I thought I had just concluded my first television interview, and while the reporter for a local television station was preoccupied with putting his equipment away, the man behind the camera flipped off the bright light he had been pointing in my face, casually walked around it, and held his hands out for my mic. Having just managed to get it out from under my vest, I set the mic in one hand and the box attached to it in the other.

“Just between you and me, off the record, the whole problem here is Bill Stowe, isn’t it? I mean none of this was an issue before he came on the scene.”

He was referring to the manager of the Des Moines Water Works, whose board was about to file an intent to sue three northwest Iowa counties and their drainage districts over excessive nitrates in the Raccoon River, which is a partial source of the water the utility requires.

He still held his hands out, with the mic in them, right in front of me. The camera was still sitting on its tripod. If I were going to make a friendly wager, for some reason I would bet both of them happened to still be on. It didn’t really matter. The facts were what they were.

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Soil and water quality have always been a concern and a focus of many producers’ efforts. If anything has changed with Stowe’s arrival on the scene, it is Des Moines Water Works’ approach to the problem. I believe you would find LD Mc Mullen (Stowe’s predecessor) was a proponent of the collaborative approach, and built many relationships in that regard with the community upstream. Stowe has ended many of those and seems to be intent on going it alone. At the end of the day the challenge for improved water quality is such a complicated issue, I don’t see how it is going to take anything less than all of us working together to find a solution.”

The cameraman had to be disappointed. I could have made several off the cuff remarks which could have been sensational side bars that would help sell the story and gain viewers. In the end, I said the main focus of concern was actually a collaborative effort to improve  soil and water quality. That’s hardly a sexy thing to sell to viewers, and no one understands that better than Bill Stowe.

In the public meeting which followed the interview, Stowe left the sensational to the public comments of those in attendance. He made an effort to be above the fray, representing a utility facing an ever increasing risk of nitrates affecting its ability to deliver safe, drinkable water to its customers, and whose back was against the wall after having exhausted every opportunity to meet with the agricultural community.

His entire statement was broken into effective 30 or 40 second sound bites, ready to be assimilated by the media in attendance, and demonstrating what makes Stowe so particularly capable. The most glaring problems, however, were that none of it appears to be true, and no one seems particularly motivated to check. Numerous farm groups have tried to meet with Stowe, but to no avail. As just one example, a representative from the Iowa Soybean Association spoke on the relationship the two groups once enjoyed in working in a collaborative partnership.  A relationship which doesn’t exist today.

While Stowe maintains that collaborative effort got his utility nowhere, the Iowa Soybean Association points to their own samples, tested by the Water Works themselves, which show a 25% reduction in nitrate concentrations from 1999-2014 in the Raccoon River. These reductions were due to “refinement in cropping systems.” Their data is backed by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, and the U.S. Geologic Service.

The next day I had a chance to be interviewed by an NPR reporter. I thought it went rough. At its conclusion I was asked, “This is really an urban vs. rural debate isn’t it?” I stumbled through the following:

“I fear that’s the way it will be portrayed by news outlets, I guess, but no, that is not how I see it. I see us in agriculture working with our local Soil and Water Conservation Boards, our local counties, our state’s Department of Natural Resources and Department of Agriculture, the National Resource Conservation Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Personally, I’m proud of these efforts and of this legacy. I’m not the only one.

If we want to start at the tip of the iceberg, the Region 7 administrator of the EPA is on the record as saying that the voluntary, collaborative approach is the role model everyone else should be working off of, and the best way to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Agriculture is doing that.  It is doing it right outside my front door, in the little watershed I live in, Badger Creek.

The approach that the Des Moines Water Works is taking is not making it ‘urban vs. rural.’ It is making it the Des Moines Water Works vs. everyone else involved. It is also introducing a new legacy, one of litigation.”

If I didn’t say it exactly like that, I should have.