EPA surveys have shown that chemicals draining from crop fields have become the leading source of pollution in U.S. rivers and lakes. Because many municipalities source drinking water from these rivers and lakes, the issue has gotten contentious.
In the September/October issue of Mother Jones, Tom Philpott reports on an Iowa water utility, the Des Moines Water Works, that is pursuing an “unprecedented” strategy to combat farm runoff. Last March, he writes, it sued “three upstream counties, charging that they violate the federal Clean Water Act by allowing fertilizer to flow into one of the rivers from which the city gets its drinking water.”
It promises to be a long, tough fight. Bill Stowe, CEO and general manager of Des Moines Water Works, tells Philpott that Big Ag “rules the roost in this world. It’s a nasty business.” Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad and the Iowa Farm Bureau have aligned against the utility, which pays as much as $7,000 a day to remove nitrates from the city’s drinking water.
Sarah Carlson, of the environmental advocacy group Practical Farmers of Iowa, says that if farmers planted nitrogen-sequestrating cover crops on 60 percent of the farmland involved in the lawsuit, “it would drastically reduce fertilizer runoff within four years.”
In a related story last Sunday, the Iowa Gazette’s Orlan Love dug deeper into Practical Farmers and the effort to reform Iowa agriculture. Members of the advocacy group say that Iowa’s “dominant corn and soybean monoculture is simply not compatible with a healthy and sustainable environment.” Many farmers who are part of the group raise animals on grass and without feeding them grain. In Love’s story, former Iowa Agriculture Secretary candidate and organic farmer Francis Thicke proposes a “kinder, gentler form of regulation” that would tie farm subsidies to farmers’ nutrient management plans.
In Ohio, after a fertilizer-fueled toxic algae bloom on Lake Erie shut off water to 400,000 residents for four days, Ohio Sen. Randy Gardner proposed borrowing between $500 million and $1 billion to help fund efforts to improve water quality across the state, according to the Toledo Blade. In response to the Toledo water crisis, the Ohio legislature has passed new laws targeting nutrient runoff. The state’s agriculture community has questioned where the money would come from to build manure storage facilities so that it wouldn’t be spread as fertilizer at inappropriate times.
Grist’s Heather Mack also tackled the runoff problems around Toledo recently, but through the lens of an Environmental Defense Fund initiative called “Sustain.” Under the program, several hundred agriculture retailers – those who engage with farmers at the field level, selling seeds, equipment, chemicals and other farm essentials – deliver detailed guidance on conservation techniques aimed at keeping nitrates on the farm and out of the waterways.
On Tuesday, Agriculture.com’s Dan Looker examined the progress of Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton’s mandatory stream-buffer initiative that was adopted in the 2015 legislative session. In southern Minnesota, nitrate pollution is widespread. Vegetative buffers between crops and water sources have been shown to significantly reduce field runoff. Due to pressure from farm groups, Dayton’s original bill was modified from mandatory 50-foot buffers to a 50-foot average and 30-foot minimum. Farmers who don’t comply face $500 fines.
Some Minnesota agriculture groups opposed the initiative, but one farmer said, “I’m a little bit surprised the farm groups opposed this. If nothing else, it was good PR for us.”
FERN has reported on this issue as well, highlighting widespread toxic algae blooms generated by farm runoff and this UC Davis study that showed nearly 10 percent of the 2.6 million people in the Tulare Lake Basin and Salinas Valley of California at risk for drinking nitrate-contaminated water.