From At the Iowa Farm Table Podcast:

attheiowafarmtable.substack.com/this-is-why-we-cant-have-clean-water

“The fact that we’ve engineered the landscape in order to move water out of the ground quickly is called tiling.

Tile is pipe 4 feet below the surface. That tile is essentially ground water that hasn’t quite reached the water table yet.

The water that would have slowly done its dance through the soil oozing down through the cracks to the water table never gets a chance to do so. The tile, which is really piping… moves the water out too quickly.

We wouldn’t have the extensive agriculture beause in many areas if we didn’t tile you couldn’t grow the kind of crops that we grow here. To grow corn and beans it needs to be dryer in some areas than what is natural.

Then, that second ingredient to Iowa agriculture is the fertilizer. It helps the plants grow – especially when you deplete the soil by growing one crop over and over. In 2024 farmers bought more fertilizer than ever before. And it’s estimated that they are also growing 600,000 more acres of corn this year than last.

But when the tile moves the water out of the soil quickly it takes the fertilizer with it out into the creeks and streams and the water doesn’t have time to shimmy down through the soil where it can do something called de-nitrification. That’s when microbes in the soil break down the dangerous nitrates.”

More