Nutrient pollution from row crop agriculture poses a significant threat to U.S. Water quality

The Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded Iowa State University of Science and Technology $590,395 on May 1, 2026, under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI, CFDA 10.310) to conduct a three-year longitudinal research program addressing nitrate contamination in private rural drinking water wells and household responses to water quality information.

The project builds on the Iowa Rural Drinking Water Initiative to measure whether prior informational interventions produced lasting changes in household water testing and avoidance behaviors; expand survey work to deepen understanding of household responses to water quality information; develop and evaluate lower-cost, scalable outreach interventions based on previous extension work; and test the validity of stated preference survey methods by comparing hypothetical willingness-to-pay responses for test strips against incentive-compatible, real-payments designs. Research activities include fielding a large-scale longitudinal survey of rural households' drinking water sources and bottled water or filter purchases; studying the impacts of providing households with in-home nitrate test kits; eliciting households' willingness to pay for in-home nitrate test kits using competing preference elicitation methods; evaluating county-level information interventions; and developing extension and education programming to improve knowledge and awareness of drinking water challenges and solutions.

Work is performed in Ames, Iowa, with a period of performance from May 1, 2026 through April 30, 2029. Yale University is a sub-recipient sharing responsibility for research goals and contributing to extension and outreach objectives, with specific focus on survey design, intervention design, analysis of results, and collaboration with Ohio State University on key research components.

An understudied but critical cost of this pollution falls on rural households using private wells, who face risks from nitrate contamination. This project builds on the successful iowa rural drinking water initiative (irdwi) to address this challenge. The project will: (i) conduct a long-run follow-up survey to determine if prior informational interventions produced lasting changes in household water testing and avoidance behaviors; (II) launch a new survey wave to deepen our understanding of households' responses to water quality information; (III) develop and evaluate lower-cost, scalable outreach interventions based on previous extension work; and (IV) test the validity of stated preference survey methods by comparing hypothetical willingness-to-pay (WTP) responses for test strips against those from an incentive-compatible, real-payments design. Ultimately, this research will generate critical insights into the, to date, unquantified public health benefits of programs that reduce nutrient pollution from agriculture.