ACWA (Agriculture's Clean Water Alliance) is a group of leading ag retailers in west-central Iowa. The issue that brought ACWA together was water quality in the Raccoon River watershed.
The Public looks to agriculture to feed a growing world population from a static land resource base. But it's also become clear that the public expects consistently improving environmental performance from the business of agriculture.
ACWA is about finding the balance as we move forward.
Our primary mission as ag suppliers has historically been to help farmers continuously improve agronomic performance. But by creating ACWA, we have made an agreement across the industry to internalize and implement a dual mission: blending optimal crop yield and profitability with the best environmental performance possible at the field edge.
We can do this.
Farmers trust us as suppliers and consultants — we have strong relationships with them and can have tremendous influence over their decisions.
And we know that many of the answers to our environmental challenges rest in science. The best way to start working is to collect of water quality data and find out what is really going on in the water.
The data will point to both challenges and solutions.
It has taken a long time to recognize and understand these problems, but we do. It's also going to take us a long time to address them, but we can — and we will.
