(July 10, 2025) We can’t fix the water until we face the truth about who’s farming—and who’s not. Iowa is in the middle of a water disaster. This summer, nitrate levels in the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers spiked so high that Des Moines Water Works was forced to run its nitrate removal system nearly nonstop—driving up costs for more than 600,000 central Iowans. Meanwhile, over 750 Iowa waterways are classified as impaired, and E. coli closures are turning beach visits into health hazards. In rural Iowa, private wells have tested above the EPA’s nitrate safety limit at rates approaching 10%.
Despite decades of voluntary conservation efforts, pollution is getting worse. And still, lawmakers refuse to regulate. Why? Because Iowa policy continues to rely on an outdated story—one we desperately want to believe.
We picture the Iowa farmer as a hands-on steward of the land: living on the farm, drinking from the same well, and doing right by neighbors and future generations. It’s a comforting image, and one that’s been politically useful. But it’s no longer true for most of Iowa’s farmland.
Today, only 42% of Iowa farmland is owner-operated. Nearly 30% of Iowa farmland is owned by out-of-state landlords, and over 50% of farmland owners have no personal farming experience. More than 40% of farmland is held in trusts, LLCs, or corporate structures. Many landowners treat farmland as a retirement nest egg or investment portfolio—not as a place to protect.
This gap between myth and reality has consequences. Voluntary conservation assumes that farmers are connected to their land and invested in its future. But in a system driven by distant ownership and short-term leases, pollution is often nobody’s responsibility.
Millions of acres are owned by absentee landlords, investment firms, and out-of-state entities. Platforms like AcreTrader allow investors with no ties to Iowa to buy shares in farmland. Foreign-owned companies—such as Syngenta, which is controlled by a Chinese state-owned firm—own acreage in counties like Boone. Some land is held by trusts with dozens of distant heirs or managed by corporate land aggregators who prioritize yield over long-term stewardship. These owners rarely see the creeks their fields drain into—and often never will.
Tenant farmers in Iowa often operate under short-term leases—sometimes renewed year to year, or even season to season—leaving them with little security and little incentive to invest in long-term conservation. Practices like cover crops, buffer strips, or no-till farming require upfront costs and pay off over time, but if the lease ends before the benefits are realized, the investment is lost. And most landlords, especially absentee or institutional ones, don’t include conservation requirements in their leases. The result is a system that rewards yield over stewardship, and short-term gain over long-term care.
Still, across Iowa, there are farmers who live on their land and treat clean water like it matters—because it does. Farmers like Denise O’Brien of Rolling Acres Farm in Atlantic, who has spent decades growing organic vegetables and advocating for environmental justice. Or the members of Practical Farmers of Iowa, who voluntarily collect water samples and use cover crops to reduce nitrate runoff. Groups like the Women, Food, and Agriculture Network train landowners—especially women inheriting land—to incorporate conservation into lease agreements. These producers build soil, rotate crops, restore native prairie buffers, and model what’s possible when land is treated as something to care for, not extract from.
But they remain the exception. State law isn’t built to support those who are doing it right. It protects those who aren’t.
If Iowa’s water policies were shaped around the real practices of conservation-minded farmers—those who live on and care for their land—rather than the outdated myth that all farmers already do this, we’d have stronger protections in place.
Instead, we legislate for an imaginary majority and leave the real leaders unsupported.
The truth is simple: clean water can’t survive a system built on wishful thinking. Neither can we.
“The farm you grew up on… became a sense of place that we really miss, because now agriculture is large corporate farms that have no sense of place. It’s a way of life that is largely gone.”
—Dr. Dennis R. Keeney, founding director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture
Sources:
USDA 2014 TOTAL Survey & 2022 Census of Agriculture
Des Moines Water Works nitrate reports, 2023–2025
Iowa Department of Natural Resources (2024 impaired waters list)
Iowa Environmental Council (nitrate & well contamination data)
Practical Farmers of Iowa; Iowa Farm Bureau
Women, Food, and Agriculture Network (WFAN)
Keeney, D. (Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture)
AcreTrader investor filings; Syngenta property records via Iowa Capital Dispatch