Iowa
This isn't meant as a poke just at Iowa, but I just did around trip junket up I-35 from K.C. To Minneapolis. I probably drove past enough decent upland habitat in two hundred miles across the state, north to south to keep you hunting for a couple a days. I read not to long ago that Iowa leads the nation in poor water quality, no wonder, thanks to the far sighted legislature, there is a hog farm on every corner of every quarter in some areas, I passed countless corn and bean fields, with 1+ acres of flooded crop in the middle of an otherwise dry field, obviously the result of wetland "reclamation", by some idiot, with the blessing of the USDA, and Iowa DNR, We are then forced to subsidize, farmers, to bribe them to enroll in WRP, CRP, etc. to get them to do the right thing. We already paiid them with price supports and direct improvement grants to plow it up in the first place. USDA farm policy is and has been since the depression, to keep commodity prices low, lots more voters eat, than farm. We all benefit from that, farmers, WICK beneficiaries, school lunch, you and me at the super market. But there is a price, we have mortgaged the future health of the land and the survival of the citizenry by our action. We may eventually do something we can't fix! See the Louisiana Gulf coast. Americans are and always have been fixated and motivated by weather and food, any threat that combines both is terrifying to us. Don't worry Iowa, you've always been progressive, My state Missouri has already destroyed our quail hunting from a harvest of 2 to 4 million in the 60's and 70's to maybe a quarter million today, Kansas City has to filter atrazine out of our drinking water, we areright behind you! Copy Nebraska, with the lukemia belt, from pesticides, Kansas, where our atrazine comes from in the spring, and Illinois who may even be ahead of Iowa when it comes to natural destruction. In fact you can pick a state, and if they haven't made a good run of mucking up the enviornment, it's because there was a natural or economic reason it was spared. Meanwhile when it comes to stocking pheasants in Iowa, Welcome to Iowa, the new Pennsylvania!!! It's at least somewhat comforting to note that the readers on this forum won't go willingly into the sunset of wild bird hunting, In Missouri we were so busy worshipping at the altar of deer and turkey, nobody made a peep till it was gone.