Easy and apparent it is, in our obstinate society, to apprehend farmers and producers for our environmental quandaries. Within a classroom setting, students are taught that increased nitrogen in our drinkable waters as well as gaseous nitrogen in our atmosphere are environmental calamities traced back to the poor conduct of rural farmers. Although such an hyperbole holds truth, I’m embarrassed to say, before today, I concurred with this tendentious argument. Yes, nitrogen runoff results from farmers’ failure to adopt voluntary conservation strategies that may foster the absorption of excess nitrogen into their soil rather than flow into nearby streams and rivers. However, unjustified it may be to consider their actions poor conduct. Is it really poor conduct to ignore planting cover crops that assume crop space on fields. Is it irrational for farmers to refuse transference to new strategies when their current efforts are profitable and have been adopted by their families for generations? I argue farmers can change their strategies and should be required to do so if failure to adopt voluntary conservation continues in the future. In a society where are natural resources may be at threat, we cannot merit our efforts on the basis of wants or what has been precedent in the past. We must falter to our needs, meaning significant changes in our actions is no longer a request. It’s a must.

However, we cannot allow for farmers to assume all the blame. Everyone one of us, including you, the reader, is responsible for nitrogen and, every one of us should be held accountable. Iowa State Representative, ,proposed her own solution to this emerging issue. She proffered that citizens should be required to pay a tax on the nitrogen they produce, in which everyone would pay for their cost on the environment and will provide incentives for environmental efficiency. There is no doubt, such a solution will be attacked by both sides of the coin, Democrats and Republicans, but; such a solution prevails over others that work only to benefit supporters of the USDA or the environmentalist in Iowa’s epic battle between the two. This battle contends because both sides believe they have the correct solutions which negatively propose significant costs on the other without any knowledge of the secondary consequences it may also cause on the other. It will take the minds of changing culture, an open society, in America to proffer solutions that may mend our broken environment. It will require a society that doesn’t see in black and white, one that can find the areas in which environmental goals and agricultural needs intersect.This will be the age of Millennials, the age of deliberative and divergent thinking, the age of solutions, the age of environmental peace.