The director of the Iowa Water Center says the state’s farmers are losing more than one-BILLION dollars a year in revenue due to soil erosion. Rick Cruse, who’s also an agronomy professor at Iowa State University, is part of a team of scientists working on what’s called the Iowa Daily Erosion Project. Cruse says that billion-dollar figure is a very conservative estimate of Iowa’s annual losses…..
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While six or seven inches of dirt may not sound like much, Cruse says the rich, black topsoil is what enables Iowa to be one of the world’s leaders in food production. When the precious soil is whittled away, so is Iowa’s livelihood…..
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Many incentive programs are in place and farming techniques are being used that are designed to slow erosion, but Cruse says none of them have fixed the problem.
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The Iowa Daily Erosion Project is made up of scientists from I-S-U, the University of Iowa, Colorado State University, the National Soil Erosion Research Lab, and the USDA National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment.