Counterpoint: Nitrates in groundwater: Think of the problem this way

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I’m a farmer in southeastern Minnesota, the specific area of highest concern for nitrates in our groundwater (“Proposed fertilizer tax could aid nitrate cleanup,” March 2). Much of this region is underlaid with “karst geology” — fractured limestone very close to the surface, often with large cracks and crevices, including caves, running deep underground and directly to the aquifers that many wells draw their water from.

Some of the area, like on my farm, is overburdened with very deep, high percentage of clays — “glacial till.” There’s 120 feet of this over the bedrock on my farm. But only a few miles away, the limestone outcroppings are often visible along the valleys.

Water moves both vertically and horizontally, using gravity to take the path of least resistance. Just because I have very deep, tight soil on my farm doesn’t mean that nitrates from my land can’t or don’t end up migrating laterally across the landscape until the water reaches an easy pathway down through the fractured limestone. My heavy soils slow this process significantly, but eventually, the water will recharge the aquifers. If it didn’t, the aquifers from which we draw our well water would simply dry up.

Tight soils like clays don’t drain well, so most farmers put drain tile in to get them to drain faster, so the ground can be worked and a crop grown. The excess goes into our surface waters and, you guessed it, takes soil nutrients with it, unless they’ve been captured before that water left the field.

We are all responsible for this situation. When considered as an aggregate per acre, those who live in residential subdivisions often may be applying more nitrogen and other chemicals per acre than a corn farmer does — literally just to have the greenest lawn in the neighborhood. The $176 billion lawn care industry in the U.S. bears testament to this fact.

Remember that drainage tile? No house or other building built since the middle of the last century has been built without it around its foundation — to keep the basement dry and the foundation secure. So you residential people are draining your soil’s free water away, just like the farmer does. Every city is filled with drainage tile, literally, often at closer intervals than a farmer’s field tile. Your sump pump, if you have one (your drainage system might simply be designed to drain by gravity), is pumping that free water away from your house.

So why do you drain the free water away from your house? Because if you didn’t, your basement would be full of water — an economic disaster for you. Same thing for the farmer. The street sewer drainage system takes water away from all of those “impervious surfaces” in a city, often directly dumping into surface waters, and all the nutrients and chemicals go right along with it.

The nutrient problem from farmland comes about because we’ve “progressed” to synthetically demanding/forcing the soil to grow more crops than it can typically grow naturally. We want more yield, so we apply as much as is economically viable, and this is “best practices” recommendation.

We, as a society, have figured out how to artificially stimulate additional yield, which makes food cheaper (supply and demand), but we haven’t calculated in or even been cognizant of the fact that by doing so, we’re throwing the naturally balanced system out of whack. It can’t handle this artificial stimulation by cocaine, if you will, and still excel at providing the otherwise naturally produced environmental services (clean, nitrate-free water) that are automatically provided in a naturally balanced system.

Imposing a small tax on nitrogen fertilizer can have only a minimal impact on outcomes, and the amount in the legislation (HF 4135) — 99 cents per ton on ag retailers and vendors — won’t even make any farmer flinch as it passes through. A more direct way to drive change would be to define more specifically and effectively the best management practices toward reduction of nutrient losses in water leaving a property — like the use of no-till and cover crops for a long enough period to be of greatest benefit — then giving incremental reductions on the property taxes of those properties that incorporated these practices. Each property owner would have to back up their claims of benefits with evidence if they wanted to apply for the tax write-offs.

Pointing fingers won’t solve the problem — and neither will time, or drilling deeper wells, unless we change our ways. This is a problem that’s been building for a century, since we began applying synthetic fertilizers and chemicals. It takes a long time sometimes for water to get to the aquifer, depending on soil conditions, but make its way there it will. And the nutrients and other chemicals that it carries with it eventually get there as well.

We’re ever in pursuit of the most yield and the cheapest food, which has driven us into this environmental disaster (and other health consequences as well, as we’re daily becoming ever more aware of). But remember — no farmers, no food. We need our farmers, but we need them to function differently than we have been asking or demanding until now.

We can do this by working together! Consumers need to choose how their food is grown, and that might mean paying a little more for food grown the way you’d prefer it be grown. Farmers will change how they farm when consumers demand it. Each of us votes with our checkbook, every time we choose where we will buy our food. Know your farmer! Buy local and direct whenever you can. It’s the only way to know with any degree of certainty just how your food was grown.