Adel, Ia. - State agriculture officials think they have the solution to the pollution problems caused by water that drains off the state's farms: Drain the water faster.
Shallow ponds like the one created with federal money on a Dallas County farm can destroy much of the pollution that runs off neighboring corn fields and eventually into Des Moines-area water supplies and on to the Gulf of Mexico.
The ponds hold the water long enough for bacteria to destroy nitrates that the water contains.
But few landowners are willing to give up cropland to create marshes, not with the price of corn and soybeans at historically high levels.
So the state Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship has come up with an idea that could make wetlands more enticing. Landowners would be allowed to replace the century-old network of drain pipes that snake under much of north-central Iowa in exchange for allowing property to be converted into wetlands.
The theory is that newer, larger pipes would drain farms faster, increasing crop yields significantly and boosting farm income, while the new wetlands would trap pollutants coming off the fields.
The wetlands would improve water quality for cities like Des Moines and help shrink an oxygen-depleted dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that is blamed on runoff of fertilizer from Midwest farms.
"We can't continue to deliver nitrates and phosphorus to the Gulf in the rates that it's going," said Chuck Gipp, director of the state agency's soil conservation division. "The upper Midwest is impacting what happens in the Gulf."
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