At What Level of ‘Do Something’ Should Agriculture Begin to Clean Up Nitrates?

Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, February 11, 2024

For at least the past decade, reported The New Lede (TNL) last September, “a growing number of peer-reviewed medical studies have linked exposure to nitrates in drinking water to elevated incidences of cancer.”

As the environmental news service clearly states, this news isn’t exactly news.

For years researchers, public health officials, and environmental watchdog groups have been warning local leaders and state lawmakers that Big Ag’s growing dependency on chemical “crop science” and CAFO-based livestock and poultry production was increasing nitrate levels in both rural and urban wells to health-impacting levels.

Warning after warning, however, went unheeded despite huge increases in nitrogen–and, in turn, nitrate pollution–across corn and livestock country. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), “…nitrogen applied to corn has increased 120 million pounds annually since 2000,” TNL notes, while “the amount of nitrogen-rich and untreated liquid and solid manure… most of it in the Midwest… grew to 1.4 billion tons by 2018…”

Worse than even those truly staggering amounts, we know that “as much as 70% of the nitrogen applied to farmland… leaked off fields and drained toxic nitrates into the region’s waters.”

Again, we’ve known this since at least 2015 when, in a high profile lawsuit, the Des Moines Water Works sued several drainage districts upstream of its key water source, the Racoon River, for contaminating its water with dangerous levels of nitrates for its 500,000 customers.

The fight turned ugly when Iowa’s then-Gov. Terry Branstad, a committed warrior for Big Ag, called the lawsuit an act of “war on rural Iowa.” The sound bite was Grade A baloney but it hit its mark; since the suit was dismissed in 2017, no public agency has attempted to bring Big Ag to heel over its growing role in nitrate pollution.

And that can’t be dismissed as just some legal weakness or lack of evidence.

But a Feb. 1 followup story on nitrate contamination by TNL, the reporting arm of the non-profit, non-partisan group that most farmers love to hate, the Environmental Working Group, noted that “lawmakers and public health officials in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska are pursuing… new strategies at reducing the risks” nitrate pollution poses to “human health presented by ongoing farm-related contamination.”

The reason is simple, says University of Nebraska (UNL) researcher Eleanor Rogan, chair of the Department of Environmental, Agricultural, and Occupational Health at its Medical Center: “‘It’s pretty obvious that in the areas where levels of nitrates and other agrichemicals in water are higher, you get more pediatric cancers and birth defects.’”

And, she adds, “‘So that sort of tells you maybe you should do something…’”

In Nebraska that something largely turns out to be $2.5 million to fund researchers “in part with identifying and controlling the sources of cancer in the state’s children.”

The reason for the new state funds is equally obvious: Nebraska has a “high rate of birth defects and pediatric cancers in areas where groundwater is contaminated with nitrates and atrazine, a weed killer.”

An Iowa state legislator, Democrat Austin Baeth, “an internal medicine specialist from Des Moines,” explains TNL, is leading a statehouse effort “to figure out the key drivers of our cancer rate,” the second highest in the nation.

One Minnesota state rep, Democrat Rick Hansen, has a different approach than his nitrate-rich neighbors. Hanson wants a “polluters-pay,” $1-per-ton surcharge on in-state sales of commercial fertilizers to fund cleanup of rural and community water sources impacted by nitrogen overuse.

It’s just one good idea that serves notice that nitrate contamination of rural–and, increasingly, downstream urban and suburban–water sources is a deadly, here-and-now problem and yesterday’s denials and today’s delays won’t be suffered silently by a now better informed, increasingly endangered public.

© 2024 ag comm