Take the click bait in the Ensia headline, Could this one simple idea be the key to solving farmer–environmentalist conflicts?, and read the article about the City of Perham's struggle to provide safe drinking water for its residents, and you'll find a lot of feel-good twaddle about process and avoiding fingerpointing.
What you won't read in Brian Bohman's article is a price tag for the citizens of Perham and Minnesota. Instead, there's this sort of thing:
Imagine waking up one day and learning that your community’s water supply is contaminated by a pollutant in concentrations deemed unsafe by officials. That’s what happened to the citizens of Perham, Minnesota, in the 1990s, when workers discovered that the level of nitrates — a pollutant that can cause serious illness or death in infants — in city well water was so high that they needed to dilute it with water sourced from uncontaminated wells to meet public health standards. The likely culprit was the use by local farmers of nitrogen fertilizer, which, if applied in quantities greater than what crops use, can end up contaminating groundwater. The finding set the stage for a potential standoff between farmers focused on growing crops and environmentalists focused on keeping water clean.
Perham is far from alone. Across the United States, farmers add nitrogen to soils to boost the production of economically important crops such as corn, wheat, edible beans, sugar beets and potatoes — but some of it ultimately ends up in surface water and groundwater, contaminating what is for many nearby communities their primary source of drinking water. Environmentalists criticize farmers for irresponsible land management, while farmers say they’re doing everything they can to reduce pollution while producing food to feed their communities.
Farmers and water resource managers in Perham, however, took a different approach than the all-too-common finger pointing. In response to the discovery of nitrogen contamination, a group of city officials, staff from the local conservation district, farmers, members of the agribusiness community, concerned citizens and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture decided to go beyond finger pointing. Instead, they held a series of meetings in the early 2000s that focused on both securing clean drinking water and ensuring a strong agricultural economy, and that were rooted in the context of local conditions. In doing so, they found that what at first may seem like an irreconcilable difference can actually be resolved when the opposing sides look for common ground — offering a potential model for other communities dealing with conflicts between farmers and citizens. . . .
Isn't that special? Are the potential polluters paying for the prevention?
Apparently not. In 2015, the Star Tribune's Tony Kennedy reported in Tainted drinking water is costing Minnesota taxpayers millions:
. . . Nitrogen fertilizer is leaching into groundwater from farm fields, contaminating wells and costing taxpayers millions of dollars a year. Sixteen communities have violated the state health limit for nitrates, and half have installed expensive nitrate-removal systems at a cost per household of $3,300 or more.
Communities are spending even more money to keep local nitrate levels in check. More than 45 of them are working with the state Department of Health to slow or reverse nitrate pollution in their public water systems, including towns that bought out nearby farmers to remove cropland from atop their well fields. . . .
There’s broad agreement that preventing nitrate contamination is cheaper than removing it from water or drilling new wells. But so-called wellhead protection plans, like a successful effort in Perham, also can be costly. The west-central Minnesota city has spent $856,000 to buy 285 acres of farm property, recouping some of the expense via new housing on some of the land.
A similar approach in Worthington has cost the city and its partners $2 million since 2006 to set aside 520 acres of farmland for conservation in a drinking water protection area. The community bought a 150-acre parcel just last year and reopened it as the Worthington Wells Wildlife Management Area, which was dedicated during the governor’s pheasant-hunting opener.
Lovely. Ensia:
is published with support from the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, major foundations and private individuals. In 2017 we became a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News — a collective of over 100 nonprofit newsrooms dedicated to serving the public interest."
Nice work if you can get it.
Photo: All that public and private support allowed Ensia to use this stock photo for the article, so Bluestem swiped it.
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Thank-you for pointing out some of the flaws in this article. I would also like to mention that the cost to rural residents outside of the Perham and Park Rapids areas is borne only by the homeowner. There is no taxpayer help for those residents, many of whom live with extraordinarily high nitrate levels and either buy bottled water or live with the consequences.
Although there might be some relevance to the idea of mutual understanding, these problems should be addressed before they get so egregious. The solutions are often what is good for the environment as well as people and include major changes in the way food is grown.
Furthermore, as one who lost her home due to lost tolerance for pesticide drift, I have a hard time thinking of french fries as real food. Killing or harming people while growing a product that further harms health is a mistaken idea of agriculture in the first place. Harming people to provide a substance that's supposed to be life sustaining makes no sense to me.
Posted by: Carol Ashley | Oct 02, 2017 at 05:54 AM