Today we visited the Iowa Environmental Council and learned about how agricultural practices in Iowa are affecting the water quality both in Iowa bodies of water and in the Mississippi river, which flows all the way down into the Gulf of Mexico. Basically, Iowa has a lot of regulations for point source pollution but it does not have those same regulations for pollution from fertilizers spread on crops because that would be considered non-point source pollution. Non-point source pollution is more difficult to regulate.  Because the Iowa government does not regulate how Iowa farmers apply fertilizer to their land or how much of it they apply, the only thing they can do to lessen water pollution is to encourage better farming practices on a voluntary basis through subsidies, which is not working according to the Iowa Environmental Council. They are working towards creating policy changes that would regulate the methods that Iowa farmers use to apply fertilizers to their crops to decrease  pollution.

In his chapter on agriculture and the environment, Robert Paarlberg talks about a lot of the same issues as did the people from the Iowa Environmental Council. In Paarlberg’s chapter, he presents the conflicting views of the agricultural scientists and the environmentalists about various topics, but I’m not sure that the Iowa Environmental Council would have fit clearly into one of those two viewpoints from what I heard in its presentation. Paarlberg presents the environmentalists as those who encourage more small-scale farming and think that sustainable farming should attempt to imitate nature as much as possible. On the other hand, agricultural scientists tend to argue that to farm sustainably, farmers should try to use as many technological advances as possible to grow higher yields in smaller plots of land, therefore leaving the wilderness areas intact. While the presentation at the Iowa Environmental Council recognized that there were many problems with the conventional agricultural system and the way that many farmers applied fertilizers, they did not encourage a return to small-scale farming either, as they recognized the fact that farmers still need to turn a profit on their crops.