Iowa's Lobe Rangers and the Questions We Leave Behind
Three Iowa farmers are challenging the state’s voluntary conservation model—and asking what today’s choices will leave for future generations.
By Staci Mercado
The Lobe Rangers. Photo by Brian Devore.
If someone stands for clean water in Iowa, does that make them anti-farmer?
Ask Matt Bormann, Zack Smith, and James Hepp. They are farmers themselves—and, as the Lobe Rangers, they reject the premise that profitable agriculture and environmental stewardship are competing goals.
The three north-central Iowa growers say Iowa’s largely voluntary approach to conservation has not produced change at the scale needed to protect water, air, and soil. Their work and advocacy focus on no-till, strip-till, cover crops, and in-season nitrogen application—approaches they say have strengthened both their operations and their soils.
The idea began, Bormann recalls, during harvest three years ago. He watched another farmer run a high-speed disk deeply through soybean stubble, a practice Bormann says left the soil especially vulnerable to erosion. Frustrated by what he saw as a broader lack of stewardship, he started a social-media group called the Strip-Till Mafia.
The group quickly became a place for farmers to compare equipment, troubleshoot, ask questions about cover crops, and vent about the difficulty of moving conservation beyond scattered examples. Bormann, Smith, and Hepp—all of whom farm in the Des Moines Lobe, the young glacial landscape spanning much of north-central Iowa—eventually began discussing a more public effort.
The name “Lobe Rangers,” tossed out by Bormann on a conference call, stuck. Their stated purpose is honest messaging about soil health, nitrogen management, and water quality—and a push for faster action.
James Hepp
Unique Paths to Conservation
Though all three Lobe Rangers use conservation practices—including no-till or strip-till, cover crops, and in-season nitrogen application—they arrived there by different routes.
James Hepp, a first-generation farmer in Calhoun County, grew up working for local farmers while his father ran an auto repair shop and parts store. After graduating from Northwest Missouri State University, Hepp worked in crop insurance and traveled throughout the Midwest. He also worked for a family friend whose farm was already managed with conservation in mind.
Eight years later, Hepp took over farming the 1,600-acre operation. He credits his mentor with setting the land on its present course. “He took the farm three-fourths of the way up the mountain,” Hepp said, “and I helped get it over the top.”
In his first year, Hepp began using cover crops. He saw far less weed pressure in covered fields than in fields without them. “It was a night-and-day difference,” he said. “I thought, there’s something here. I’ve got to work on this.”
Zack Smith
Zack Smith, a fifth-generation farmer in Winnebago County, spent 18 years in agricultural retail after earning an agronomy degree from Iowa State University. When his parents began stepping back from the farm, Smith was given 15 acres to manage differently. He used strip-till while his father continued conventional tillage elsewhere.
Smith said a drought-year windstorm damaged both crops, but windblown soil cut his father’s conventionally tilled corn to the ground while Smith’s strip-tilled corn remained standing. At harvest, he said, the strip-tilled acres yielded 27 bushels more per acre. “That was the turning point,” Smith said. “From there we went all in.”
Matt Bormann
Matt Bormann, a fifth-generation farmer in Kossuth County, also came to conservation first as a matter of business survival. “When I started, corn was $1.65 a bushel,” he said. “Failure wasn’t an option; I had to make ends meet.” As prices tightened after the ethanol boom, he said, his family looked for ways to lower costs and manage risk.
Bormann said reduced tillage also changed how his fields handled wet weather. After an overnight inch of rain, his operation returned to soybean harvest by midday while neighboring farmers waited for fields to firm up. “We were barely picking any mud up on the wheels,” he said. “It just made all the machinery work a lot better, too.”
Scene from a field day hosted at the Hepp Farm.
Photo by Brian Devore.
A Crisis That Feels Personal
For the Lobe Rangers, questions about water and soil reach into their own families and communities. Each has watched family members, friends, or neighbors confront cancer in a state where the disease has become impossible to ignore.
Iowa has the nation’s second-highest cancer incidence rate and is one of only two states where the rate is rising, according to the Iowa Environmental Council and The Harkin Institute’s "Environmental Risk Factors and Iowa’s Cancer Crisis" report. More than 170,000 Iowans are living with a past or current cancer diagnosis. The report identifies pesticide exposure, nitrate, PFAS, and radon among environmental risk factors associated with increased cancer risk, while stressing that cancer is complex and has multiple causes.
A friend recently told Smith that his wife has an aggressive form of breast cancer. The family had spent years recreating on an Iowa river, Smith said, and now wonders what may have contributed to her illness. No one can determine the cause of an individual cancer diagnosis from such a history alone, but the question has stayed with him.
Smith, who worked in the chemical business for nearly two decades, also thinks about his own exposure. “I don’t want to die for the sake of corn,” he said. “I can tell you that much. I didn’t have that mindset 20 years ago, but now it seems kind of stupid.”
Hepp has lost a sister and grandparents to cancer. “It seems like every time you go to town, somebody’s got some form of cancer,” he said.
Bormann said physicians and other medical professionals regularly approach him about concerns over nitrates in drinking water and chemical exposures. “They’re really glad we are asking questions,” he said, “because they deal with cancer every single day.”
For the Lobe Rangers, those conversations have increased their conviction that asking questions is not an attack on agriculture. It is a responsibility. As Hepp put it, “It’s healthy, and it’s not disrespectful to question stuff. You need to question things.”
Scene from a field day hosted at the Hepp Farm.
Photo by Brian Devore.
From the Inside
Before helping form the Lobe Rangers, Bormann worked within the agricultural institutions he now criticizes. He served on Iowa’s State Soil Conservation and Water Quality Committee, was a Kossuth County Farm Bureau president, and spent nine years as a voting delegate for Iowa Farm Bureau.
Bormann said he joined the committee believing he could help advance meaningful conservation policy. Instead, he said he came to view its work as largely ceremonial. The role, he said, was “more or less rubber-stamping bureaucrats’ reports.”
He said he experienced a similar disconnect as conservation agriculture became a popular subject for farm publications and industry communications. In January 2021, four magazines sought interviews with him at once. At first, the attention felt encouraging. Then he began to question its purpose.
“I kind of realized, it’s like I’m doing all these damn interviews,” Bormann said. “I’m just a poster boy. The farm groups are gonna parade me around, and I’m just getting used.”
Bormann’s critique is directed at an agricultural establishment that, he believes, highlights individual examples of successful conservation without accepting the policy changes and sustained investment needed to move those practices across Iowa’s landscape.
Iowa Farm Bureau disputes the premise that voluntary conservation has failed. In a 2025 editorial, the organization pointed to long-term monitoring and said nutrient-management strategies have contributed to declining nitrogen and phosphorus at many locations in the Des Moines River watershed. It also argued that increased rainfall and seasonal variability complicate claims that Iowa’s water quality is worsening.
Other recent research has reached a more cautionary conclusion. A 2025 scientific assessment commissioned by Polk County identified agricultural runoff as a major contributor to water-quality problems in the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers, important sources of drinking water and recreation for central Iowa. The report’s findings intensified a long-running disagreement over whether Iowa’s voluntary approach is producing improvement quickly enough.
For Bormann, the divide is not between farmers who care and farmers who do not. It is between celebrating isolated progress and confronting what he sees as the scale of the remaining problem.
Scene from a field day hosted at the Hepp Farm.
Photo by Brian Devore.
The Limits of Voluntary Change
In 2013, Smith attended one of the early meetings connected to Iowa’s newly launched Nutrient Reduction Strategy. At the time, he believed voluntary conservation would work. Farmers, he thought, would recognize the need to protect water and soil and adopt the practices that made sense for their operations.
Over time, he said, he stopped seeing evidence that enough of them were following. “And so that frustration kept growing, ” Smith said.
Iowa’s Nutrient Reduction Strategy relies on voluntary adoption of practices intended to reduce nutrient loss from farms, including reduced tillage, cover crops, nutrient management, buffers, wetlands, and bioreactors. It calls for reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus losses to waterways while leaving most agricultural conservation decisions to individual farmers.
Iowa State University’s Nutrient Reduction Strategy tracking dashboard reports approximately 9.5 million no-till acres statewide, based on data from the USDA Census of Agriculture and the Survey of Agricultural Retailers. But the strategy’s science assessment makes clear that no single practice will meet Iowa’s nutrient-reduction objectives. Meaningful reductions require combinations of in-field management, land-cover changes, erosion-control measures, and edge-of-field practices.
Smith and his fellow Lobe Rangers argue that the pace remains inadequate. Smith said the mismatch between encouragement and urgency became clearer during a call with soil-health specialists who urged more farmer-to-farmer conversations and patience. He asked what the cost would be if change took another half-century.
“There was just nothing but crickets on the other end of the phone,” he said. “They didn’t have an answer.”
The Lobe Rangers do not argue that every farmer is indifferent to conservation. They argue that a system based primarily on voluntary participation gives too little reason for those who have not changed to do so.
“Voluntary change is kind of a joke,” Smith said. “It’s going to take consequences to drive accountability.”
The Lobe Rangers did not lay out regulatory proposals in our interview. The group is still developing a broader policy agenda, but believes Iowa needs expectations and accountability that go beyond voluntary participation.
Existing federal policy does create some conservation conditions. Farmers seeking crop-insurance premium subsidies and certain USDA benefits must comply with rules intended to protect highly erodible land and wetlands. But those requirements do not amount to a statewide mandate for cover crops, strip-till, or the other practices the Lobe Rangers favor.
Bormann said he eventually came to resent the expectation that farmers already using conservation practices should bear the burden of persuading everyone else. At some field days, he said, agency staff, industry representatives, and media outnumbered farmers considering a change.
“Why is it the responsibility of the people doing the conservation to train everybody else?” he said.
Still, Bormann said the group’s more recent events have drawn more farmers and more serious questions. He sees that interest as encouraging, though he remains unsure whether concern will translate into widespread changes in fertilizer timing, tillage, and other practices.
Scene from a field day hosted at the Hepp Farm.
Photo by Brian Devore.
Fear, Common Ground, and Accountability
The Lobe Rangers say many farmers are interested in different practices but wary of the social, financial, and political risks of trying them.
A decision to reduce tillage, plant cover crops, change nitrogen timing, or question established practices can carry real uncertainty: added management, unfamiliar equipment, variable weather, cash-flow pressure, rented ground, and the possibility of a failed first attempt. The men say social pressure can add another layer of risk: farmers may fear ridicule from neighbors or worry that a change will be interpreted as an admission that conventional systems have environmental costs.
Those pressures are familiar to the group. Before they became collaborators, Bormann and Smith were active in Farm Bureau circles and often disagreed. They now joke that, before knowing one another well, each questioned the other’s intelligence.
“I love hanging out with these guys even though they have different views on some things,” Bormann said. “We can talk about stuff and not have to agree.”
Their own reasons for changing have expanded over time. Smith said the initial appeal was practical: “Less machinery, less labor, less fuel.” Soil health, water quality, personal health concerns, and the future of rural communities later heightened the urgency.
The group identifies two immediate policy priorities that it considers practical first steps. One is dependable funding for the University of Iowa’s Iowa Water Quality Information System, which gathers and publishes real-time data on nitrate levels, streamflow, pH, dissolved oxygen, and temperature. The system has faced uncertain funding after the loss of previous state support and has relied in part on temporary philanthropic and county assistance.
The other is funding Iowa’s long-unfunded Natural Resources and Outdoor Recreation Trust Fund, created by constitutional amendment after 63% of Iowa voters approved it in 2010. The amendment directs revenue from the next increase in Iowa’s state sales tax of at least three-eighths of a cent to the trust fund, which is intended to support water quality, soil conservation, habitat, and outdoor recreation.
“Those aren’t controversial things,” Smith said. He believes the more consequential choices lie ahead: electing lawmakers willing to support what he considers comprehensive water-quality policy. “There’s nothing that's been comprehensive enough to deal with that,” he said.
Scene from a field day hosted at the Hepp Farm.
Photo by Brian Devore.
A Reason for Hope
For all their frustration, the Lobe Rangers do not describe Iowa agriculture as beyond repair. Their optimism begins with a simple conviction: farmers can change, because they have changed—and more Iowans are beginning to ask what kind of agriculture, water, and rural future they want.
Hepp believes the public’s growing attention matters. Farmers make up a small share of Iowans, he said, but everyone depends on the food system and lives with the consequences of decisions made across the landscape.
“I think up until recently, people outside agriculture didn’t think they mattered,” Hepp said. “Now, their opinion is important, and people are talking, asking questions.”
Hepp does not cast other farmers as villains. “Most farmers truly did the best they could and are doing the best they can, or trying to,” he said. But he believes scrutiny is necessary. “It’s good to have a reality check and have people ask questions.”
Bormann has seen the conversation shift, too. When the Lobe Rangers released their first video, he said, the three men worried about how it would be received. Instead, he has found more farmers and members of the public willing to engage with difficult questions about nitrate loss, tillage, fertilizer use, and the future of regulation.
“We’re helping to facilitate conversations,” Bormann said. “I think we’re really becoming a catalyst for conversation.”
For Smith, the group’s message is hopeful because it refuses to frame agriculture as the enemy. Farmers can produce profitable crops while using practices that protect soil and water, he said. Hepp’s path from first-generation farmer to conservation-minded operator is one example.
“We have the facts and science on our side,” Smith said. “We have the practical experience and the credibility for people to believe us.” He added: “Agriculture can be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.”
The Lobe Rangers’ hope rests on a belief that Iowans—including farmers, consumers, voters, and elected officials—can no longer afford to treat soil and water as somebody else’s concern.
Scene from a field day hosted at the Hepp Farm.
Photo by Brian Devore.
What We Leave Behind
The Lobe Rangers’ argument begins with a challenge to a familiar Iowa reflex: that questioning agricultural practices means questioning farmers themselves.
They reject that divide. For Bormann, Smith, and Hepp, advocating for cleaner water, healthier soil, and less polluted air is not anti-farmer. It is an argument for farming systems they believe can endure—systems that protect farm businesses while recognizing that water, air, and soil extend beyond any one field or property line.
Farmers may own or rent the acres they work, but the rivers that receive runoff, the air that families breathe, and the drinking water downstream belong to a wider public. Their case for greater accountability rests on that shared reality: when land-management decisions affect everyone, they argue, everyone has a stake in the outcome.
For Hepp, that stake has a small, energetic face. His oldest child, Karsten, is four and already has “the farm bug,” Hepp said. Hepp and his wife are raising three young children amid the fields where he hopes conservation and profitability can coexist.
Bormann’s sons, 13 and 15, already help on the family farm, and his 10-year-old daughter has shown an interest in joining them. Smith’s two daughters are students at Iowa State University but do not plan to farm. He considers himself “the last of the Mohicans” in his family’s farming line. Still, he hopes his daughters will choose to make their lives in Iowa—and that the state they inherit will be one where clean water, healthy landscapes, and a viable rural future are not competing aspirations.
Those futures differ. The responsibility, the Lobe Rangers say, does not.
Their question for Iowa is no longer whether clean water, clean air, and healthy soil matter. It is whether the state is willing to treat them as shared necessities—and to build an agricultural system accountable for protecting them.
Works Cited
Central Iowa Source Water Research Assessment (CISWRA). Currents of Change: Analysis of The Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers in Central Iowa, Final Scientific Assessment of Source Water Research Report. 2025. www.polkcountyiowa.gov/media/lixlchbz/ciswra-currents-of-change_final-scientific-assessment-of-source-water-research-report_jun272025.pdf.
"Data Shows Iowa Water Quality Improving." Iowafarmbureau.com, 24 Nov. 2025, www.iowafarmbureau.com/Article/Data-shows-Iowa-water-quality-improving.
Fowle, Colleen, et al. "Environmental Risk Factors and Iowa’s Cancer Crisis.” Iowa Environmental Council and the Harkin Institute for Public Policy & Citizen Engagement, 2026, www.iaenvironment.org/webres/File/Environmental%20Risk%20Factors%20and%20Iowa's%20Cancer%20Crisis%20-%20Report(1).pdf.
Hepp, James. Personal Interview. 10 Aug. 2026.
Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Iowa State University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy." 2025, www.nutrientstrategy.iastate.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2025%20INRS%20Complete%20Feb%202025.pdf.
Matt, Bormann. Personal Interview. 10 Aug. 2026.
Smith, Zack. Personal Interview. 10 Aug. 2026.