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Miles of algae covering Lake Erie.
A large algae bloom overtook the western basin of Lake Erie last week, alarming residents and local officials.
A potentially harmful algae bloom covered more than 700 square miles in the western basin of Lake Erie last week, turning the lake bright green and alarming residents and local officials.
Scientists say that algae blooms have been a growing problem for Lake Erie since the 2000s, mostly because of the extensive use of fertilizer on the region’s farmland.
The algae blooms contain cyanobacteria, which, under certain conditions, can produce toxins that contaminate drinking water and cause harm to the local ecosystem.
During last week’s bloom, the amount of toxins in the algae remained low at the intake points where towns draw water from the lake, according to officials.
Lake Erie’s algae blooms are driven by a landscape dominated by agriculture.
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Rain causes nutrients from fertilizers on farmland to run off into rivers.
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The nutrients travel along rivers, eventually reaching Lake Erie.
In the Maumee River, the largest tributary to any of the Great Lakes, green algae was visible last week in an aerial photograph.
According to experts, excess nutrients that are transported by the Maumee River can be a good indicator of how severe an algae bloom in the lake will be.
Millions of people get drinking water from Lake Erie. Previous blooms have been toxic.
While not all algae blooms are toxic, they can produce a type of toxin called microcystis that can cause serious liver damage under certain conditions. Dangerous levels of the toxin caused Toledo, Ohio, to shut down the drinking water supply of a half-million residents for three days in 2014.
In total, almost 3 million people get drinking water from the central basin of Lake Erie. Officials have been testing the intake points in the lake where towns draw water and report that the current toxin levels are low.
The blooms are hurting the region’s economy.
Lake Erie attracts millions of visitors for beaches and recreation like fishing, and many businesses stand to lose money during large algae blooms.
David Spangler, vice president of the Lake Erie Charter Boat Association, describes the algae as a musty-smelling, lime-green skin on the lake’s surface that’s so thick you could write your name in it.
“An awful lot of money may go someplace else other than Ohio if we continue having these issues in the lake,” Mr. Spangler said. He noted that in 2015, an algae bloom kept boats out of the lake for six to seven weeks.
The algae blooms are getting larger.
Since the 2000s, algae blooms in Lake Erie have become much more extensive.
According to one study by the Stanford University Carnegie Institute for Science, most of the increase in the size of the blooms can be attributed to a rise in the amount of dissolved phosphorus flowing into the lake.
In the 1980s, researchers started tracking algae blooms in Lake Erie. They were mostly small, but changes in farming practices caused them to spike.
The blooms are expected to grow more harmful as global warming changes rainfall patterns.
According to local experts, storms have become more intense in the region, carrying more nutrients from the farmland into the lake.
Another study shows that extensive algae blooms will continue to grow throughout the continental United States and around the globe, especially in Southeast Asia.
The mayor of Toledo, Paula Hicks-Hudson, wrote a letter to President Trump on Sept. 26, calling on the federal government to declare Lake Erie impaired, which would allow for the lake’s nutrient loads to be regulated under the Clean Water Act.
“There is something very wrong with our country when our rivers and lakes turn green,” Ms. Hicks-Hudson wrote in her letter. “As I look out my office at a green river, I can tell you one thing: The status quo is not working.”
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Boesch navigated Bay’s stormier days, helped put cleanup on course.
When Donald Boesch came to Maryland 27 years ago, the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort was struggling to make real progress. The research institution he’d come to lead faced challenges, too, just to survive intact.
‘People’s scientist’ hands off UMCES leadership, leaving legacy of integrity, science-based solutions in his wake
By Timothy B. Wheeler on September 13, 2017
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UMCES President Donald Boesch in a hatch aboard the Rachel Carson, the 81-foot research vessel built during his tenure. (Cheryl Nemazie/UMCES)UMCES President Donald Boesch brought science to bear on controversies, sought consensus. (Dave Harp)Donald Boesch (far right) spoke at 2010 press conference in Annapolis in support of a plan to expand Maryland’s oyster sanctuaries for their ecological benefits that was proposed by Gov. Martin O’Malley (left). DNR Secretary John Griffin was also present. (UMCES)Boesch served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. Sitting to his right at this meeting was Fran Ulmer, chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage. (UMCES)
UMCES President Donald Boesch in a hatch aboard the Rachel Carson, the 81-foot research vessel built during his tenure. (Cheryl Nemazie/UMCES)
When Donald Boesch came to Maryland 27 years ago, the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort was struggling to make real progress. The research institution he’d come to lead faced challenges, too, just to survive intact.
Now, as Boesch prepares to step down this month as president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the Bay’s health appears to be improving, though it’s far from saved. And his institution has not only survived, but generated a growing body of research that’s helped guide the recovery.
Those who’ve worked with Boesch through that time credit his leadership on both scores. They say he’s played a critical role in advocating for science-based solutions to coastal degradation in the Bay, in his native Gulf of Mexico and worldwide. And, he’s overseen a threefold increase in research grants, fending off potentially crippling budget cuts he faced in his first year, and ultimately winning funding for new facilities at the labs — and even a new research vessel, the Rachel Carson.
“You meet a lot of people on the Chesapeake Bay, and everyone is talented and everyone is knowledgeable,” said Ann Swanson, longtime director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, in remarks filmed for a June dinner honoring Boesch. “But there are few that are shining stars. And Don is one of those stars.”
Boesch deflects such praise to the researchers he’s helped recruit to the center’s four laboratories — up from three when he arrived. But he acknowledges that he’s been willing — more so than most scientists — to apply research to the messy business of setting government policy. It came with the job, he points out; the center’s president traditionally sits on the Maryland governor’s “Bay Cabinet,” the rare academic amid a coterie of political appointees.
“I’ve been at the table, and once I got my sea legs, a very loyal and active participant,” he said in an interview reflecting on his tenure. “My job is twofold: to tell the truth as I know it…and help the governor be successful.”
In that role, Boesch has advised five governors, both Democrats and Republicans. He helped to build the case for the state’s first regulation of farmers’ use of fertilizer and, later, phosphorus-laden poultry manure. He’s also pushed for restoration of the Bay’s depleted oyster population by carving out harvest-free sanctuaries and undertaking large-scale reef reconstruction. In the last decade especially, he’s been an outspoken advocate for addressing the threat of climate change, both to the Bay and world.
Those have been contentious issues, but Boesch has not shied from controversy. Without rancor, he sought to bring science to bear on and bring together disputing stakeholders — and sometimes even feuding scientists.
“Don was very good at handling those whitewater situations, all the rapids, and maintaining his integrity as a scientist, (while) also wanting to help policy makers move forward,” said John Griffin, former secretary of natural resources who served three governors during Boesch’s tenure.
Boesch came to Maryland from his native Louisiana, where he was born in a working-class neighborhood of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. He majored in biology at Tulane University and went on to become the first executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, which he helped to build into a formidable research institution. But he got a taste of the Chesapeake along the way, when he earned his doctorate in oceanography at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
“That was a shaping experience,” he recalled during the June dinner. “From day one, I worked right in the environment I studied. I was either in the Bay or right on the shore looking at it every day. It was that experience that led to my whole career working in marine labs.”
He came back in 1990 at a critical time. The Chesapeake restoration effort had been under way for seven years when Boesch moved into the president’s office at the Horn Point Laboratory, a former DuPont waterfront estate near Cambridge. Just a few years before, state and federal leaders had identified nutrient pollution as the Bay’s biggest threat, and had pledged to reduce it by 40 percent by the year 2000. They didn’t realize how hard that was going to be.
“The folly was to think you could do this through voluntary measures,” Boesch said. While on paper, at least, it looked like states were taking steps to curb pollution, Boesch said he found himself trying “to convince people we weren’t getting anywhere very fast.” Readings from water quality monitors around the Bay didn’t match the improvements projected by the computer models used by the federal-state Bay Program to direct the restoration effort.
“I think one of Don’s biggest impacts,” said Dave Nemazie, Boesch’s longtime assistant, “is in a sense holding both the Bay Program accountable as well as the state accountable in how they used the assessments that were done, and making sure that no one was gaming the story too much.”
He has influenced some of Maryland’s most fraught environmental issues. Twenty years ago, in the wake of a rash of harmful algal blooms that killed thousands of fish and triggered health complaints in fishermen, Boesch chaired an expert panel tasked with determining if there was any linkage between the outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida — dubbed the “cell from hell” at the time — and nutrient pollution. Many were saying the outbreaks were fueled by the widespread use of poultry manure as fertilizer on the Eastern Shore, an assertion hotly denied by farmers and poultry industry. And scientists even differed on whether pfiesteria or another aquatic microorganism was killing fish.
The Cambridge Consensus, as the panel’s report was called, concluded that a link between the fish kills and nutrient pollution was probable, if not provable. Nutrient enrichment of water is often associated with harmful algae blooms, it noted, so reducing the flow of nitrogen and phosphorus from farms into the Bay would likely lower the risk of more toxic outbreaks.
The report provided the scientific basis for Gov. Parris Glendening to push through legislation requiring Maryland farmers for the first time to limit and report their use of nutrient-rich manure and chemical fertilizer on crops.
More than a decade later, Boesch got pulled into a similar dispute. Despite the earlier nutrient management law, there was growing evidence that phosphorus from poultry manure was building up on many farm fields on the Eastern Shore and getting into the water. Farmers scoffed, and scientists in the University System of Maryland couldn’t even agree on how widespread or serious the problem was, or what exactly to do about it.
It wasn’t easy, but eventually Boesch crafted a statement the disagreeing researchers could agree on. Their report to Gov. Martin O’Malley contributed to his decision to draw up new limits on the land application of phosphorus. The proposed regulation got withdrawn by O’Malley’s successor, Gov. Larry Hogan, who had pledged to protect Maryland’s poultry industry from overregulation. Soon thereafter, though, Hogan proposed much of the same regulation, though with enough wiggle in it to win over the industry opposition.
Sometimes, Boesch played the opposite role, of trying to dissuade politicians from a hasty, ill-advised move. Fourteen years ago, with oyster diseases devastating the Bay’s once-robust seafood industry, watermen were clamoring to try disease-resistant Asian oysters. Maryland’s Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr., who aligned himself with watermen, endorsed the plan and said he would seek a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin placing the Asian shellfish in the Bay.
“It was moving like a juggernaut,” Boesch recalled. Worried, as were many scientists, about the potential harm that could result from introducing nonnative species, Boesch said he played a behind the scenes role in getting the National Academy of Science to study the issue.
“I knew it would take a while, and I knew the probable outcome,” Boesch said. The report called for more research. The Army Corps then took five more years to complete a detailed study of the potential environmental impacts. By that time, Ehrlich had lost re-election to O’Malley, who opposed the introduction.
Boesch has been involved in the ensuing effort to rebuild the Bay’s native oyster population. This has been hotly debated as well. Some of his own scientists contend the only way to bring the bivalves back is to stop harvesting them. With Boesch’s advice and support, O’Malley opted instead to expand the state’s sanctuaries and undertake large-scale restoration efforts, building large new reefs and seeding them with billions of baby oysters spawned at the UMCES laboratory that was built while Boesch was its president.
Many watermen have bitterly opposed the move, calling the restoration effort a costly boondoggle. It’s still early, but monitoring so far shows the oysters are growing and thriving on the rebuilt sanctuary reefs. The Hogan administration made a move this year to open some sanctuaries to harvest, but the legislature blocked it.
As an eminent biological oceanographer with dozens of published studies to his name, Boesch has been called on for his expertise and advice on coastal and marine issues nationally and even internationally. He’s served on numerous government boards, commissions and advisory bodies, including the National Academy of Science. President Obama tapped him for his national commission to review the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and recommend measures to make offshore drilling safer.
Sen. Paul Pinsky, the Maryland legislature’s leading environmental advocate, called Boesch “the people’s scientist” at the June dinner. He credited Boesch with helping to pass several important environmental bills, particularly last year’s measure pledging to reduce Maryland’s greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030, one of the most ambitious goals set by any state.
“His passion has propelled him to speak truth to power, promote change and empower others to seek that change,” Pinsky said.
At the dinner, Boesch reflected on how his upbringing and his family had influenced him and enabled him to persist. Mentioning his two granddaughters, he said, “Every day I think about them. It motivates me to do what I do to ensure they have a livable planet.”
Soon, though, he’ll be doing it as just another member of the UMCES faculty. On Sept. 18, he’ll make way for his successor, Peter Goodwin, a civil engineering professor from the University of Idaho with a track record of research and work on issues involving rivers, lakes, estuaries and wetlands.
Boesch acknowledges that several key issues on which he’s labored long remain unresolved. Oyster restoration is still up in the air — as is the future of federal involvement in the overall Bay cleanup effort, given events in Washington, DC. And the Trump administration is moving to halt any U.S. action on climate change, including withdrawing from the 2015 Paris accord.
“There’s never a stopping point that’s convenient,” he said. He does plan to spend the next year on the UMCES faculty and is looking to write a book or two. His first won’t be about the Bay, he said, but about the Gulf’s dead zone, plunging into the intersection of science and policy once again with characteristic directness — “how we came to learn what was wrong,” he said, yet haven’t done anything meaningful about it so far.
Boesch said he believes the Bay community has something going for it that gives him hope.
“One of the things that distinguishes this area is this agreement on what our goals are,” he said. “We may differ on how we get there, but agree on common goals.”
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Power plants get two-year reprieve for parts of wastewater rule.
Power plants won’t have to meet new limits until 2020 on toxic wastewater that comes from using air pollution control systems and transporting bottom furnace ash, the EPA announced.
From Daily Environment Report™
Turn to the nation's most objective and informative daily environmental news resource to learn how the United States and key players around the world are responding to the environmental...
By Amena H. Saiyid
Power plants won’t have to meet new limits until 2020 on toxic wastewater that comes from using air pollution control systems and transporting bottom furnace ash, the EPA announced Sept. 13.
The Environmental Protection Agency said it was postponing by two years compliance dates that would be required of more than 1,000 power plants nationwide, as it reconsiders how strictly it should limit those two sources of wastewater.
The postponement, requested by electric power utilities, applies to new Obama-era limits on wastewater generated by transporting bottom ash and by operating flue gas desulfurization (scrubber) units used to capture sulfur dioxide emissions from burning petroleum coke and coal.
Bottom ash transport wastewater refers to the water that power plants use to collect, cool, and convey ash and other slag from the bottom of a boiler to other parts of the utility for treatment.
These two sources of wastewater would make up 87 percent of the toxic pollutants removed by power plants, if the agency had chosen to implement the 2015 Obama rule as finalized.
The agency’s final unpublished rule follows public comments submitted on a proposal to postpone the 2015 rule’s compliance deadlines for all six categories of wastewater containing arsenic, selenium, nitrates, mercury, zinc, and other pollutants that power plants nationwide discharge. The rule will take effect upon publication in Federal Register.
Four Other Waste Streams Unaffected
The compliance deadlines for the two waste streams will be pushed back to Jan. 1, 2020. The rule’s deadlines for the four other sources of toxic wastewater—fly ash, mercury controls, gasification, and coal ash landfills—will still start Jan. 1, 2018.
A national industry group representing power plant operators, including subsidiaries of Ameren Corp. and American Electric Power, sought a deadline extension because the EPA is revising parts of a 2015 rule setting effluent limits for technology they would be required to use to treat the wastewater (RIN: 2040-AF14). The industry had pushed for the rewrite, arguing that the EPA used outdated and incomplete data to set standards for these two waste streams.
American Electric Power didn’t respond to Bloomberg BNA’s request for comment. The Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities, had commented on the postponement at a July 31 hearing at EPA headquarters. At that time, Rich Bozek, the institute’s director of environmental and health and safety policy, urged the EPA to postpone the deadlines for the two waste streams.
“Without a postponement, electric companies will continue to invest millions of dollars to plan for compliance with a rule that ultimately may change significantly,” Bozek said. “That would be a waste of electric company and customer resources, and it would force electric companies to make decisions about generation fleet investments and closures based on incorrect and incomplete information.”
Delay Expected
Environmental groups opposed to the agency’s decision to rewrite the 2015 rule weren’t surprised by the postponement. They already are involved in suing the EPA over its initial decision to reconsider the rule without public comment.
“EPA has chosen to delay two of the most significant sources of toxic pollutants,” Casey Roberts, a senior attorney with Sierra Club, told Bloomberg BNA Sept. 13.
The Sierra Club has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg L.P. Bloomberg BNA is an affiliate of Bloomberg L.P.
To contact the reporter on this story: Amena H. Saiyid in Washington at asaiyid@bna.com
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rachael Daigle at rdaigle@bna.com
For More Information
The EPA final rule postponing compliance is available at https://src.bna.com/swi.
Copyright © 2017 The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Here’s how corn makes America go round.
Companies want to know the environmental impact of their supply chains. Researchers used a crucial commodity to show them.
Not every day does an obscure scientific report directly help massive U.S. companies looking to cut costs, use natural resources more efficiently, and make sure their customers know about it. And yet Labor Day saw the quiet unveiling of a project that provides minute detail—down to individual factories—of the movement of corn along America’s sprawling meat and ethanol supply chains.
The ramifications of being able to tie pollution and water use to specific amounts of desirable commodities, and in specific locations, cannot be overstated at a time of accelerating climate change. The opaque title of the Sept. 4 study, however, fails to give away what’s going on. “Subnational mobility and consumption-based environmental accounting...” In English, what the researchers have done is broken out granular geographic information about where corn is produced and transported within two industries that consume it most—meat and ethanol.
Many agricultural staples have enormous environmental consequences. Corn’s side-effects—fertilizer use and emissions, transportation pollution, water uptake, land change—are particularly noteworthy given the enormous scale of U.S. production. As the image atop this story shows, satellite chlorophyll-sensors can “see” plant growth in the U.S. corn belt from space.
Previously, companies evaluating the environmental side-effects of the corn they buy often had to work from national estimates, according to the study’s authors. The impacts are well-understood at the higher-levels, but lacked critical specificity for individual producers. With this new research, meat and poultry firms for example will be able to estimate that a bushel of corn produced in western South Dakota may be three or four times as carbon-intensive as a bushel from southern Minnesota.
“It matters for these companies where stuff is coming from,” said Jennifer Schmitt, a co-author of the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and director of the University of Minnesota’s NorthStar Initiative for Sustainable Enterprise.
Governments, investors, and civil society groups are all giving increased scrutiny to how “sustainable” large companies claim to be. Many have taken up the challenge by investigating, managing, and disclosing data about the sum total of resources it takes to make their products, from most basic raw materials to post-consumer detritus. Within the last 10 years, sustainability has become a point of competition among leaders in many industries, especially consumer-facing ones.
The general problem that the researchers took on—prompted by a collaboration with the non-governmental organization the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)—is that some 75 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions and water use of economic production is bound up in an enormous, poorly documented network of supply chains. Given the importance of corn to both the meat and ethanol industries, and the importance of the meat and ethanol industries to American consumers, they focused on that specific network.
Think of the new research as a computer model of the United States of Corn. It allows everyone to judge with previously impractical detail where corn has the biggest impact on the environment. With localized information about where corn comes from, and where it ends up being eaten by cattle, swine, or foul, or cooked into auto fuel, companies can better understand where in their supply chains the most carbon is burned, the most water is used, and where the landscape is most transformed. The new Food System Supply Chain Sustainability model “provides a means to link county-level corn production in the U.S. to firm-specific demand locations associated with downstream processing facilities,” write Timothy Smith of the University of Minnesota and five co-authors.
The tool has already been test-driven by a major company. When the world’s largest pork producer, Smithfield Foods Inc., announced in December that it planned to cut its greenhouse gas emissions some 25 percent by 2025, it drew confidence from partnerships with EDF and the developers of the model. The study’s numbers for Smithfield are correct, even though they predate the company’s work with both EDF and the University of Minnesota, said Kathleen Kirkham, a spokeswoman for the company.
Tyson Foods called the figures cited for their operations incorrect, “since the corn we source is mostly for our poultry business and not the cattle and pigs we buy from independent farmers and ranchers,” said Caroline Ahn, a spokeswoman for Tyson. She said the company’s corn purchases are less than a quarter of the amount stated in the new study. Tyson, which details its environmental program here, is working with the research group World Resources Institute to set science-based greenhouse gas targets and water-use goals, she said. (Other companies either declined to comment or have yet to return a request for comment on the study’s findings.)
The study estimates the geographic picture of U.S. corn distribution, thereby overshadowing an issue central to producers, namely, substantial yield-per-acre gains in the last 20 years. Steffen Mueller is principal economist for the Energy Resources Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is an expert in lifecycle modeling of corn and biofuels, and criticized the new study for using 2012 as its base year, a time when devastating drought reduced corn yields to 122 bushels an acre, which is equivalent to 1995 levels, or roughly 28 percent below 2016.
Mueller said that newer data would have been more appropriate, and is concerned with recent examples of outdated data use in research [pdf]. (The researchers wrote they used 2012 data because it’s from the most recent relevant U.S. Department of Agriculture report. Because of the drought circumstances that year, they also ran 2007 numbers and found that the geography of corn was more or less stable between the two years, according to the study.)
Developers of the FoodS3 model introduced in the paper received financial support from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, EDF, and the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. The NorthStar program is a center within the University of Minnesota that works with companies, governments, and NGOs to make sure their research addresses practical needs. With the corn-supply-chain model launched, Schmitt said she hopes the group will next look more closely into irrigated water use and expand analysis to other environmental impacts.
As she put it, “We have a lot of ‘nexts.’”
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California towns tackle nitrate pollution with local solutions.
It will take decades to slow nitrate contamination in groundwater from industrial agriculture in parts of the state of California, so communities are taking matters into their own hands to get clean drinking water.
PORTERVILLE, CALIFORNIA, A town of about 50,000 people, lies nestled at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near the gateways to Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. It’s an idyllic setting, but in the nearby rural communities of East Porterville, Poplar, Terra Bella and Ducor, many residents get their drinking water from private wells that are rarely tested for contaminants. That’s potentially dangerous because groundwater in the area is known to be polluted with nitrates.
A program in Porterville is trying a new tactic to help people in these communities obtain clean water. It’s one of a number of local responses trying to tackle the state’s nitrate problem.
A by-product of the nitrogen fertilizer that farmers put on crops, nitrates in groundwater have increased since the rise of industrial agriculture in the 1950s. Growers apply more fertilizer than the crops can absorb, and the excess nitrates are then washed into surface or groundwater when the crops are irrigated. In California, the most heavily affected areas are the Tulare Lake Basin in the San Joaquin Valley, where Porterville lies, and the Salinas Valley on the Central Coast, 100 miles south of San Francisco. Although nitrate pollution can also come from animal waste and ineffective sewage treatment, in these areas 96 percent is from crop agriculture, according to a study conducted by the University of California, Davis for the State Water Resources Control Board.
It’s difficult to know exactly how many people are exposed to nitrate-laced drinking water across the state. The U.C. Davis study estimated that up to 250,000 people using 10,000 private or small local system wells are at high risk of excessive exposure to nitrates in the San Joaquin and Salinas valleys. And recent state data identifies about 60 public water systems chronically out of compliance with safe nitrate levels.
The biggest known health risk to consuming nitrates is blue-baby syndrome, or methemoglobinemia. When babies consume nitrates, bacteria in their stomachs convert it to a more toxic form, nitrites, which reduces the body’s ability to deliver oxygen. Symptoms include difficulty breathing and a bluish color around the eyes and mouth. Without medical attention, the condition can induce coma and lead to death. Pregnant women are also at risk. Some studies have shown links to birth defects and certain cancers, but the evidence is not as clear.
So what’s California doing about it?
The state started to get serious about cleaning up nitrates a decade ago. It is now working with growers to stop new pollution and is considering how it might clean up old contamination. But it’s costly to clean an entire aquifer, and even extraordinary efforts would take several decades to pay off.
So the state is also focused on funding interim local solutions to supply people with safe drinking water. Most of these instant fixes include bottled water, installing a filter at the kitchen sink or a big filter at a wellhead. Other, more permanent solutions include drilling a new well or connecting contaminated systems to cleaner ones in neighboring towns. In the meantime, towns are pursuing their own solutions.
Rural Outreach
Cristobal Chavez, a former truck driver and Teamster, lives with his wife and five foster children outside the small Tulare County town of Poplar, where he has 15 acres and raises sheep, goats and chickens.
High levels of nitrates were reported by municipal water systems in his area, prompting the nonprofit Community Water Center based in nearby Visalia to ask to test Chavez’s well two years ago as part of an outreach campaign to private well owners. The state doesn’t require private well owners to test their wells for contaminants, and many people don’t know that they should or they can’t afford to do so.
Results for Chavez’s well showed levels of nitrate more than three times the maximum contaminant level allowed by law, according to the Community Water Center.
“We were surprised. We were using that water for drinking and everything,” says Chavez. “Since they told us, we don’t do it anymore.” But that’s been at a cost of nearly $200 a month for bottled water.
Chavez’s well went dry three years ago during the drought, forcing him to dig a deeper well. Now he says, “I have plenty of water, but I can’t drink it.”
Without access to a community water system, many private well owners are on their own when it comes to finding solutions to nitrate contamination. But in Porterville, about 10 miles down the road from Chavez, Self-Help Enterprises, a local nonprofit, is working to change that.
In an area where many residents are low-income and rely on private wells, Self-Help Enterprises decided to target those most affected by nitrates: expectant mothers and infants. The organization offers them water tests when they visit the office of their local Women, Infants and Children (WIC), a federal food and nutrition program. A grant from the Central Valley Salinity Coalition, a nonprofit alliance of agricultural businesses and water districts working to clean up salts and nitrates, has funded a six-month pilot program that launched in April.
So far, 63 people have taken home testing kits, and 25 have returned them, says Abigail Solis, community development specialist with Self-Help Enterprises. Of the 25 water samples tested, eight had nitrate levels above the legal limit and one was four times the legal limit, she says.
If a test reveals dangerous nitrate levels, project funds will cover bottled water delivery as long as the pilot runs – through to October of this year – or an under-sink filter, which cleans the water through reverse osmosis.
As for why more people aren’t taking advantage of the program, Solis says access is likely an issue. The WIC office can accept water samples only between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., Monday through Wednesday, to ensure that the sample is tested quickly enough to gives accurate results. People are at work during the day, says Solis, and transportation is a hurdle for many. Solis is working to obtain funding to continue the project and hopes to send someone out to collect samples from people’s homes to increase participation.
“Sometimes we think families either don’t care about these issues or they’re not aware,” says Solis. “We have learned families are very aware and care very much. They’re just not sure what they can do about it.”
Bottled Water Reliance
Irma Medellin started the grassroots organization El Quinto Sol de America to drive civic participation in Tulare County communities where many residents don’t feel they have a political voice, she says. A big part of that work has included raising awareness about water contamination.
“It’s necessary to work together so our government listens and then the government can also include us in their plans,” she says through a translator. “The government has a lot of money, but poor communities are often the last in line.”
Grassroots activism in the valley in recent years has helped to bring more resources to hard-hit areas. The state now has 85 active projects supplying bottled water to California communities suffering from water contamination or drought impacts. Thirty of those projects address nitrate contamination.
“The agricultural industry is contaminating the water, and we pay the price,” says Medellin.
But in at least one area of the state – the Salinas Valley in Monterey County – some farmers are finally paying too. In that area, both growers and residents rely primarily on groundwater, which, thanks to decades of intensive agriculture, is polluted with nitrates. Starting this summer, individuals using private wells and towns affected by nitrate pollution are now receiving bottled water deliveries paid for by local area growers. This temporary program emerged after the State Water Resources Control Board and the local Central Coast Regional Water Control Board made moves toward cracking down on agricultural polluters in the area.
They drafted an enforcement order against the larger farmers in the Salinas Valley, prompting the parties to agree to a settlement in which growers would provide affected people with clean water immediately and work to install long-term water supply solutions, such as digging deeper wells for them or connecting them to nearby water systems.
Technological Solutions
Bottled water programs are only a stopgap measure until more permanent solutions can be found, but that often takes years. Another option is point-of-use filtration systems that go under a sink and use either reverse osmosis or distillation, but they usually cost several hundred dollars apiece and most households would need several. Filters also need to be changed regularly.
Pending state legislation, Assembly Bill 166 would direct the State Water Resources Control Board to study the feasibility of providing rebates for household water filtration systems for residents.
Large water filtration systems can also be installed at the wellhead. Typically those systems have been considered expensive, slow and challenging because they require ongoing maintenance, such as changing filters and properly disposing of the brine waste that is generated.
But a United Kingdom-based company, Ionex SG, thinks it has found a better way. Its system uses ion exchange, a technology that’s been around for years and exchanges a contaminant with a more desirable substance, says chief executive officer Phil Chandler. Traditional ion exchange systems generate large volumes of waste, but Ionex’s technology reduces that waste, he says, and thus lowers the disposal costs.
The technology – which can be used to treat contaminants such as nitrates, as well as hexavalent chromium, uranium or perchlorate – is already being tested in California with four different water agencies.
“After five years of self-funded research and field trials [Ionex SG] is conditionally approved for drinking water applications in California,” says Chandler. And since 2015, the company has been treating nitrate-contaminated drinking water in the San Joaquin Valley for Triple R Mutual Water, which has 152 connections in the Sierra foothills town of Springville in Tulare County.
Chandler says that Ionex is committed to working in the San Joaquin Valley, where the region’s small, rural communities provide a good opportunity to test the company’s technology. “I can predict that we will be installing further treatment systems in the region in 2018.”
Making New Connections
Treatment systems to remove nitrate aren’t the only option for impacted communities. Seville, a small, rural town nestled among orange groves in the eastern San Joaquin Valley, is populated with second- and third-generation agricultural workers, as well as recent immigrants. The community of about 500 has just one well, and it’s tainted with nitrates.
Ruben Becerra grew up in Seville and now lives in a neighboring town, but he returns to his boyhood home several times a week to deliver bottled water to his 93-year-old mother. “The water is not drinkable,” says Becerra. In addition to nitrates, the leaky infrastructure also invites bacterial contamination. Buying bottled water has been an economic hardship for local residents, many of whom are elderly, disabled or work in low-income jobs, he notes.
Becky Quintana, also from Seville, has been drinking and cooking with bottled water for nearly a decade. But some of her fellow residents couldn’t afford $60 a month for bottled water. “They’d only buy water for infants, and the rest of family would drink the tainted water,” she says.
“For years Seville was a stepchild out in the country – totally abandoned out there,” Becerra says. “No one wanted to deal with us. But officials now are forced to work on the problems.”
Things improved three years ago when the state agreed to supply everyone with bottled water. But the residents of Seville are also pursuing more permanent solutions.
Seville joined forces with its neighboring town of Yettem to dig another well, where they found clean water. Now they must expand the well and build pipes to both towns, says Ryan Jensen, community water solutions manager at the Community Water Center.
However, just because the water is clean now doesn’t mean it will stay clean. “The well could become contaminated,” says Jensen. “Then they would have to shut it down and drill a new well.” Or now that the new combined Yettem-Seville water district will have three wells, managers could blend contaminated water with less contaminated water to meet federal water-quality standards.
Another possibility is to obtain water from a surface water source, and a multi-town partnership, including Seville, is exploring that possibility.
“This has been a marathon for us,” says Quintana. “I’m not sure how many months or years it will be till we get clean water coming through our infrastructure.”
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Does 'sustainability' help the environment or just agriculture's public image?
Big food companies like Walmart want farmers to reduce greenhouse emissions from nitrogen fertilizer. But the best-known program to accomplish this may not be having much effect.
Brent Deppe is taking me on a tour of the farm supply business, called Key Cooperative, that he helps to manage in Grinnell, Iowa. We step though the back door of one warehouse, and our view of the sky is blocked by a gigantic round storage tank, painted white.
"This is the liquid nitrogen tank," Deppe explains. "It's a million-and-a-half gallon tank."
Nitrogen is the essential ingredient for growing corn and most other crops. Farmers around here spread it on their fields by the truckload.
"How much nitrogen goes out of here in a year?" I ask.
Deppe pauses, reluctant to share trade secrets. "Not enough," he eventually says with a smile. "Because I'm in sales."
For the environment, though, the answer is: Way too much.
The problems with nitrogen fertilizer start at its creation, which involves burning lots of fossil fuels. Then, when farmers spread it on their fields, it tends not to stay where it belongs. Rainfall washes some of it into streams and lakes, and bacteria in the soil feed on what's left, releasing a powerful greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide.
There have been lots of attempts to control renegade nitrogen. Most have focused on threats to water and wildlife. Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, for instance, have spent billions of dollars keeping nitrogen (and other forms of fertilizer runoff) out of the Chesapeake Bay.
Reducing nitrogen's contribution to global warming, though, is even more difficult. Philip Robertson, a researcher at Michigan State University who's studied those greenhouse emissions, says that "ultimately, the best predictor of the amount of nitrous oxide emitted to the atmosphere is the rate at which we apply nitrogen." Essentially, the only proven way to cut heat-trapping emissions from nitrogen fertilizer is to use less of it. Most farmers haven't been willing to do this, because it could cut into their profits.
Enter the SUSTAIN program, which some food companies, including Walmart, are touting as a step toward the breaking this stalemate, allowing farmers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions without reducing their profits. Land O'Lakes, one of the largest agricultural businesses in the country, runs SUSTAIN. It has made a pledge to Walmart to enrolls 20 million acres of farmland in the program, as part of Walmart's plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "Land O'Lakes is a company that goes from farmer to consumer," says Matt Carstens, the executive in charge of it. "We have an obligation and an opportunity to do what's right."
I came to Key Cooperative to see what SUSTAIN looks like in practice.
I met Ben Lauden, a farmer who enrolled his acres of corn and soybeans in the program. Since signing up, Lauden has been doing a few things differently. He's applying nitrogen fertilizer several times during the growing season, instead of all at once. That's so the fertilizer arrives when the growing corn plants need it, and less is wasted. He buys "stabilizers" — chemicals that are mixed with nitrogen and keep it from washing away so quickly. Also, data on his fertilizer use goes into a computer program that monitors the weather and predicts how much nitrogen will remain in the soil.
It's all intended to let him use nitrogen more efficiently. But is he actually using less of it? Lauden pauses. "I think you would use less, but I don't — I can't quantify it, I guess," he says.
That's more or less what Michigan State researcher Philip Robertson has observed. The technologies that Key Cooperative is selling to Lauden, "if used properly, should allow the farmer to use less nitrogen fertilizer," Robertson says. But he adds, "whether that actually happens is the $64,000 question, because there are lots of cases where farmers have been sold stabilizers without necessarily recommending a reduction in the rate of fertilizer application."
Even Matt Carstens, who created SUSTAIN and promoted it to food companies and environmental groups, isn't promising that it will reduce the amount of nitrogen released into the environment. He does believe that it will help farmers use it more efficiently, allowing them to grow more corn without using more fertilizer. "There's definitely a trend in the direction of using [nitrogen] more wisely," he says. "But to say that every year we can count on a reduction, that's just not possible."
In fact, there's even some confusion about what SUSTAIN is supposed to accomplish. Brent Deppe, the manager at Key Cooperative, says that the program was introduced to him and to farmers as a way to tell consumers about the steps farmers are taking to protect the environment. "The message wasn't being told," Deppe says. "We're doing a lot of the right things. We just aren't advertising it."
SUSTAIN does not advise farmers to do anything as dramatic as growing different crops. And according to some environmentalists, that's exactly the problem. Careful management of fertilizer "is a good thing to do, but it's not enough," says Matt Liebman, a professor at Iowa State University.
Sarah Carlson, who works for an environmentally minded group called Practical Farmers of Iowa, has confronted Walmart executives about SUSTAIN and its limited goals. "I was like, 'Why are you only focused on nitrogen fertilizer management?" Carlson says. "That makes such little impact on water quality, and such little impact on greenhouse gas reduction."
Carlson has a counter-proposal. It sounds simple: Companies could give farmers a financial incentive to move away from simply growing corn and soybeans, instead adding "small grains" like oats (or rye) to their mix of crops.
That simple move could cut greenhouse gas emissions by a third, much more than anything SUSTAIN is doing, she says. Oats, unlike corn or soybeans, can easily be grown together with a "cover crop" of clover. That clover has an important benefit: It adds nitrogen to the soil the organic way, replacing the need for synthetic nitrogen that's manufactured in energy-intensive factories. (Nitrogen from clover still gets converted into nitrous oxide by soil bacteria, however.) In addition, cover crops add carbon to the soil, which also helps fight climate change.
Many farmers would be happy to do this, Carlson says. They understand the environmental benefits. But right now, those farmers don't have a market for those oats.
"You know, Walmart, you should suggest to your commodity buyers that they buy more small grains [like oats] for feed rations" for animals like pigs," Carlson says. "We have all these pigs in the state; 5 percent of their diet could be oats. We can just sprinkle it in there. It wouldn't be that hard."
There is, however, one crucial obstacle: Relying on oats for your bacon would cost a little more money, and somebody would have to pick up that tab. It could be Walmart — and, in turn, American consumers.
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Can anyone, even Walmart, stem the heat-trapping flood of nitrogen on farms?
Down on the farm, the most important greenhouse source is something that doesn’t normally get a lot of attention. It’s the fertilizer — mainly nitrogen — that farmers spread on their fields to feed their crops.
The Environmental Defense Fund opened an office near Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., 10 years ago. It was part of a carefully plotted strategy to persuade the giant retailer that going green could be good for business. If it worked, it certainly could be good for the planet — Walmart’s revenues are bigger than the entire economy of most countries.
“We really saw that working with companies could be transformative at a scale that was pretty unmatched,” says Suzie Friedman, a senior director at EDF.
If you’re looking for evidence that the strategy is working, there’s this: Last year, Walmart unveiled Project Gigaton, a plan to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by a billion tons of carbon between now and 2030. That’s almost as much carbon as what’s released from the country’s entire fleet of passenger cars and trucks in a year.
The cuts will come from the company’s suppliers: the vast galaxy of companies that make the products it sells.
Even before unveiling that pledge, Walmart had been calculating the climate price tags of those products, estimating the greenhouse gases that are released in the process of making each one. Laura Phillips, Walmart’s senior vice president for sustainability, was startled to see the climate price of simple food items, like baked goods, that don’t seem like they’d require burning a lot of fossil fuels.
“Why is that?” she wondered. “Why are we seeing bread have high emissions?”
Other food companies are asking the same question. Many of them, including General Mills and Kellogg’s, have made their own commitments to reduce greenhouse emissions. To get a better grasp of the task, they joined forces and set up an organization called Field to Market to measure and reduce the environmental impact of their operations.
Allison Thomson, the group’s research director, says “it has been a process of discovery, mapping out the emissions and understanding that there’s a huge footprint that comes from the farm.”
That’s right: on the farm. Not just factories or fleets of trucks.
Down on the farm, the most important greenhouse source is something that doesn’t normally get a lot of attention. It’s the fertilizer — mainly nitrogen — that farmers spread on their fields to feed their crops.
Nitrogen is the most important nutrient for plants. It’s the fuel that drives modern food production. Every year, American farmers spread millions of tons of it on corn fields alone.
Manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer is energy-intensive, burning lots of fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide. What’s just as damaging, and perhaps even more so, is what happens when it’s spread on a field. Bacteria feed on it and release a super-powerful greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide.
These bacteria are naturally present in the soil, says Philip Robertson, a researcher at Michigan State University, “but once they get exposed to nitrogen fertilizer, they really light up” and pump out nitrous oxide.
If you add it all up, fertilizer is the biggest part of the global warming price tag of a loaf of bread or a box of corn flakes. According to one study, carried out by the consulting group Deloitte, greenhouse emissions from fertilizer are the biggest single piece of the global warming price tag for almost half of the top-selling items on the shelves at Walmart.
Yet it’s a climate driver that Walmart can’t easily control. “We don’t make the product ourselves,” Phillips says. “We would want to work with our suppliers” to reduce the climate cost of fertilizer.
In fact, even Walmart’s suppliers, the companies that deliver meat and baked goods, don’t control fertilizer use. Bakers just buy the grain that the farmers grow; meat packers buy the cattle that eat that grain. They’re a step removed from the farmers who grow the grain and decide how much fertilizer to put on fields.
This long supply chain threatens to undermine the Environmental Defense Fund’s carefully plotted strategy to enlist Walmart as a partner in environmental progress.
“That was a really big eye-opener,” Friedman says. “This is a lot more complicated than we thought in the beginning.”
“In the beginning, you had the idea that Walmart can just do it?” I ask.
“I think that even Walmart had that idea in the beginning,” Friedman says. “We learned that you really need to engage the whole supply chain.”
In the spring of 2014, though, way down at the other end of that long supply chain, a man named Matt Carstens was paying attention. Carstens was a fertilizer dealer; he worked, at the time, for a company called United Suppliers, in Iowa.
Carstens had been reading about Walmart’s interest in cutting greenhouse emissions — specifically emissions from fertilizer applied to corn fields in the Midwest.
“It got pretty specific what they were targeting, and that kind of hit close to home,” Carstens says.
He tried to set up a meeting with Walmart, but couldn’t get anyone to return his calls. So he called EDF instead. The environmental group had been quoted in those stories he was reading.
Before long, he was on a flight to Washington, D.C., to meet with the environmental group, to hear their concerns about fertilizer use on farms.
“You can’t help but sit back, as somebody deeply involved in agriculture, and go, ‘We’ve got to understand this,’ ” Carstens says. “You can take two approaches at that point. You can try to fight it, or you can try to be part of whatever solutions are out there.
After those meetings, on the flight back to Iowa, Carstens decided that he knew some potential solutions: Technology like chemicals that farmers can mix with nitrogen fertilizer to keep it from washing away so quickly; computer programs that show farmers how much nitrogen is in their soil, so they don’t add more than they need.
But an equally important part of the solution, he realized, was his own connection to farmers. Walmart and EDF didn’t have that connection.
“They knew where the issue was, but how do you reach that farmer?” Carstens says. “Everybody wants to talk to the farmer, but the trusted adviser of the farmer is their ag retailer, in most cases.” An ag retailer is a business, like his own, that supplies seeds and chemicals to farmers, along with advice about how to use them.
Carstens imagined building a business devoted to selling those solutions. It could work, he thought, if those tools puts more money in farmers’ pockets, by saving them money that they’d otherwise spend on fertilizer. “You can’t go to the farm and just say, ‘You have to do this, because,’ ” Carstens says. “You have to put it in a way that’s economical or profitable for them.”
After that, things moved quickly. While he was still working for United Suppliers, Carstens turned that brainstorm into a program called SUSTAIN, which sells nitrogen-saving tools. In 2015, Land O Lakes, an agricultural cooperative that spans the country, bought United Suppliers and adopted SUSTAIN as its own.
Land O’Lakes has promised Walmart that it will enroll 20 million acres of farmland in SUSTAIN by 2025, and Walmart is counting on it to help meet the goals of Project Gigaton.
Tomorrow: We go to Iowa to find out how farmers are receiving this message of better fertilizer management, and whether it’s making much of a difference.
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