On Tuesday we woke up in Iowa City and drove to the University of Iowa to meet Dr. Dave Cwiertny who is the Director at Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination at the University of Iowa. He spoke to us about water contamination in Iowa and how it effects public health. He touched on how manure use, and practices can have unhealthy affects that cause, air and water pollution. I loved visiting Iowa University. I don’t know what I was expecting exactly but I was really impressed by the campus and I loved the University. Iowa City was very trendy and fun. We were fortunate enough to have time before our next appointment and we got to independently explore the city for a little. The girls and I walked around popping into little boutiques and shops. We went in a book store and a retro comic shop. It was nice to bond with the other girls and explore the city a little bit. We decided on a place to eat and sat outside, as it was an uncharacteristically nice day that day, to enjoy our meal.

After eating we met back up at our glorious van to journey on to a nearby park to meet with Dr. Chris Jones, who is a research Engineer for the Iowa Institute Hydraulic Research. I missed the beginning of his talk as it took place on the other side of a grove of poison ivy of which I am incredibly allergic, but fortunately the rest of the discussion took place at nearby picnic table. I was interested and a little put off by some of his comments. He spoke positively about round-up and said in defense of round-up having been accused of causing cancer, “anything in excess can be bad for you.” He then went on to compare round up to peanut butter saying that too much peanut butter would also be bad for you. In my mind this argument makes zero sense. I was incredibly surprised that someone who researches water and health effects would have anything positive to say about round up. He even said that he believes overall, round up is a good tool. I also found him to be a bit cocky in his opinions. We have spoken to many people that are classified as experts in their own fields and many of them have had differing opinions that contradict each other. Of course, they each claim that they are right, and their research is right and everyone else is wrong. This makes it hard to know exactly what is true. I found Dr. Jones to be especially cocky in his opinions and his capacity to have the right answers. He also argued that increasing soil health is not always the right thing to do. This is an oxymoron. Improving the heath of soil is always a good thing. He argued that healthy soil has more nitrogen and farmers are so used to putting nitrogen on their fields because their soil does not have enough nitrogen. Therefore, is the soil being healthy and the farmers are spraying nitrogen, there will be way too much nitrogen. This argument seems kind of ridiculous to me. The farmers can just stop spraying nitrogen. This saves them money and effort. It seems like a win win. He also said that corn is at the top of the food chain in farming, like buying a corvette- I would argue it’s the easiest and most common crop is Iowa and would be more of the Toyota Camry of crops, everyone in Iowa is growing corn. Chestnut trees are much riskier with a higher investment and higher payout which seems much more like the corvette of farming.