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Funding Iowa water quality projects presents challenge
Iowa Soybean Association president Wayne Fredericks
Iowa farmers are constantly being challenged to do more to help reduce nutrient runoff and improve water quality.
But according to Wayne Fredericks, president of the Iowa Soybean Association (ISA), finding the funds to help farmers implement major water quality projects is a big challenge.
“You know, many of these practices are edge-of-field practices such as bioreactors and saturated buffers and some these practices that really have no economic benefit to the producer himself,” Fredericks says. “So those are really difficult to fund in light of the economic conditions out there on the farm right now.”
Fredericks says an increase in state funding assistance is probably not in the cards for 2016.
“We raised our gas tax last year in the Iowa legislature and nobody likes to talk about additional taxes at this time,” he says.
One possibility is a proposal to raise Iowa’s sale tax by three-eighths of one percent to fund natural resources and outdoor recreation programs. “A lot of water quality work could be funded out of that type of tax,” Fredericks says. But legislation to that effect, which would have generated an estimated 180 million dollars annually for the Iowa Natural Resources and Outdoor Recreation Trust Fund, failed to win approval in the last legislative session.
Fredericks says ISA will continue to look for ways to provide more long-term funding assistance to farmers who want to implement water quality projects on their farms.
AUDIO: Wayne Fredericks
Why is it that farmers always need to be subsidized by American taxpayers to do what they should be doing to protect the environment and preventing the erosion of riparian areas on their own property!