Riverbank erosion is threatening our home. There must be a a solution.

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We knew we’d buy our home on the Le Sueur River near Mankato the first time we saw it. The area was so natural and peaceful. There was lots of wildlife and birds, which we love.

Twenty years later, we still love it, but our property has also become an incessant source of stress and worry.

That’s because erosion is pushing the riverbank closer and closer to our back door. We live in fear it will claim our house. When we read the recent Star Tribune article about the unintended impacts of agricultural drainage, we saw the story of our own property reflected in it (”Minnesota’s fertile farm fields have a cost, as this summer’s floods showed,” Nov. 23).

When our house was built in 1974, it sat 100 feet from the river, which was the setback requirement at the time. Today it’s just 24 feet from the banks. We’ve lost nearly 50 feet since we moved here twenty years ago, in 2004. There have been four major floods since then. We’ll never forget the one in 2010. We took shifts trying to sleep in the living room as we listened to the river roaring. We could hear the dirt falling into the river in clumps: kerploosh after kerploosh. It was terrifying.

But it’s not just floods that have transformed our property — the river has changed. Over the past 60 years, its volume has more than doubled. Increased precipitation has played a part, but we’ve come to learn that another significant driver is the widespread changes in agriculture.

Small grain farming has shifted to row crops while more and more farmers began installing drainage systems to protect their crops from flooding. The practice is now the norm. Today we’re told there are hundreds of miles of underground drain tiles and ditches crisscrossing our watershed.

While good for protecting crop yields, the changes have also altered the hydrology of the river and the watershed that feeds it. Instead of naturally acting like a sponge, tiling and ditches shunt water much more quickly off the landscape and push it into our streams and rivers. This has led to significant increases in water volume and erosion throughout the Minnesota River basin. The erosion endangers properties along the river like ours, as well as municipal infrastructure in places like Mankato, where the city has spent millions on riverbank stabilization over the past decade. One of its wells now sits just 12 feet from the riverbank. In less than a decade, the Minnesota River bank has been eroded by 50 feet.

Our fear of losing our house is not unfounded. Some of our neighbors’ homes have collapsed into the river, lost because of the severe erosion. Others have watched large sections of their property washed away. And the impacts extend beyond those who live on the river. Boaters have to navigate around trees and emerging gravel bars. Water polluted with increased sediment and agricultural runoff hurts fish and water quality.

We will not sit idly by. Fourteen years ago, we joined the Le Sueur River Watershed Network to advocate for different agricultural land management practices proven to curb erosion. We’ve sought help from state agencies. We’ve even hosted busloads of government officials to show them the impacts.

While there’s no question changing weather from climate change has worsened the situation, everyone has recognized another common denominator: agricultural drainage.

That’s the reason an inch of rain causes the river level to spike a foot overnight. And it means that if we want to protect our rivers and the people who live along them, we have to face this part of the problem head on.

Many of our friends and neighbors are farmers. We understand they need to make a living and have a right to do what they can to protect their land from flooding. But shouldn’t we be afforded the same right?

“We’re so sorry about your predicament, but there’s nothing we can do,” state agencies repeatedly tell us. “Drainage isn’t regulated.”

Empathy isn’t going to save our house. We need to change the way we approach drainage. There are effective alternatives. Methods — like planting cover crops or water storage — that will alleviate farmers’ flooding concerns and protect the people who live downstream.

We can have a system that works better for everyone. Don’t we deserve to keep our home?

Donald and Rebecca Waskosky live in Mankato.