cheaper than the gas to take it to a proper disposal facility.
But we need the conservation carrot to outweigh the commodity carrot. We need to appeal to our innate, selfish desires as human beings. And meeting the basic standards for us to all enjoy our basic freedoms on the water takes less than you might think.
For instance, converting 10% of a field to prairie strips can eliminate soil loss by more than 90%. Cost-sharing exists through state and federal programs to ease the burden on producers in installing these strips, but it still costs the owner money to do the right thing.
That’s a complete absurdity. No matter how effective these practices are shown to be, at the scale we need them it’s simply asking too much for sheer altruism to win the day. Plenty of producers can’t personally afford a hit to their bottom line when the reward is little more than a pat on the back. Nor should they have to.
Meanwhile, the rest of us can’t afford to reschedule our vacation, or pay medical bills when our tap makes us sick. Municipalities can’t afford to keep spending millions on their wastewater treatment to keep up with the growing load of harmful chemicals. Nor should they have to.
Because that money is already being spent, as what farmers call “opportunity cost,” every time a taxpayer leaves the state in search of somewhere with functioning ecosystems and healthy water.
It's being spent every time a family plans a summer trip to the Boundary Waters or the Ozarks instead of Lake Okoboji or Lake Rathbun.
It's being spent right here, building higher levees and bigger culverts to accommodate increased flows, the land-use equivalent of adding another bilge pump to a boat without a drain plug rather than keeping the water where we want it in the first place.
We have to push our leaders – all of them, every party, from city councils to senators and presidents – to protect the commons. Help your local officials find a piece of city property being mowed for no reason, and help them restore it to native vegetation.
Call your state representatives and tell them to fund the trust, so we can grow the carrot that producers need to put good practices on the ground.
Put your money where your mouth is, no matter how small, by growing some native plants in a part of your yard you don’t really need.
Fond as those memories are, I never want to canoe in my parents’ backyard ever again. I want to take my dog canoeing on the Turkey and not worry he might take a drink.
Looking Back
Busy, busy, busy month around our parks! We kicked the month off on July 10th with a beautiful evening exploring Prairies and Fireflies at the Motor Mill Historic Site. 10 intrepid night owls came out and the fireflies did not disappoint! If you get a chance to find a good natural area - like one of our prairies - before their activity winds down for the year, you won't regret it.
Two days later, Motor played host again for the S.T.E.A.M camp, helping budding conservationists get their hands dirty and their brains sharp by engaging all the different, creative ways humans' minds find wonder in the natural world.
The next week, our day camp series continued with a sports camp here at Osborne, highlighting all the ways to enjoy a little friendly competition and an elevated heart rate in the great outdoors.
The day after that, on July 18th, the O.W.L.S. took a tour of the Secrest barn in West Liberty. The long drive was well worth it for this unique, octagonal barn that's truly an architectural, agricultural marvel.
Just one day later, back to the wee ones! This time, day campers took a trip to Bixby state preserve and backbone state park to examine some of Iowa's most unique geological and biological sites. Perfect weather to bathe in the fog rolling out of Bixby's ice cave!
Then on the 24th, a new crop of day campers explored the wonderful woodlands around Osborne park, dissecting logs and aging trees and learning a few species... collecting a few toads... You know how kids do in the woods.
And just two days after that, some youngsters got up close and personal with the aforementioned Turkey River watershed (thankfully on a "clean" day), with a River Rats Float and adventure from Elkader to Motor Mill. Finally, on July 27th, our seasonal naturalist Nick Schaefers busted out the "net" to do some "sky fishing," a unique and fascinating activity using a bedsheet and a lamp to attract and document moths flying by night at Motor Mill. In between all that, it was the time of year to do our annual bat surveys for the Iowa DNR and Iowa State University. This was year five of the program, and we look forward to getting the results! Speaking of nighttime, the Osborne Campground is coming along beautifully. The electricity and sewer lines are just about hooked up, she's just waiting for the finishing touches. Right on schedule to open for camping season in 2025. Looking Forward
The first week of August will see our last Hunter Education course of the year. Keep an eye on our website and facebook for future offerings! I saw a mighty fine looking buck at the Becker East wildlife area just two weeks ago... On August 9th, we'll be hosting a backyard biochar workshop at the Osborne Pond, where we'll get a little sooty exploring how to make this miraculous substance that might - might - hold some promise in improving the efficiency of some of those aforementioned water quality improvement practices. Call Osborne at 563-245-1516 to reserve a spot for this free workshop. The night after, on August 10th, we'll be hosting a Night at the Inn at the Motor Mill Historic Site, with music and plein-air artists showing off their work. There'll be some hands-on opportunities as well, so bring out the family! Finally, on August 20th, the O.W.L.S. will make the journey to Marquette to set sail on the Maiden Voyage with the legendary Robert Vavre. Prior to departure, the group will feast on a fish fry courtesy of one of the finest rough-fish chefs you've ever met. Still a few spots left so call and sign up quick!