Recent Blogs - 2026

posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, August 17, 2026 Mike Delaney has been testing Iowa's water for 20 years with a strip and a vial. A mussel bed, he learned, does the same job but over 50 years. Here's what mussels are telling us about the Raccoon River - and why one species of fish can mean the difference between a working ecosystem and a dead zone.

posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, August 14, 2026 For 10 years, Iowans could access data about nitrate levels and other water quality indicators in real time, via monitors that automatically updated a public dashboard every 15 minutes. Then the legislature voted to cut the funding. Here's how local money kept the sensor network operational - and why it can't last without state support.

posted by Kean Roberts on Friday, August 7, 2026 "One word drives me as a person: accountability." A Linn County farmer on cover crops, cost-shares, and why he wanted his edge-of-field practices somewhere the neighbors would have to drive past them.

posted by Kean Roberts on Friday, August 7, 2026 One acre of Iowa wetland removes roughly 1,340 pounds of nitrate-nitrogen a year, and it can do that while occupying less than one percent of the land draining into it. Here's how - and why Iowa needs to revitalize this once-lost ecosystem.

posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, July 31, 2026 Today, Iowa considers a stream unsafe for swimming at 235 E. coli CFU per 100 milliliters. In the late 1920s, the water downstream of Des Moines measured 135,000. Before you wish for the water quality of a century ago, it's worth knowing what that water was actually like. The challenges we face today are daunting - but different from those a century ago.

posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, July 24, 2026 What if the solution to Iowa's flooding problem has been practiced for centuries - just not here? Kate Giannini, Program Manager at IIHR - Hydroscience and Engineering at the University of Iowa, traveled to Delft, Netherlands on a Fulbright Specialist grant to find out. What she brought back is already changing how Iowa communities like Columbus Junction prepare for the next flood.

posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, July 23, 2026 Most people think Iowa's water quality problem begins and ends on the farm. The Iowa Stormwater Education Partnership (ISWEP) is here to complicate that story. When rain falls on a rooftop, parking lot, or street, it picks up oil, fertilizer, road salt, and debris before flowing untreated directly into the nearest waterway. ISWEP helps more than 75 Iowa cities, counties, and universities tackle this overlooked source of pollution through a variety of methods.

posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, July 17, 2026 Iowa's water quality crisis has been decades in the making - and the solution has been standing in the field the whole time. Iowa Farmers Union makes the case that farmers and ranchers already have the tools to fix what ails Iowa's waterways through natural infrastructure. The only thing missing is a system that rewards them for it.

posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, July 16, 2026 When the Cedar River flooded in 2008 and nitrate levels in the city's aquifer began to climb, Cedar Rapids had a choice: build bigger treatment infrastructure, or work with the farmers upstream. They chose both - and a decade later, the data are starting to show what that bet looks like. Mary Beth Stevenson, the city's Watersheds and Source Water Program Manager, explains how natural infrastructure is changing the math on water quality in the Cedar River watershed.

posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, July 9, 2026 Not all water worries are equal - and knowing which one applies to you, in your specific relationship to a river, matters more than a generalized fear of Iowa's waterways. Guest author, Rick Dietz, offers something rarer than a list of contaminants: a perspective from the water itself. In this piece, he draws on years of moving through Iowa's rivers to argue that getting close enough to notice what is healthy, what is changing, and what has been damaged is a form of stewardship.