Iowa Ag Secretary Mike Naig has been touring his home states, visiting fields combating recent floods.
He says that he has seen his fair share of flood damage, but he has also seen some well-performing crops thanks to conservation practices.
According to Sec. Naig, “Actually, some good news! I was just up in the lakes area and you know, they’ve really been focused on putting in wetlands up above those lakes, and, you know, there’s been some aerial photography taken and you can see that those wetlands did their job. They held back some of that surge, that bounce that would have otherwise affected properties and contributed again to flow downstream, and so there’s, I think, a success story and one that I think will be told— needs to be told— is looking at the benefits of that, there’s water quality benefits, but there’s also flood mitigation that occurs there. So, there are some good news stories there where we saw that play out.”
Naig said areas of erosion could benefit from terraces or a buffer strip.
