I worked with farmers as a Watershed Coordinator which I enjoyed working with farmers, especially those farmers willing to try conservation practices such as cover crops, drainage water management, bioreactors, strip tillage, and edge of field conservation practices etc. However, today only about 3-5% of all corn and soybean ground has cover crops (from the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation). In the winter, one can travel the rural areas and see that not much tilled black soil has cover crops and the road ditches have a lot of snirt (soil and dirt) in them from wind and water erosion. We need improvement in the edge of field practices. My suggest is all farmers need to do a conservation practice. They can choose from a long list of practices, what they want to do, but they have to do at least one. We need to recognize corn is a high maintenance crop, requiring ample inputs (nitrogen, pesticides etc.), and ways to mitigate environmental degradation from this crop. We also need to work with facts, and not sugar coat issues. The recent “elephant in the room” is being recognized with the possibility that processing corn into ethanol could require eminent domain for a pipeline to sequester carbon from the ethanol plants. Why was this not mentioned previously when the ethanol industry was in it’s infancy? Lets show the complete picture of Iowa Corn to be honest with everyone. If we are honest, we should be able to move forward with little suspicions.