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The Iowa Trout Stream at the Center of a Feedlot Fight

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024

In 2017, Larry Stone heard whispers about construction taking place near his home in Clayton County, Iowa. A retired photographer, Stone pulled up to the site, located around 20 miles away from where he lives, and began taking photos. “A guy came roaring up on his little ATV and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’” Stone recalled recently. His curiosity eventually landed Stone a tour of the project: Walz Energy, a joint venture between a cattle-feeding operation and an energy company. The idea, the manager explained, was that Supreme Beef would run a feedlot, and Feeder Creek would supply a biodigester, a machine that would process manure and capture the resulting methane to be sold as energy. “The [manager] said, ‘This is not a feedlot; it’s a renewable energy project. We need at least 10,000 cows to get enough manure for the amount of methane we want to generate,’” Stone said. “Anything that is a contaminant on the surface can get down into the fractured bedrock very easily and very quickly contaminate the groundwater.” The biodigester project fell apart, but the plan for a 11,000-head feedlot moved forward. Without the biodigester, Supreme Beef—which is perched on the headwaters of Bloody Run Creek, a spring-fed trout stream filled year-round with rainbow, brook, and brown trout—had to come up with a plan to get rid of its manure, known as a nutrient management plan (NMP), which would need to be approved by Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR). According to the DNR, any open feedlot operation with 1,000 or more animal units needs to submit a plan to ensure the operation does not over-apply manure to surrounding cropland. Seven years ago, the Iowa Sierra Club, the Iowa chapter of Trout Unlimited, and a group of concerned citizens formed the Committee to Save Bloody Run in response to that plan, which they saw as scientifically incomprehensible. Since then, the committee has been opposing Supreme Beef’s operations and fighting the feedlot’s manure management plans. The scrutiny of these plans is timely, as Iowa now has the second highest cancer incidence in the country, and it is the only state where rates are increasing. Many cancers are linked to nitrates, which are found in drinking water contaminated with manure or nitrogen fertilizer, and advocates are concerned about the link. The fight to keep Iowa waterways clean is decades long—and the increase in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) there is only making the fight more difficult. Each year, animals in CAFOs produce twice as much waste as the entire U.S. population. Although the state is known for hog production—hogs outnumber people 7:1—the number of cattle in Iowa feedlots is increasing, too. And for good reason: Cattle is the top-ranked agricultural commodity in the U.S. The fight is especially contentious in northeast Iowa because the region is unlike the rest of the state, where fertile layers of soil were left behind from glacial drift and now act as a filter for water that moves down into the aquifers below. Northeast Iowa’s Driftless region has not seen glacial drift in over 2 million years. An aerial view of the Supreme Beef facility taken by drone. (Photo credit: David Thoreson) Chris Jones, a retired University of Iowa research engineer and the author of The Swine Republic, explains that because of this difference in the soil, the region has never been well suited for large-scale industrial agriculture. “Anything that is a contaminant on the surface can get down into the fractured bedrock very easily and very quickly contaminate the groundwater,” he said. “So, when we try to farm at these very large scales . . . that presents a real acute and chronic hazard to the water resources in that area.” According to the committee, Supreme Beef likely first moved cattle to its farm in 2021, when it was operating on a NMP approved by the DNR, but that plan was later thrown out after the Committee to Save Bloody Run challenged it in court. In November 2023, DNR accepted a new NMP from Supreme Beef, despite years of opposition. Advocates say they’re up against collusion between the DNR and the Iowa Legislature, which they believe to be doing everything in its power to keep the cattle feedlot open—regardless of its impact on water quality. DNR claims it is simply following standard procedure. Now, the committee is attempting to defend against agricultural pollution using a new approach: It’s taking the DNR to court over its water use permit laws. “All those cattle drink a lot of water,” said Jones, who is an expert witness in the case. “There has been some concern that the Supreme Beef well would rob water from other nearby wells that serve both homesteads and that are used for watering livestock.” One resident who lives not far from the Supreme Beef operation, Tammy Thompson, claims in the suit that she needed to drill a new, deeper well because their water was contaminated. “DNR strongly believes that the water use permit should be renewed. They feel that it’s not their responsibility or obligation to determine how the water is being used and how that use might impact the environment,” said Jones. Supreme Beef did not respond to Civil Eats for comment for this story,  Origins of the Current Fight Retired chemist Steve Veysey has been fishing in Bloody Run Creek for decades. The creek is 50-70 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, and thanks to natural springs, it never freezes over. He also likes the fact that it’s shallow enough to wade in. In 2006, Veysey was one of the plaintiffs in a group that sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for not requiring the state of Iowa to enforce standards in the antidegradation policy nestled within the Clean Water Act. The policy states that “existing instream water uses and the level of water quality necessary to protect the existing uses shall be maintained and protected.” Veysey and other plaintiffs claimed Iowa regulations did not ensure this. “In terms of water quality, there was the presumption of crap instead of the presumption of quality,” Veysey said. “And we won. EPA forced the state, essentially, to adopt new rules that presumed a stream or river segment had beneficial uses unless it was proven otherwise.” As a part of that victory, the state created a list of “Outstanding Iowa Waters” deemed worthy of protection. Bloody Run Creek was one of them. Then, in 2017, over a decade after the Clean Water Act victory, Veysey found himself again advocating to get the government to keep Bloody Run clean. “There were a couple of, I would call them, con men, who went to the Walz family, which had a very small cattle operation at that time. They convinced them they could make lots of money by expanding their operation and having it be a methane digester and a waste energy operation,” said Wally Taylor, legal chair of the Iowa Sierra Club who argued the antidegradation case in 2006. Under the initial biodigester plan, the DNR permitted Walz Energy as an industrial wastewater treatment facility. During that construction, they created and received permitting for an industrial wastewater treatment lagoon. According to Veysey, when the biodigester plan stalled, the feedlot repurposed the basin as a 39-gallon earthen lagoon to house raw manure right on top of the Bloody Run watershed. In a 2021 petition for judicial review submitted in Iowa District Court, the Committee to Save Bloody Run argued that the lagoon directly defied state’s definition of an “open feedlot structure,” but due to a technicality, which states that open feedlots can use “alternative technology” to “dispose of settled open feedlot effluent,” the judge ruled that it was legal. “If manure gets in a stream [and] decays, it sucks the oxygen out of the water,” Veysey said. “Now, all of a sudden, the dissolved oxygen that fish need to survive goes below a certain threshold and your fish die.” Steve Veysey fishes for trout in Bloody Run Creek. (Photo credit: Larry Stone) Pollution by way of the Supreme Beef operation is not purely hypothetical. In 2018, the Iowa DNR fined Walz Energy $10,000 for illegally discharging stormwater into Bloody Run Creek while building the feedlot. They were fined again for other violations, and in 2018, the DNR attorney recommended the case be taken up by the Iowa attorney general’s office. Then, in an unusual move, the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission (EPC), a long-standing group comprised of Iowans appointed by the governor, decided to allow the DNR to resolve the problem on its own, and gave the agency full jurisdiction over Supreme Beef, without an attorney general investigation. A DNR for Whom? In September 2023, Supreme Beef submitted what would become its final NMP and, after multiple revisions, in November, the DNR accepted a revised plan it never opened for public comment. The day after the plan was accepted, Taylor, legal chair of the Iowa Sierra Club, said Supreme Beef began spreading manure onto nearby farm fields—a move that members of the committee worry will oversaturate crops and result in the remaining manure leaking into the headwaters of Bloody Run. The advocates say the pattern is part of a familiar history. “We think that the DNR gave Supreme Beef a heads-up ahead of time before they even actually approved the plan,” said Taylor. “The DNR has, for years, taken a hands-off approach on animal feeding operations and let them get by with lots of things.” “The DNR has, for years, taken a hands-off approach on animal feeding operations and let them get by with lots of things.” Back in 2021, open records requests filed by a reporter from the Cedar Rapids Gazette confirmed that Senator Dan Zumbach, the father-in-law of Jared Walz, a co-owner of Supreme Beef, worked with the DNR to find ways to get the plant approved. Zumbach, who is vice chair of the Iowa Senate Appropriations Committee, has received campaign donations from Monsanto, Bayer, Koch Industries, Smithfield, and DuPont, all large agribusinesses that might impact his decision. Zumbach did not respond to Civil Eats for request for comment for this story. In 2022, Veysey, Taylor, Stone, and Jessica Mazour submitted an ethics complaint to the Iowa Senate against Zumbach. They referred to emails between Iowa government officials accessed through a public record request to argue that Zumbach was misusing his power as a state senator to assist with his son-in-law’s feedlot. The complaint also noted various instances where Veysey attempted to verify the math in the NMP and said he found faulty calculations, which the group believes ultimately allows Supreme Beef to “significantly underestimate the number of crop acres they would really need for manure application.” “The mistake was clearly pointed out to DNR staff during the public comment period by many reviewers but was ignored,” the complaint read. It was ultimately dismissed by the Iowa Senate. In response to these claims and the others in this story, the DNR told Civil Eats that it “approved the NMP under the parameters set forth in state law and administrative rules” and then referred to a set of specific requirements and environmental protection codes. It has been widely reported that Zumbach likely used his position in the legislature to pressure Chris Jones to stop writing his University of Iowa blog, which featured his research on Iowa water quality data. As Robert Leonard reported in Deep Midwest, Jones alleges that the pressure came with an implied threat that funding for monitoring systems could be impacted. A few weeks later, Zumbach co-sponsored Senate File 558, which was signed by the governor in June 2023 and effectively shifted funding away from water sensors put in place to measure water pollution. Earlier that year, a sensor Jones had installed at Bloody Run Creek measured levels as high as 23.9 mg of nitrate and nitrite per liter. The EPA’s safe drinking water standard is 10 mg per liter, and new research shows that any more than 5 mg puts people in danger “This was sort of a brazen abuse of power,” said Jones. “He’s defunding the water quality sensors that are immediately downstream from the Supreme Beef operation. After previous efforts to push back against Supreme Beef’s NMPs proved unsuccessful, members of the Committee to Save Bloody Run are now involved in a lawsuit against the DNR focused on water use permit regulations. Attorney James Larew is arguing that the DNR did not consider the public interest—which included around 70 comments in opposition—when it renewed Supreme Beef’s water use permit, which allows it to withdraw an anticipated 21.9 million gallons per year. Goat farmer Tammy Thompson, whose farm is located approximately 500 feet away from the feedlot, declared in the suit that “the contamination was so bad that it prohibited us from being able to move forward with our entrepreneurial endeavor of selling goat milk.” “If you’re doing something right, Satan’s going to keep coming after you. I don’t understand why they keep coming after Supreme Beef.” The approach to regulation—or lack thereof—is familiar to those who have been watching the farm landscape in Iowa. “There’s only one instance that we could find where an application for a water use permit had ever been denied by the Department of Natural Resources,” said Larew. “We’re talking tens of thousands going back into the 1950s, never challenged. The statutes themselves indicate that it’s not just the quantity of water the department should be concerned with but also these larger public interests. While Supreme Beef did not respond to Civil Eats’ request for comment, at the hearing in the DNR building in the beginning of February, co-owner Jared Walz expressed frustration about the latest lawsuit. “If you’re doing something right, Satan’s going to keep coming after you,” Walz said. “I don’t understand why they keep coming after Supreme Beef.” The Committee to Save Bloody, however, doesn’t intend to stop fighting for clean water. The seven-year battle has been driven by retirees hoping for a better future for Iowa waterways. It’s an uphill battle, but the stakes are high, said Veysey. “If we can’t protect the best [waters] we have, we can’t protect any of it.” Some farmers are also resisting the expansion of large agribusinesses like Supreme Beef. As Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmer’s Union, put it, “Food is being controlled by folks who have very little concern for our communities and our landscapes.” Iowa lakes and streams feed into the Mississippi River, which flows thousands of miles across the country before reaching the Gulf of Mexico, where agricultural runoff is a major contributor to hypoxia in the dead zone. “Our waterways do not stop at the state line,” Lehman said. The post The Iowa Trout Stream at the Center of a Feedlot Fight appeared first on Civil Eats.

“A guy came roaring up on his little ATV and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’” Stone recalled recently. His curiosity eventually landed Stone a tour of the project: Walz Energy, a joint venture between a cattle-feeding operation and an energy company. The idea, the manager explained, was that Supreme Beef would run a feedlot, […] The post The Iowa Trout Stream at the Center of a Feedlot Fight appeared first on Civil Eats.

In 2017, Larry Stone heard whispers about construction taking place near his home in Clayton County, Iowa. A retired photographer, Stone pulled up to the site, located around 20 miles away from where he lives, and began taking photos.

“A guy came roaring up on his little ATV and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’” Stone recalled recently.

His curiosity eventually landed Stone a tour of the project: Walz Energy, a joint venture between a cattle-feeding operation and an energy company. The idea, the manager explained, was that Supreme Beef would run a feedlot, and Feeder Creek would supply a biodigester, a machine that would process manure and capture the resulting methane to be sold as energy.

“The [manager] said, ‘This is not a feedlot; it’s a renewable energy project. We need at least 10,000 cows to get enough manure for the amount of methane we want to generate,’” Stone said.

“Anything that is a contaminant on the surface can get down into the fractured bedrock very easily and very quickly contaminate the groundwater.”

The biodigester project fell apart, but the plan for a 11,000-head feedlot moved forward. Without the biodigester, Supreme Beef—which is perched on the headwaters of Bloody Run Creek, a spring-fed trout stream filled year-round with rainbow, brook, and brown trout—had to come up with a plan to get rid of its manure, known as a nutrient management plan (NMP), which would need to be approved by Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

According to the DNR, any open feedlot operation with 1,000 or more animal units needs to submit a plan to ensure the operation does not over-apply manure to surrounding cropland.

Seven years ago, the Iowa Sierra Club, the Iowa chapter of Trout Unlimited, and a group of concerned citizens formed the Committee to Save Bloody Run in response to that plan, which they saw as scientifically incomprehensible. Since then, the committee has been opposing Supreme Beef’s operations and fighting the feedlot’s manure management plans.

The scrutiny of these plans is timely, as Iowa now has the second highest cancer incidence in the country, and it is the only state where rates are increasing. Many cancers are linked to nitrates, which are found in drinking water contaminated with manure or nitrogen fertilizer, and advocates are concerned about the link.

The fight to keep Iowa waterways clean is decades long—and the increase in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) there is only making the fight more difficult. Each year, animals in CAFOs produce twice as much waste as the entire U.S. population. Although the state is known for hog production—hogs outnumber people 7:1—the number of cattle in Iowa feedlots is increasing, too. And for good reason: Cattle is the top-ranked agricultural commodity in the U.S.

The fight is especially contentious in northeast Iowa because the region is unlike the rest of the state, where fertile layers of soil were left behind from glacial drift and now act as a filter for water that moves down into the aquifers below. Northeast Iowa’s Driftless region has not seen glacial drift in over 2 million years.

An aerial view of the Supreme Beef facility taken by drone. (Photo credit: David Thoreson)

An aerial view of the Supreme Beef facility taken by drone. (Photo credit: David Thoreson)

Chris Jones, a retired University of Iowa research engineer and the author of The Swine Republic, explains that because of this difference in the soil, the region has never been well suited for large-scale industrial agriculture. “Anything that is a contaminant on the surface can get down into the fractured bedrock very easily and very quickly contaminate the groundwater,” he said. “So, when we try to farm at these very large scales . . . that presents a real acute and chronic hazard to the water resources in that area.”

According to the committee, Supreme Beef likely first moved cattle to its farm in 2021, when it was operating on a NMP approved by the DNR, but that plan was later thrown out after the Committee to Save Bloody Run challenged it in court. In November 2023, DNR accepted a new NMP from Supreme Beef, despite years of opposition.

Advocates say they’re up against collusion between the DNR and the Iowa Legislature, which they believe to be doing everything in its power to keep the cattle feedlot open—regardless of its impact on water quality. DNR claims it is simply following standard procedure.

Now, the committee is attempting to defend against agricultural pollution using a new approach: It’s taking the DNR to court over its water use permit laws.

“All those cattle drink a lot of water,” said Jones, who is an expert witness in the case. “There has been some concern that the Supreme Beef well would rob water from other nearby wells that serve both homesteads and that are used for watering livestock.”

One resident who lives not far from the Supreme Beef operation, Tammy Thompson, claims in the suit that she needed to drill a new, deeper well because their water was contaminated.

“DNR strongly believes that the water use permit should be renewed. They feel that it’s not their responsibility or obligation to determine how the water is being used and how that use might impact the environment,” said Jones.

Supreme Beef did not respond to Civil Eats for comment for this story, 

Origins of the Current Fight

Retired chemist Steve Veysey has been fishing in Bloody Run Creek for decades. The creek is 50-70 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, and thanks to natural springs, it never freezes over. He also likes the fact that it’s shallow enough to wade in.

In 2006, Veysey was one of the plaintiffs in a group that sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for not requiring the state of Iowa to enforce standards in the antidegradation policy nestled within the Clean Water Act. The policy states that “existing instream water uses and the level of water quality necessary to protect the existing uses shall be maintained and protected.” Veysey and other plaintiffs claimed Iowa regulations did not ensure this.

“In terms of water quality, there was the presumption of crap instead of the presumption of quality,” Veysey said. “And we won. EPA forced the state, essentially, to adopt new rules that presumed a stream or river segment had beneficial uses unless it was proven otherwise.”

As a part of that victory, the state created a list of “Outstanding Iowa Waters” deemed worthy of protection. Bloody Run Creek was one of them.

Then, in 2017, over a decade after the Clean Water Act victory, Veysey found himself again advocating to get the government to keep Bloody Run clean.

“There were a couple of, I would call them, con men, who went to the Walz family, which had a very small cattle operation at that time. They convinced them they could make lots of money by expanding their operation and having it be a methane digester and a waste energy operation,” said Wally Taylor, legal chair of the Iowa Sierra Club who argued the antidegradation case in 2006.

Under the initial biodigester plan, the DNR permitted Walz Energy as an industrial wastewater treatment facility. During that construction, they created and received permitting for an industrial wastewater treatment lagoon. According to Veysey, when the biodigester plan stalled, the feedlot repurposed the basin as a 39-gallon earthen lagoon to house raw manure right on top of the Bloody Run watershed.

In a 2021 petition for judicial review submitted in Iowa District Court, the Committee to Save Bloody Run argued that the lagoon directly defied state’s definition of an “open feedlot structure,” but due to a technicality, which states that open feedlots can use “alternative technology” to “dispose of settled open feedlot effluent,” the judge ruled that it was legal.

“If manure gets in a stream [and] decays, it sucks the oxygen out of the water,” Veysey said. “Now, all of a sudden, the dissolved oxygen that fish need to survive goes below a certain threshold and your fish die.”

Steve Veysey fishes for trout in Bloody Run Creek. (Photo credit: Larry Stone)

Steve Veysey fishes for trout in Bloody Run Creek. (Photo credit: Larry Stone)

Pollution by way of the Supreme Beef operation is not purely hypothetical. In 2018, the Iowa DNR fined Walz Energy $10,000 for illegally discharging stormwater into Bloody Run Creek while building the feedlot. They were fined again for other violations, and in 2018, the DNR attorney recommended the case be taken up by the Iowa attorney general’s office.

Then, in an unusual move, the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission (EPC), a long-standing group comprised of Iowans appointed by the governor, decided to allow the DNR to resolve the problem on its own, and gave the agency full jurisdiction over Supreme Beef, without an attorney general investigation.

A DNR for Whom?

In September 2023, Supreme Beef submitted what would become its final NMP and, after multiple revisions, in November, the DNR accepted a revised plan it never opened for public comment.

The day after the plan was accepted, Taylor, legal chair of the Iowa Sierra Club, said Supreme Beef began spreading manure onto nearby farm fields—a move that members of the committee worry will oversaturate crops and result in the remaining manure leaking into the headwaters of Bloody Run.

The advocates say the pattern is part of a familiar history. “We think that the DNR gave Supreme Beef a heads-up ahead of time before they even actually approved the plan,” said Taylor. “The DNR has, for years, taken a hands-off approach on animal feeding operations and let them get by with lots of things.”

“The DNR has, for years, taken a hands-off approach on animal feeding operations and let them get by with lots of things.”

Back in 2021, open records requests filed by a reporter from the Cedar Rapids Gazette confirmed that Senator Dan Zumbach, the father-in-law of Jared Walz, a co-owner of Supreme Beef, worked with the DNR to find ways to get the plant approved. Zumbach, who is vice chair of the Iowa Senate Appropriations Committee, has received campaign donations from Monsanto, Bayer, Koch Industries, Smithfield, and DuPont, all large agribusinesses that might impact his decision. Zumbach did not respond to Civil Eats for request for comment for this story.

In 2022, Veysey, Taylor, Stone, and Jessica Mazour submitted an ethics complaint to the Iowa Senate against Zumbach. They referred to emails between Iowa government officials accessed through a public record request to argue that Zumbach was misusing his power as a state senator to assist with his son-in-law’s feedlot.

The complaint also noted various instances where Veysey attempted to verify the math in the NMP and said he found faulty calculations, which the group believes ultimately allows Supreme Beef to “significantly underestimate the number of crop acres they would really need for manure application.”

“The mistake was clearly pointed out to DNR staff during the public comment period by many reviewers but was ignored,” the complaint read. It was ultimately dismissed by the Iowa Senate.

In response to these claims and the others in this story, the DNR told Civil Eats that it “approved the NMP under the parameters set forth in state law and administrative rules” and then referred to a set of specific requirements and environmental protection codes.

It has been widely reported that Zumbach likely used his position in the legislature to pressure Chris Jones to stop writing his University of Iowa blog, which featured his research on Iowa water quality data. As Robert Leonard reported in Deep Midwest, Jones alleges that the pressure came with an implied threat that funding for monitoring systems could be impacted.

A few weeks later, Zumbach co-sponsored Senate File 558, which was signed by the governor in June 2023 and effectively shifted funding away from water sensors put in place to measure water pollution. Earlier that year, a sensor Jones had installed at Bloody Run Creek measured levels as high as 23.9 mg of nitrate and nitrite per liter. The EPA’s safe drinking water standard is 10 mg per liter, and new research shows that any more than 5 mg puts people in danger

“This was sort of a brazen abuse of power,” said Jones. “He’s defunding the water quality sensors that are immediately downstream from the Supreme Beef operation.

After previous efforts to push back against Supreme Beef’s NMPs proved unsuccessful, members of the Committee to Save Bloody Run are now involved in a lawsuit against the DNR focused on water use permit regulations.

Attorney James Larew is arguing that the DNR did not consider the public interest—which included around 70 comments in opposition—when it renewed Supreme Beef’s water use permit, which allows it to withdraw an anticipated 21.9 million gallons per year. Goat farmer Tammy Thompson, whose farm is located approximately 500 feet away from the feedlot, declared in the suit that “the contamination was so bad that it prohibited us from being able to move forward with our entrepreneurial endeavor of selling goat milk.”

“If you’re doing something right, Satan’s going to keep coming after you. I don’t understand why they keep coming after Supreme Beef.”

The approach to regulation—or lack thereof—is familiar to those who have been watching the farm landscape in Iowa. “There’s only one instance that we could find where an application for a water use permit had ever been denied by the Department of Natural Resources,” said Larew. “We’re talking tens of thousands going back into the 1950s, never challenged. The statutes themselves indicate that it’s not just the quantity of water the department should be concerned with but also these larger public interests.

While Supreme Beef did not respond to Civil Eats’ request for comment, at the hearing in the DNR building in the beginning of February, co-owner Jared Walz expressed frustration about the latest lawsuit.

“If you’re doing something right, Satan’s going to keep coming after you,” Walz said. “I don’t understand why they keep coming after Supreme Beef.”

The Committee to Save Bloody, however, doesn’t intend to stop fighting for clean water. The seven-year battle has been driven by retirees hoping for a better future for Iowa waterways. It’s an uphill battle, but the stakes are high, said Veysey. “If we can’t protect the best [waters] we have, we can’t protect any of it.”

Some farmers are also resisting the expansion of large agribusinesses like Supreme Beef. As Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmer’s Union, put it, “Food is being controlled by folks who have very little concern for our communities and our landscapes.”

Iowa lakes and streams feed into the Mississippi River, which flows thousands of miles across the country before reaching the Gulf of Mexico, where agricultural runoff is a major contributor to hypoxia in the dead zone.

“Our waterways do not stop at the state line,” Lehman said.

The post The Iowa Trout Stream at the Center of a Feedlot Fight appeared first on Civil Eats.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

How Mississippians Can Intervene in Natural Gas Pipeline Proposal

Mississippi residents can comment on a proposal for a natural gas pipeline that would span nearly the full width of the state

Mississippians have until Tuesday to intervene in a proposal for a natural gas pipeline that would span nearly the full width of the state.The pipeline, called the “Mississippi Crossing Project,” would start in Greenville, cross through Humphreys, Holmes, Attala, Leake, Neshoba, Newton, Lauderdale and Clarke counties and end near Butler, Alabama, stretching nearly 208 miles.Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co., a subsidiary of Kinder Morgan, sent an application for the project to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on June 30. The company hopes the pipeline, which would transfer up to 12 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, will address a rising energy demand by increasing its transportation capacity.Kinder Morgan says on its website that, should it receive approval, construction would begin at the end of 2027 and the pipeline would begin service in November 2028. The company says the project would cost $1.7 billion and create 750 temporary jobs as well as 15 permanent positions.The project would also include new compressor stations in Humphreys, Attala and Lauderdale counties, although exact locations haven’t been set.Singleton Schreiber, a national law firm that focuses on environmental justice, is looking to spread awareness of the public’s ability to participate in the approval process, whether or not they support the proposal.“We’re just trying to raise awareness to make sure that people know this is happening,” said Laura Singleton, an attorney with the firm. “They’re going to have to dig and construct new pipelines, so it’s going to pass through sensitive ecosystems like wetlands, private property, farmland, things like that. So you can have issues that come up like soil degradation, water contamination, and then after the pipeline is built you could potentially have leaks, spills.”Singleton added while such issues with pipelines are rare, when “things go bad, they go pretty bad.”To comment, protest, or file a motion to intervene, the public can go to FERC’s website (new users have to create an account, and then use the docket number “CP25-514-000”). The exact deadline is 4 p.m. on Aug. 5. More instructions can also be found here.In addition to FERC, the proposal will also face review from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and the state environmental agencies in Mississippi and Alabama.Mississippians have seen multiple incidents related to gas leaks in recent years. In March, three workers were injured after accidentally rupturing an Atmos Energy pipeline doing routine maintenance in Lee County, leaving thousands without service. Then last year, the National Transportation Safety Board found that Atmos discovered gas leaks over a month prior to two explosions in Jackson, one of which claimed the life of an 82-year-old woman.This story was originally published by Mississippi Today and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - June 2025

BPA faces suit over energy market decision that opponents say would raise rates

The lawsuit comes after governors, lawmakers, utility regulators and renewable energy proponents in the region unsuccessfully pressed the BPA to reconsider its plans.

Five energy and conservation nonprofits are suing the Bonneville Power Administration over its decision to join a new energy trading market, claiming it will raise electricity and transmission costs in Oregon and across the region. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, alleges that BPA’s move violates the Northwest Power Act and the National Environmental Policy Act and will also weaken energy grid reliability and reduce access to clean energy. BPA, the Northwest’s largest transmission grid operator, in May announced it would join the Arkansas-based Southwest Power Pool day-ahead market known as “Markets Plus” instead of joining California’s day-ahead market. The Southwest market is smaller with fewer electrical generation resources, experts say. Prior to that decision, Pacific Northwest governors, lawmakers, utility regulators and renewable energy proponents had pressed the BPA for months to reconsider its plans, which the agency initially announced in March.The nonprofits involved in the legal challenge are the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a watchdog organization that advocates for utility customers; national environmental group the Sierra Club; the Montana Environmental Information Center, which promotes clean energy; the Idaho Conservation League, a natural landscape conservation group; and the NW Energy Coalition, which promotes affordable energy policies. The groups, represented by San Francisco-based environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice, want the court to vacate BPA’s decision, require the agency to prepare an environmental impact statement and rescind the financial commitments already made to the Southwest energy market.The BPA’s spokesperson Nick Quinata declined to comment on the pending litigation. Previously, the agency said the Southwest day-ahead market is superior to the California one because it would allow BPA to remain more independent due to its market design and governance structure. BPA, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, markets hydropower from 31 federal dams in the Columbia River Basin and supplies a third of the Northwest’s electricity, most of it to publicly owned rural utilities and electric cooperatives. It also owns and operates 15,000 miles – 75% – of the Northwest’s high-voltage transmission lines. Nearly every electric utility in Oregon benefits from either the clean hydroelectricity or the transmission lines controlled by BPA. BPA’s decision sets the stage for having two energy markets across the West.The lawsuit says that will likely lead to rising prices and blackouts during periods of high electricity demand because of the complexity of transmitting power across boundaries between different utilities and the agreements required for such transfers. Oregon’s two largest utilities, investor-owned Portland General Electric and Pacific Power, have both signed agreements to join California’s day-ahead market instead. They, too, have argued that once BPA leaves the Western market, the available energy they can purchase would diminish and become more expensive, leading to higher prices for customers across the region.Regional electricity providers also may have to construct additional power generation facilities, increase operation of existing facilities or both, to make up for BPA’s participation in a smaller and less efficient energy market, the suit contends. It could also increase reliance on generation resources powered by fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas plants because clean energy isn’t as widely available in the smaller Southwest market, the suit says. The Northwest Power Act, passed by Congress in the 1980s, requires BPA to provide low-cost power to the region while encouraging renewable energy, conservation and protection of fish and wildlife.BPA violated those duties when it chose the Southwest market option, according to the lawsuit. The groups also allege BPA’s market choice could harm fish and wildlife in the Columbia basin because it could alter the operation of the federal hydroelectric dams from which Bonneville markets power. The lawsuit claims BPA failed to comply with federal environmental law by not conducting any environmental impact analysis on impacts to fish and wildlife before making its decision. The Citizens’ Utility Board, a party to the lawsuit, said it hoped the BPA reverses course – otherwise its decision will splinter the West’s electricity markets, costing utility customers billions of dollars at a time when many are already dealing with skyrocketing bills.The board, as well as other critics of BPA’s decision, have pointed to an initiative developing an independent governance structure for California’s day-ahead market.“Oregon is facing overlapping energy challenges: rising utility bills, rising electricity demand from data centers, and stalling progress on meeting clean energy requirements. The last thing we need is for one of our region’s largest clean energy suppliers to reduce ties with the Pacific Northwest,” said the group’s spokesperson Charlotte Shuff. — Gosia Wozniacka covers environmental justice, climate change, the clean energy transition and other environmental issues. Reach her at gwozniacka@oregonian.com or 971-421-3154.If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

States, enviro groups fight Trump plan to keep dirty power plants going

In late spring, the Department of Energy ordered two aging and costly fossil-fueled power plants that were on the verge of shutting down to stay open. The agency claimed that the moves were necessary to prevent the power grid from collapsing — and that it has the power to force the plants to stay open even if the…

In late spring, the Department of Energy ordered two aging and costly fossil-fueled power plants that were on the verge of shutting down to stay open. The agency claimed that the moves were necessary to prevent the power grid from collapsing — and that it has the power to force the plants to stay open even if the utilities, state regulators, and grid operators managing them say that no such emergency exists. But state regulators, regional grid operators, environmental groups, and consumer groups are pushing back on the notion that the grids in question even need these interventions — and are challenging the legality of the DOE’s stay-open orders. The DOE claimed that the threat of large-scale grid blackouts forced its hand. But state utility regulators, environmental groups, consumer advocates, and energy experts say that careful analysis from the plant’s owners, state regulators, regional grid operators, and grid reliability experts had determined both plants could be safely closed. These groups argue that clean energy, not fossil fuels, are the true solution to the country’s grid challenges — even if the ​“big, beautiful” bill signed by Trump last week will make those resources more expensive to build. Some of the environmental organizations challenging DOE’s orders have pledged to take their case to federal court if necessary. “We need to get more electrons on the grid. We need those to be clean, reliable, and affordable,” said Robert Routh, Pennsylvania climate and energy policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups demanding that DOE reconsider its orders. Keeping J.H. Campbell and Eddystone open ​“results in the exact opposite. It’s costly, harmful, unnecessary, and unlawful.” Taking on the DOE’s grid emergency claims The groups challenging the DOE’s J.H. Campbell and Eddystone stay-open orders point out that the agency is using a power originally designed to protect the grid against unanticipated emergencies, including during wartime, but without proving that such an emergency is underway. “This authority that the Department of Energy is acting under — Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act — is a very tailored emergency authority,” said Caroline Reiser, NRDC senior attorney for climate and energy. ​“Congress intentionally wrote it only to be usable in specific, narrow, short-term emergencies. This is not that.” For decades, the DOE has used its Section 202(c) power sparingly, and only in response to requests from utilities or grid operators to waive federal air pollution regulations or other requirements in moments when the grid faces imminent threats like widespread power outages, Reiser said. But DOE’s orders for Eddystone and J.H. Campbell were not spurred by requests from state regulators or regional grid operators. In fact, the orders caught those parties by surprise. They also came mere days before the plants were set to close down and after years of effort to ensure their closure wouldn’t threaten grid reliability. J.H. Campbell was scheduled to close in May under a plan that has been in the works since 2021 as part of a broader agreement between utility Consumers Energy and state regulators, and which was approved by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the entity that manages grid reliability across Michigan and 14 other states. “The plant is really old, unreliable, extremely polluting, and extremely expensive,” Reiser said. ​“Nobody is saying that this plant is needed or is going to be beneficial for any reliability purposes.” To justify its stay-open order, DOE cited reports from the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), a nonprofit regulatory authority that includes utilities and grid operators in the U.S. and Canada. NERC found MISO is at higher risk of summertime reliability problems than other U.S. grid regions, but environmental groups argue in their rehearing request that DOE has ​“misrepresented the reports on which it relies,” and that Consumers Energy, Michigan regulators, and MISO have collectively shown closing the plant won’t endanger grid reliability. Eddystone, which had operated only infrequently over the past few years, also went through a rigorous process with mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM Interconnection to ensure its closure wouldn’t harm grid reliability. The DOE’s reason for keeping that plant open is based on a report from PJM that states the grid operator might need to ask utility customers to use less power if it faces extreme conditions this summer — an even scantier justification than what the agency cited in its J.H. Campbell order, Reiser said. As long as the DOE continues to take the position that it can issue emergency stay-open orders to any power plant it decides to, these established methods for managing plant closures and fairly allocating costs will be thrown into disarray, she said. “We have a system of competitive energy markets in the United States that is successful in keeping the lights on and maintaining reliability the vast, vast majority of the time,” Reiser said. ​“The Department of Energy stepping in and using a command-and-control system interferes with those markets.”

Designing a new way to optimize complex coordinated systems

Using diagrams to represent interactions in multipart systems can provide a faster way to design software improvements.

Coordinating complicated interactive systems, whether it’s the different modes of transportation in a city or the various components that must work together to make an effective and efficient robot, is an increasingly important subject for software designers to tackle. Now, researchers at MIT have developed an entirely new way of approaching these complex problems, using simple diagrams as a tool to reveal better approaches to software optimization in deep-learning models.They say the new method makes addressing these complex tasks so simple that it can be reduced to a drawing that would fit on the back of a napkin.The new approach is described in the journal Transactions of Machine Learning Research, in a paper by incoming doctoral student Vincent Abbott and Professor Gioele Zardini of MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).“We designed a new language to talk about these new systems,” Zardini says. This new diagram-based “language” is heavily based on something called category theory, he explains.It all has to do with designing the underlying architecture of computer algorithms — the programs that will actually end up sensing and controlling the various different parts of the system that’s being optimized. “The components are different pieces of an algorithm, and they have to talk to each other, exchange information, but also account for energy usage, memory consumption, and so on.” Such optimizations are notoriously difficult because each change in one part of the system can in turn cause changes in other parts, which can further affect other parts, and so on.The researchers decided to focus on the particular class of deep-learning algorithms, which are currently a hot topic of research. Deep learning is the basis of the large artificial intelligence models, including large language models such as ChatGPT and image-generation models such as Midjourney. These models manipulate data by a “deep” series of matrix multiplications interspersed with other operations. The numbers within matrices are parameters, and are updated during long training runs, allowing for complex patterns to be found. Models consist of billions of parameters, making computation expensive, and hence improved resource usage and optimization invaluable.Diagrams can represent details of the parallelized operations that deep-learning models consist of, revealing the relationships between algorithms and the parallelized graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware they run on, supplied by companies such as NVIDIA. “I’m very excited about this,” says Zardini, because “we seem to have found a language that very nicely describes deep learning algorithms, explicitly representing all the important things, which is the operators you use,” for example the energy consumption, the memory allocation, and any other parameter that you’re trying to optimize for.Much of the progress within deep learning has stemmed from resource efficiency optimizations. The latest DeepSeek model showed that a small team can compete with top models from OpenAI and other major labs by focusing on resource efficiency and the relationship between software and hardware. Typically, in deriving these optimizations, he says, “people need a lot of trial and error to discover new architectures.” For example, a widely used optimization program called FlashAttention took more than four years to develop, he says. But with the new framework they developed, “we can really approach this problem in a more formal way.” And all of this is represented visually in a precisely defined graphical language.But the methods that have been used to find these improvements “are very limited,” he says. “I think this shows that there’s a major gap, in that we don’t have a formal systematic method of relating an algorithm to either its optimal execution, or even really understanding how many resources it will take to run.” But now, with the new diagram-based method they devised, such a system exists.Category theory, which underlies this approach, is a way of mathematically describing the different components of a system and how they interact in a generalized, abstract manner. Different perspectives can be related. For example, mathematical formulas can be related to algorithms that implement them and use resources, or descriptions of systems can be related to robust “monoidal string diagrams.” These visualizations allow you to directly play around and experiment with how the different parts connect and interact. What they developed, he says, amounts to “string diagrams on steroids,” which incorporates many more graphical conventions and many more properties.“Category theory can be thought of as the mathematics of abstraction and composition,” Abbott says. “Any compositional system can be described using category theory, and the relationship between compositional systems can then also be studied.” Algebraic rules that are typically associated with functions can also be represented as diagrams, he says. “Then, a lot of the visual tricks we can do with diagrams, we can relate to algebraic tricks and functions. So, it creates this correspondence between these different systems.”As a result, he says, “this solves a very important problem, which is that we have these deep-learning algorithms, but they’re not clearly understood as mathematical models.” But by representing them as diagrams, it becomes possible to approach them formally and systematically, he says.One thing this enables is a clear visual understanding of the way parallel real-world processes can be represented by parallel processing in multicore computer GPUs. “In this way,” Abbott says, “diagrams can both represent a function, and then reveal how to optimally execute it on a GPU.”The “attention” algorithm is used by deep-learning algorithms that require general, contextual information, and is a key phase of the serialized blocks that constitute large language models such as ChatGPT. FlashAttention is an optimization that took years to develop, but resulted in a sixfold improvement in the speed of attention algorithms.Applying their method to the well-established FlashAttention algorithm, Zardini says that “here we are able to derive it, literally, on a napkin.” He then adds, “OK, maybe it’s a large napkin.” But to drive home the point about how much their new approach can simplify dealing with these complex algorithms, they titled their formal research paper on the work “FlashAttention on a Napkin.”This method, Abbott says, “allows for optimization to be really quickly derived, in contrast to prevailing methods.” While they initially applied this approach to the already existing FlashAttention algorithm, thus verifying its effectiveness, “we hope to now use this language to automate the detection of improvements,” says Zardini, who in addition to being a principal investigator in LIDS, is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and an affiliate faculty with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.The plan is that ultimately, he says, they will develop the software to the point that “the researcher uploads their code, and with the new algorithm you automatically detect what can be improved, what can be optimized, and you return an optimized version of the algorithm to the user.”In addition to automating algorithm optimization, Zardini notes that a robust analysis of how deep-learning algorithms relate to hardware resource usage allows for systematic co-design of hardware and software. This line of work integrates with Zardini’s focus on categorical co-design, which uses the tools of category theory to simultaneously optimize various components of engineered systems.Abbott says that “this whole field of optimized deep learning models, I believe, is quite critically unaddressed, and that’s why these diagrams are so exciting. They open the doors to a systematic approach to this problem.”“I’m very impressed by the quality of this research. ... The new approach to diagramming deep-learning algorithms used by this paper could be a very significant step,” says Jeremy Howard, founder and CEO of Answers.ai, who was not associated with this work. “This paper is the first time I’ve seen such a notation used to deeply analyze the performance of a deep-learning algorithm on real-world hardware. ... The next step will be to see whether real-world performance gains can be achieved.”“This is a beautifully executed piece of theoretical research, which also aims for high accessibility to uninitiated readers — a trait rarely seen in papers of this kind,” says Petar Velickovic, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind and a lecturer at Cambridge University, who was not associated with this work. These researchers, he says, “are clearly excellent communicators, and I cannot wait to see what they come up with next!”The new diagram-based language, having been posted online, has already attracted great attention and interest from software developers. A reviewer from Abbott’s prior paper introducing the diagrams noted that “The proposed neural circuit diagrams look great from an artistic standpoint (as far as I am able to judge this).” “It’s technical research, but it’s also flashy!” Zardini says.

The UK Says at an Energy Summit That Green Power Will Boost Security, as the US Differs

Britain has announced a major investment in wind power as it hosts an international summit on energy security

LONDON (AP) — Britain announced a major investment in wind power Thursday as it hosted an international summit on energy security — with Europe and the United States at odds over whether to cut their reliance on fossil fuels.U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government will invest 300 million pounds ($400 million) in boosting Britain’s capacity to manufacture components for the offshore wind industry, a move it hopes will encourage private investment in the U.K.’s renewable energy sector.“As long as energy can be weaponized against us, our countries and our citizens are vulnerable and exposed,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told delegates.He said “low-carbon power” was a route to energy security as well as a way to slow climate change.Britain now gets more than half its electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, and the rest from natural gas and nuclear energy. It aims to generate all the U.K.’s energy from renewable sources by 2030.Tommy Joyce, U.S. acting assistant secretary of energy for international affairs, told participants they should be “honest about the world’s growing energy needs, not focused on net-zero politics.”He called policies that push for clean power over fossil fuels "harmful and dangerous," and claimed building wind turbines requires "concessions to or coercion from China" because it supplies necessary rare minerals.Hosted by the British government and the International Energy Agency, the two-day summit brings together government ministers from 60 countries, senior European Union officials, energy sector CEOs, heads of international organizations and nonprofits to assess risks to the global energy system and figure out solutions. Associated Press writer Jennifer McDermott contributed to this story. ___The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

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