Chris Jones - Nitrogen Discharge from Iowa Rivers

Iowa is famous for the livestock it produces - the number of hogs in Iowa in 2020 was more than twice that in the next highest state - more than 24,000 hogs.  Iowa is also the top producer in chickens and 7th highest in cattle.  All these animals eat a lot of corn and soybeans and they make a lot of manure.  

Chris Jones is a Research Engineer at the Iowa Institute of Hydraulics and Engineering, and he has a chatty and informative blog where he analyzes and reports on  Iowa water data.  

In his March 1, 2021 post, Jones compiled data from the monitoring of Iowa watersheds since 2003.  His post documents his data sources and explains his methodology.  The graph above shows the amount of nitrogen being discharged from Iowa on the major rivers.  The green line is the rivers discharging to the Missouri River, and the blue line is the rivers going directly to the Upper Mississippi.  The red line is the total discharge.  Jones' data shows that the total nitrogen discharge has doubled since 2003.  

In 2019, Jones wrote a post that compared the impact of the population of livestock to the human population of major cities.  Our speaker at the UMRR session, David Osterberg, quoted Chris Jones  as he talked about the need for a stronger approach to nutrient management.  You can watch the video of Osterberg's talk via the link in this UMRR Blog post.  Chris Jones' blog post that Osterberg quoted is found at this link.