Funding the IIHR Water Sensors: It Shouldn’t Have to Be This Hard

GOP legislators are reluctant to fully fund the water sensors. Who should be responsible for monitoring Iowa’s water?

by Diane Rosenberg | Executive Director

$300,000.

That’s all the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Appropriations Committee proposed allocating to fund the state’s real-time water monitoring network. The Senate committee allocated $Nothing.

The University of Iowa IIHR Iowa Water Quality Information System network is a nationally respected, state-of-the-art network and the only one providing continuous nitrate monitoring every 15 minutes throughout Iowa. You can learn more about it here. It needs $600,000 to fully operate and it will go dark on June 30 unless the state acts before the session ends.

Legislators are hearing from a lot of people demanding they the fund sensors. You would think these elected officials might care a little more about what Iowans want. After all, a Global Strategy Group poll found 82% of Iowans are likely to vote for a candidate that makes protecting clean water a priority.

Yet, the state legislators can’t even come together to provide the minimum $600,000 to operate approximately 60 sensors at their current level, nor another needed one-time allocation of $500,000 to replace old equipment.

If legislators felt a responsibility to know what’s in our water in order to better protect Iowans, they could even expand water sensor funding to include monitoring for additional harmful pollutants like toxic algae blooms, PFAS, carcinogenetic byproducts of chemical water disinfection above Safe Drinking Water Act limits, and more. Annually, $1 million would do it.

That’s only 32¢ an Iowan. To know what’s in our water. Only 32¢ each for you and I.

The money is there. It’s in the $18 million Groundwater Protection Fund, a revolving fund replenished yearly with fertilizer and pesticide fees and more. That fund provided money for the water sensors before the state defunded the network in 2023.

One would think with Iowa’s #2 national ranking in cancer, Iowa being a top-heavy agricultural state, and our water quality crisis, legislators might want to take a closer look at the connection between all three. After all, the Iowa Environmental Council and The Harkin Institute’s recently released report, Environmental Risk Factors and Iowa’s Cancer Crisis rounded up a lot of evidence – documented in an appendix of 12 dense pages of citations in very small type – making a connection between cancer and Iowa’s agricultural practices.

The report looks at four factors: PFAS, pesticides, radon and, of course, nitrates. I’m going to focus on nitrates here since that is most relevant to the IIHR water quality network.

There Is a Cancer/Nitrate Connection

The report’s nitrate section had over 70 citations alone. “Nitrate concentrations in Iowa are among the highest in the United States,” the authors wrote. The “Des Moines and Raccoon rivers rank in the top 1% of rivers nationwide for nitrate concentration with 80% of this contamination originating from agricultural sources,” referencing the findings of the 2025 Central Iowa Water Source Water Resource Assessment report.

It outlines several ways the nitrate gets into our water, including tiling and an over application of synthetic fertilizer. Since we are a state dominated with hog confinements – with 2-1/2 times more than the second-largest hog producing state (Minnesota) – our water also experiences problems with applying excess animal manure including those pesky manure spills and runoff.

Iowa’s nitrate levels flew off the charts last summer and so far the Des Moines Water Works denitrification plant has been running about 90% of the time since January.

High nitrate consumption is linked to a variety of cancers, most notably colorectal, ovarian, kidney, and bladder cancers. There are additional cancers associated with nitrates, and you can read about them all on page 47 of the IEC/Harkin report.

So, we have a nitrate crisis, a cancer crisis, and some pretty convincing connections.  One would hope our legislators would want to know more. But when the Iowa Environmental Council made a State House presentation in early April to share the results of the cancer/environment report, ONLY TEN legislators attended.

Who Should Fund the Sensors?

The Iowa State Legislature defunded the sensors in 2023, and The Walton Family Foundation stepped up to partially fund the network over these last two years. This was clearly designated as bridge funding, and the money runs out on June 30.

There’s been a lot of shade thrown on the credibility of the IIHR sensor network and a USGS study is currently underway to see if the data aligns with the DNR’s grab samples and USDA sensor data. Some legislators think we should wait until that study is complete before fully funding the sensors. There are a lot of reasons why that’s a bad idea, but one of the biggest ones is that the study will take about three years to complete.

We can’t wait three years to know what’s in the water we’re drinking today.

It’s also a very poor use of taxpayer money. A very similar USGS study was already completed in 2018, and it confirmed the credibility of the IIHR data. Further, a 2016 Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship (IDALS) report affirms the value and need of the IIHR network. This is in contrast to some legislators who believe  the monthly DNR/IDALS ambient water tests are enough. You can read more about that in Adam Shriver’s Substack post here.

Some GOP senators question whether the water sensors are even something that state government should fund. If the state does walk away from addressing water quality this session, two counties, Polk and Johnson, will each throw in $200,000 for one year, and an Isaak Walton League GoFundMe page has raised over $70,000.

It’s honorable that these counties are providing more bridge funding until the state legislature gets its act together. But if the state acted this session, those counties could spend that money on other services that their constituencies depend upon like mental health services, food insecurity programs, and infrastructure maintenance.

And it’s patently unfair to make Iowans desperate enough to fund the sensors themselves, shouldering this expense when they are not the ones that created this problem in the first place.

This Is a State Problem – And the State Should Fix It

As kids, I think most of us were taught that if we were responsible for creating a problem, we were also responsible for resolving it. Iowa’s weak CAFO and water quality regulations have created this water quality mess. And who is responsible for that?

That’s right. Iowa state legislators.

I have a long laundry list of the ways the Iowa legislature has failed Iowans. I want to be clear; this has been a bipartisan failure. I’m going to rattle off several here:

• The state allows much more nitrogen (and phosphorus) to be applied onto fields than what a crop requires.

• The Nutrient Reduction Strategy is voluntary. Nitrate loads are increasing. Voluntary is not working.

• The state doesn’t require EPA Clean Water Act permits for hog factory farms. The rationale? Liquid hog sewage is contained in a pit and therefore doesn’t discharge into waterways. Yet, the reality is that too much manure winds up in our waterways. A DNR presentation at the 2017 Iowa Groundwater Association meeting reported approximately 800 manure spills between 1996 and 2012. A 2025 Food and Water Watch report found that between 2013 and 2023, another 179 spills took place.

• The state also doesn’t have a good handle of where manure actually is applied. CAFO operators submit paper manure management plans (MMPs) that are not thoroughly analyzed before they’re filed away. The state could bring the DNR into the 21st century and allocate funding for a digitized manure management and geospatial mapping system with real-time reporting of manure applications. JFAN along with the Iowa Environmental Council and other organizations recommended this during four different Chapter 65 Rules Reviews between 2022-2024. These recommendations went into the circular file.

• Fields can be in more than one MMP. In Jefferson County they can be in as many as three, four or even five. The DNR allows the farmers to work out who is applying what, where, and when with no oversight. What could go wrong? A digitized system could ensure manure is not overapplied on fields.

• The state doesn’t fund the DNR well enough to even fully enforce CAFO regulations. As of last summer, the DNR had 31 animal feeding operation field officers, only two of which focused solely on CAFOs. The others had anywhere from two to four additional areas of responsibility. This is not nearly enough to oversee over 9000 medium and large CAFOs and approximately 4000 small CAFOs in 99 counties.

• When the DNR does try to enforce regulations, they primarily…coach. Fines are few and far between for the number of issues that arise, and the amounts are paltry – just the cost of doing business.

• The state could also allocate more money to the DNR for working with communities in developing plans to clean up waterways, called Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs). We have over 700 polluted waterways, and just a few TMDLs are implemented every year. In 2025, there were a whopping five.

• The DNR can’t even verify how many hogs are in a factory farm. Many are reported to be 2480, 2490, or even 2499 hogs – just under the limit that would trigger a permit and Master Matrix. Years ago, I asked former DNR AFO coordinator Gene Tinker how the DNR actually knew there were only, say, 2499 hogs in a confinement. He acknowledged the DNR was well aware that many CAFOs overstock, sometimes by as many as 100 hogs or more, and that it was a problem. However, Tinker said the state made the DNR powerless to verify the numbers CAFO owners provide. MMPs then don’t fully account for all the extra manure. And when you have a CAFO with 1249 hogs, it’s an even bigger problem as you’ll read next.

• CAFOs with fewer than 1250 hogs (500 animal units) don’t need to submit manure management plans. It’s anyone’s guess where that manure will wind up. These small animal feeding operations – SAFOs – are also off the hook for several other regulations, like being prohibited from applying manure on snow or frozen ground.

• About that – snow and frozen ground can happen anytime in the late fall and early spring. However, the state’s laws are limited to certain dates. So, for example, if we get a snowfall on December 1, if manure is spread on December 3, and if it warms up again on December 4, just imagine where some of that manure will wind up.

• Thanks to Executive Order Number 10, codified in 2024, state regulations can be weakened, but not strengthened. This is definitely not good for agricultural regulations. Over a two-year period from 2022 – 2024, JFAN, the Iowa Environmental Council and other organizations had pages of recommendations on how regulations could be strengthened, 99% of which were ignored.

• CAFOs are allowed to be built in karst terrain. Honestly, that’s such a bad idea for so many reasons. Karst bedrock is porous, think Swiss cheese, and manure can easily trickle down through the bedrock to pollute groundwater. Iowans in Northeast Iowa, especially those relying on private wells, are especially vulnerable to nitrates and E. coli polluting their drinking water.

• Iowa allows farmers to tear down tree lines along waterways to access more field acreage, removing a barrier that works to prevent manure from easily entering streams.

• There are no regulations or pollution controls on tiling, a large source of nitrate pollution in our waterways.

• In 1995, the state removed a county’s right to local control of where CAFOs can be sited, removing a community’s ability to protect vulnerable water sources from improper CAFO locations.

• The DNR itself even can’t stop a poorly sited confinement as long as it checks all the (weak) regulatory boxes since the Director’s Discretion Rule was removed during the last Chapter 65 rules review. This rule could have allowed the DNR director to nix a badly sited CAFO, but the DNR was too afraid to use it even before it was eliminated. An example of where this would have been extremely useful was in Allamakee County in 2016 when a confinement was built in a grassy waterway. The best the DNR could do was to tell the corporation what a bad place it was and ask that it not be built,  all while approving the permit. It was built.

I could go on, but I think I made my case. The state poorly regulates industrial agriculture, so we now have this water pollution crisis which has even made national news.

Will the State Own Up?

Given the state’s failure to properly regulate industrial agriculture with all its ensuing pollution issues, it seems obvious, to me at least and I know I’m not alone, that it’s the state’s responsibility to fix this mess. And to fix it, you must know what’s in the water.

So, it naturally follows that it’s the state’s responsibility to continuously monitor that water.

But there are some state legislators that either don’t want to face the problem or they want to ignore it because Big Ag is so powerful in Iowa, and it holds a lot of influence over our elected officials. Less monitoring means fewer polluted waterways get reported to the EPA every two years, and the 700+ count of impaired waters starts to decrease. Just maybe it looks like that voluntary Nutrient Reduction Strategy is working after all, and we don’t need to worry so much about water quality or further regulations. A win for Big Ag dollars!  

Some legislators, like Senator Dan Zumbach, want you to think that our water quality is getting better. Seriously. Someone like Senator Ken Rozenboom, wants you to think nitrates are not causing cancer because, you know, spinach. But Iowans are smarter than that, and it’s insulting to imply otherwise. We know our water quality is bad.

So, it’s up to us Iowans to keep turning the heat up on our legislators because it’s getting a little toasty in Des Moines. The House at least came up with that $300,000 to keep us quiet.

But $300,000 is not enough. $600,000 should not be enough. Allocating $1 million a year plus a one-time $500,000 allocation to replace old equipment is the right thing to do, the responsible thing to do. And. We. Don’t Have. To. Be. Quiet.

It’s a shame that we must fight so hard for funding the IIHR water quality sensors. But if we must fight, so be it. Call or write to your legislators today. Tell them to allocate $1 million a year to protect the health of you and your family and not a penny less.

We deserve to know what’s in our water. We are all worth 32¢ a year.