Democrats Need to Go on the Offensive on Water Quality

Hold Republicans accountable for failure to clean up our water

Robert Leonard

and

Matt Russell

Jul 24, 2025

Spreading hog manure in rural Mahaska County.

This column was written with my friend and fellow Iowa Writers Collaborative Member, Matt Russell. Matt is a co-owner of Coyote Run Farm and writes at “Growing New Leaders: Perspectives from Coyote Run Farm.” This column is cross-posted there. Please consider subscribing to Matt’s column. He shares insights there that no one else has. Photos are mine. Matt is the first author of this column—Substack automatically puts my name first on my posts.

Most Democrats believe in farmers and ranchers. It’s clear Republicans don’t. Republicans used to talk the talk even as they didn’t walk the walk. But now they don’t even talk the talk.

The Trump administration has taken a hatchet to the Biden-era programs that invested in farmer-led, environmentally focused solutions to challenges such as water quality and climate change.

Iowa Democrats seem to be flat-footed in responding to the issues of water quality and agriculture. They don’t need to be.

We are at a tipping point with respect to public opinion demanding action on water quality in Iowa. Republican inaction, lies, and misdirection are at the core. Other factors also come into play, including Iowa’s high cancer rate, and the banning of lawn watering in the Des Moines Metro because of high nitrogen levels in the water supply. These are high-profile events.

The battle is about whether elected leaders believe farmers can help solve the problem or not. Democrats need to double and triple down on the fact that they do. And every time they speak about water quality, they need to point out that Republicans are not investing in farmers to help solve the problem. They need to make the Republicans defend their actions as they cancel programs, cut funding, and slash the technical assistance that farmers had been counting on to help clean up our water, improve the health of our soil, provide more habitat for wildlife, and help solve the climate crisis.

Democrats need to hold Republicans accountable because in the 10 years Republicans have had control of state government, Iowa's water quality has gotten worse.

Trees have continued to be taken out on highly erodible land that is then tilled to raise corn and soybeans. Some farmers continue to hang iron over the streambank. Others farm into road ditches. Grasslands have been converted, and cow-calf operators find it increasingly difficult to find pasture. Manure and fertilizer are over-applied, especially where animal agriculture has become overly concentrated.

While Republicans talk about supporting farmers, ranchers, and rural communities through voluntary conservation, their actions and inaction during the first six months of Trump 47 reveal their hypocrisy. They aren’t investing in voluntary efforts by Iowa farmers; they are divesting.

Republicans, who have provided lip service for voluntary programs, have set our state on a course towards regulation. Democrats are now being asked to fix our water quality and other environmental challenges related to Iowa agriculture. If elected, we hope they will be eager to do so by partnering with the farmers ready to do it.

Politically, that has to start with Democrats pointing out that Republican leadership has been failing the farmers and ranchers, ready to put their operations to work to help deliver solutions. And with President Trump now leading the Republican party, those cuts to voluntary programs and the farmers ready to lead have become catastrophic.

If voluntary won’t work and regulation becomes necessary, Republicans will be directly to blame.

Democrats need to be swinging the bat at the Republicans who refuse to invest in farmer-led conservation. Make Republicans defend the cuts to conservation programs meant to support farmers and ranchers who want to clean up the water, save our soil, and provide additional environmental benefits. Make Republicans defend the cuts to the staff at USDA who provide support to farmers and rural communities. Hold Republicans responsible for millions upon millions of dollars of federal funding cuts at Iowa’s public universities, much of which was meant to support Iowa farmers and rural communities and the American way of life.

Here's how to beat Republicans. Be loud and proud about how much Democrats believe in investing in farmers and unapologetic in pointing out how Republicans have been failing to support Iowa farmers willing to go the extra mile to improve water quality and soil health. And since President Trump took back the White House in January, that failure of support has become an attack on voluntary conservation programs and the farmers who want to use them.

Republicans have cut somewhere between 50 and 100 million dollars in conservation funding this year alone for Iowa farmers. Republicans had been telling us that it’s coming, and it’s just on pause. They will now argue that the funding is in the Reconciliation package and will be available in the next farm bill for conservation.

That doesn’t change the fact that those dollars aren’t available in this growing season for Iowa farmers. That's a lost growing season. You don't get that back. As we debate water quality right now in Iowa, in this growing season, those dollars promised to Iowa farmers through the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) at USDA were not available. Iowa farmers had planned to use that money in the Environmental Quality Incentive Program, Conservation Stewardship Program, Regional Conservation Partnership Program, and the Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities.

Chris Clayton, DTN Ag Policy Editor, writes frequently about USDA funding. These two posts provide more detail about the funding cuts resulting from the Trump Administration's canceling billions of dollars meant for implementation in 2025. “Federal Agencies Must Release IRA Funds: Federal Judge Orders USDA and Other Departments to Release Frozen IRA Dollars.” “USDA Cuts Hit RCPP Grant Projects: Groups Weigh Options After USDA Rescinds $1 Billion in Regional Conservation Grants.”

Farmers worked up proposals that exceeded the full funding originally available. In other words, even before the cuts, the programs had more interest than funding. Republicans are outright lying to Iowans when they say they support voluntary programs and then make such dramatic cuts to those programs. If Republicans believed in farmers, those innovations led by farmers would be in the fields instead of in a filing cabinet for possible consideration a year or two or more down the road.

As farmers face economic headwinds and criticism about water quality, the Trump administration canceled the checks. And every Republican in Iowa who should have been standing up for Iowa farmers either made excuses for these cuts or remained silent.

Republicans have been all in on resisting outcome-based accountability. Outcome-based accountability is how we accelerate the best practices on the most important acres. We can also use the outcome-based results to reward farmers when their innovations pay off with measurable results.

You can punish the bad actors with regulation, and we might have to go there. You can also reward the best innovators and stewards and have others follow their lead. Republicans want neither. They are hell bent against empowering the farmers willing to develop the solutions, AND won't hold the bad actors accountable. And thus, we don't see improvements, and it’s Iowa Republicans that need to be held accountable for shitty water.

Stream below a muddy cattle lot in rural Mahaska County. The stream drains directly into the Des Moines River, perhaps a quarter of a mile away.

How hard do Republicans work to prevent outcome-based solutions so farmers doing their best jobs can’t get paid for providing better environmental outcomes? They tried to kill the water monitoring program at the University of Iowa. They have fought every attempt to put accountability into the nutrient reduction strategy.

The Trump administration has also attempted to kill anything related to climate change. Including, and especially, agricultural solutions to the climate crisis, which also provide multiple environmental benefits, including cleaner water.

We wrote about these efforts frequently in 2019-2021. Here’s one of our first op-eds in the New York Times in March 2019. ‘Our Small Towns Are Toppling Like Dominoes’: Why We Should Cut Some Farmers a Check: For pennies a meal, the federal government can incentivize better environmental services.

Agriculture had moved past climate change denial, and the federal government was putting farmers at the table to leverage the resources to help solve one of the biggest problems facing humanity. Under President Trump, Republicans have taken away billions of dollars for farmers to implement voluntary and increasingly market-based solutions to the climate crisis. But even worse, with their climate change-denying identity politics, they've taken away the American farmers’ and ranchers’ seats at the table for global leadership. Talk about not believing in farmers.

The Trump administration is gutting research at both Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Farmers are not anti-science. They depend on it every day. And often they lean in and do it themselves. The attack on our research institutions completely undermines the voluntary approach for farmers to be part of the solution.

Gutting the staff at USDA and other federal agencies like the National Weather Service also means farmers will have less publicly available knowledge to implement solutions on the land.

This isn’t new. Republicans have long been hypocritical about investing in farmers to help solve water quality and other environmental challenges. In 2017, Republicans ended the funding for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.

That they killed the Leopold Center in the first session of their first legislature after winning total control of state government with both chambers and the governor’s office is pretty solid evidence that their silence now is grounded in their actual beliefs.

For ten years, Republicans have used public policy to oppose farmers providing our state with production of crops and livestock and producing environmental benefits at the same time. It’s high time that Democrats expose the deception of their rhetoric to the contrary.

In keeping with those politics, Republicans will argue that Democrats are campaigning against rural Iowans in general and farmers in particular. That’s not true. Democrats can’t let Republicans control this narrative. Democrats must campaign against Republicans, who are the ones unwilling to make transformative investments in Iowa farming families and rural communities.

Republicans, for purely political reasons, argue that all farmers are good stewards of the land, livestock, and water. That simply isn’t true.

Many farmers do better at conservation because they believe in it. Many more want to improve and have been applying for programs at their county USDA Service Center in greater numbers than there are funds available. Staff from local Soil and Water Conservation Districts, Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, and partner organizations like Pheasants Forever support the NRCS team to empower farmers to innovate on their farms for better conservation.

Republicans are dismantling that support system, which means farmers wanting to do more are getting less. The farmers who are truly bad actors when it comes to conservation will have less accountability. Republicans are setting forth a future where farmers who want to do less conservation or none at all will have better access to USDA programs and support than the farmers who want to expand their conservation.

Led by the Trump Administration, Republicans are cutting everything while they still claim that we need a voluntary approach. They are literally gutting the resources for the voluntary efforts they claim to support.

When you win the political battle, then you get to do the policy. Republicans have been winning the political battle in rural Iowa and have thus followed with policy. Democrats need to frame a political battle around the policies that Republicans have been implementing that reveal the truth that Republicans don’t actually believe in farmers. They don’t want farmers to solve environmental problems. In the first six months of the Trump Administration, Republicans have revealed they don’t believe in rural America.

When Democrats run scared of offending farmers and rural communities by not taking on Republicans directly, they don't inspire rural Iowans with a vision of leadership, and they really piss off urban Iowans. That's terrible politics. That’s a two-fer of a losing approach.

Democrats need to do better in their politics to hold Republicans accountable for the policies that are undermining the very investments farmers are ready to make on their farms to provide Iowans, Americans, and the world what we all need.

The approach of attacking Republican values around their policies in rural Iowa can be a winning approach for Democrats. This isn’t only about water quality and farmers. This is about the entire Republican set of policies that have become crystal clear with the agenda of the second Trump Administration.

Don’t take the Republican bait of putting Democratic policy on the table first. Instead, point out that Democrats have been willing and will continue to be willing to invest in rural Iowans. Democrats will fight for these investments because they believe in farmers, rural health providers, public schools, new Iowans, main street businesses, and the value of rural people and communities.

There is going to have to be more government, not less. And it needs to be smart government. That’s an opening for Democrats. Smart government can mean more opportunities for farmers and rural Americans, not less.

In terms of farmers and water quality, Republican leadership has resulted in fewer resources for farmers to implement the practices that will improve our water, save our soil, provide more resilience to extreme weather, and help create the solutions that will get us out of the climate crisis.

The challenge with water quality isn’t a trap for Iowa Democrats. It’s an incredible political opportunity to punch Republicans in the nose. And if Democrats don’t deliver that punch, all Iowans, and not just rural Iowans, will recognize they aren’t swinging.

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