‘Sad and debilitating’: rural midwesterners contend with well water tainted by livestock waste
For nearly three decades, Jeff Broberg couldn’t drink water from his tap.
He lives on a sprawling, 170-acre grain and legume farm in Winona county, a rural part of south-east Minnesota saturated with animal agriculture. Like most properties in the area, Broberg’s has a well connected to his faucet. On a whim, when Broberg first moved in in 1986, the now 69-year-old retired geologist started testing his water for nitrate – an invisible, odorless and tasteless compound found in animal manure and commercial fertilizer. Consuming it in high quantities has been linked to a variety of health risks.
Initially, his at-home tests showed that his water was safe to drink, but after four years, testing showed that his well water had reached a contamination level at the threshold of federal safety limits.
Unable to safely drink the water from his tap, Broberg started transporting eight empty jugs every week to a friend’s property in Saint Charles, Minnesota, to fill them with clean water. He eventually tired of this and bought a reverse osmosis filtration system that would clean his well water at home. For now, it’s effective at filtering out the nitrate – but it’s not a permanent or entirely effective solution.
The culprit, experts say, is the proliferation of animal agriculture.
Megafarms in the US produce more than 100bn pounds of meat that fill supermarket aisles in the US and abroad. But they also produce 940bn pounds of manure annually – twice as much sewage as produced by the human population. The people who live in the shadow of these industrial operations say their health and quality of life are increasingly at risk.
Broberg’s experience of water contamination is common in this part of Minnesota, where more than 90,000 people rely on private wells as their primary source for drinking water. In some townships, over 40% of wells exceeded the federal health standard for nitrate – most of which is caused by animal agriculture. Broberg’s own farm is just down the street from a hog farm that has rapidly expanded over time, so that it now has more than 3,000 animals.
According to the Minnesota pollution control agency, nearly 70% of the state’s water pollution comes from crop and livestock production. In Broberg’s region of the state, pollution control officers estimate that 89% of water contamination comes from commercial fertilizer and manure that’s been spread on cropland. Unlike municipal water systems, which are tested regularly, private well owners are entirely responsible for the quality of their water.
This is a public health emergency
Jeff Broberg of Winona county, Minnesota
Various regulations and initiatives have been implemented over the years to address the issue, but as industrial agriculture continues to grow, many residents are demanding more urgent action. Late last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) formally notified the state of Minnesota that it must address nitrate contamination in drinking water in the region where Broberg lives.
For Broberg and many other Minnesotans, it’s a long-awaited action.
“This is a public health emergency,” he said.
I
t’s not just Minnesota; well water contamination from animal agriculture pollution is a problem across the US midwest. In Wisconsin, a state where 25% of people get their drinking water from private wells, an estimated 80,000 wells contain unsafe levels of nitrate. In Iowa, more than 6,000 wells had nitrate levels above the federal safe limit, and one of the leading contributors to this water contamination is agricultural pollution.
The region is home to thousands of large-scale industrial livestock operations – known as concentrated animal feeding operations (Cafos) – which produce enormous amounts of animal waste that can then seep into the groundwater or spill into nearby waterways. Pollution can also come from slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.
In January, the EPA proposed regulations that would require pollution reductions from half of American slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, both of which are leading water polluters for nitrogen and phosphorus.
Jeff Broberg on his farm, inspecting a map showing the region’s geology and its particular susceptibility to nitrate groundwater pollution. Photograph: Star Tribune/Getty Images
While the regulations would significantly reduce pollution from the largest plants, they would also ignore many meat processing plants that pollute municipal sewage treatments. Many environmental groups are calling for more restrictions. (The EPA is also now the subject of a lawsuit that claims the regulatory body hasn’t done enough under the Clean Water Act to protect waterways and drinking water from pollution from livestock farming.)
“We hear this all the time – ‘Well, we’re gonna have to feed this growing population in the world.’ And they never finish the sentence by saying ‘We’re going to have to pollute our groundwater to do it.’ I mean, that would be real,” Broberg said.
Nancy Utesch, 59, a farmer in Kewaunee county, Wisconsin, has seen this first-hand. Many farms use manure as fertilizer on nearby crop fields, but overapplication can lead to pollution. Last April, she woke to the sounds of tractors spreading manure on a 30-acre property next to her farm. The parcel of land is home to two wetlands, which Utesch was worried would be contaminated if the spreading continued. She contacted Wisconsin’s department of natural resources (WDNR) twice during the day to express her concern.
A departmental warden inspected the land from the road, but did not observe any violations that would warrant him access to the property.
At one point, Utesch considered driving her car in front of the tractor to stop them from spreading the manure. As she lay in bed that night, she could still see the tractor lights shining through her window. Later testing by the WDNR revealed one of the wetlands had indeed been contaminated with manure.
Being under that burden all the time questioning whether your water is OK to drink – it really is very stressful,
Nancy Utesch of Kewaunee county, Wisconsin
In Kewaunee county, an area sometimes referred to as “Cafo Alley” because there are nearly five times as many cows as humans living there, manure spreading is not out of the ordinary. During manure application season, large machinery roams the seemingly endless fields spreading manure, making it almost impossible to avoid the smell of animal waste.
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A 2021 USDA study found that the biggest contributor for acute gastrointestinal illness from Kewaunee county’s private drinking water wells is cow manure. Though the water from Utesch’s well is currently safe to drink, she fears things will only get worse without change.
“Being under that burden all the time questioning whether your water is OK to drink – it really is very stressful,” she said.
A national study found that nitrate-contaminated water could be responsible for up to 12,000 cases of cancer each year and $1.5bn in annual healthcare costs. This type of pollution can also cause methemoglobinemia, a condition in infants known as blue-baby syndrome, and other adverse pregnancy outcomes. While nitrate is one of the most well-researched water contaminants related to agriculture, other chemicals that aren’t being tested for are also probably found in polluted water, says Aleta Borrud, a retired physician who worked at the Mayo Clinic and a clean water advocate. “We’re putting stuff on our land that’s meant to kill biological organisms – why do we think that’s not going to have some impact on us?” she said.
B
onnie Haugen, 65, runs a small-scale dairy farm with her husband, Vance, in Canton, Minnesota. When they first bought the farm in 2011, there were at least a dozen family dairy farms within a three-mile radius of their property. Today, they are the only ones left.
We all want to have and should have access to good quality air, water and a way to live
Bonnie Haugen of Canton, Minnesota
“We forget sometimes that we’re all people. We have differences, but we have some very basic commonalities, such as we all want to have and should have access to good quality air, water and a way to live,” she said.
As of 2022 – the last time she tested the water from her well – the nitrate level sat at 8.99 mg/l, just below federal safe levels. (Some studies have shown greater health risks, including digestive system cancers, even at levels technically deemed safe.)
“It’s just sad and debilitating, because we don’t know what we don’t know,” Haugen said.
But new regulations won’t come easily. In many states, the agriculture industry is incredibly influential. In Wisconsin, the dairy industry filed a lawsuit seeking to undermine the state’s only protection for regulating Cafo waste. Last year, county commissioners in Fillmore county, Minnesota, doubled the amount of animal units a feedlot can have from 2,000 to 4,000. It’s difficult to challenge the industry that contributes so much economically, says David Cwiertny, director of the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination at the University of Iowa.
“Critics will be quick to say, ‘Why are you against farmers?’” Cwiertny said. “We need to be able to talk about it in a way where we can understand sources of pollution, impacted communities, and figure out a solution.”
In the face of the industry’s strength, many residents are starting to organize around the issue of clean water so they can fight back. In 2018, Broberg, along with a retired hydrologist named Paul Wotzka, started the Minnesota Well Owners Organization to educate and provide support to private well owners in south-east Minnesota.
The group regularly runs free water testing clinics, so that well owners can bring a sample from their tap to have it tested for nitrate and bacteria contamination.
As people await their results, the mood is anything but light. Residents quietly chat with one another, fretting over the possibility that their water is unsafe to drink. Some come to get their water tested because they have grandchildren in the house, others because they have health issues and wonder if they are linked to the water they are drinking.
Broberg says that to fix the problem, it needs to be framed not as a matter of conservation, but as an urgent public health issue.
But in a part of the country that’s fiercely proud of its agricultural roots, it’s not always easy. The founders of the Minnesota Well Owners Organization, along with other clean-water advocates in the midwest, hope that raising this issue will bring people together. Because everyone – residents, farmers and feedlot owners – is drinking from the same water source. Everyone wants clean drinking water, Broberg says.
“We’ve found that really strikes a great chord with people.”