EDITORIAL: Environment: Water quality efforts deserve support
Jul. 28—After 15 years of study and some 90 reports, researchers have unearthed solutions to cleaning up the Le Sueur River and its tributaries. For so long, scientific disagreements or political divides made solutions elusive.
New research that reveals the most cost-effective way to clean up the watershed seems to be a breakthrough moment in solving this problem of sediment building and nutrient runoff.
The most recent study involved environmental economists studying real world solutions to the run-off problem that would be economically feasible. Researchers have long known that slowing down the water as it drains from farm fields to rivers was the best solution, but it wasn't always economically feasible to take so much farmland out of production and pay farmers a market price.
But the new information seems to suggest strategically placed wetlands will prove cost effective in slowing runoff and maintaining water quality. The Greater Blue Earth River Basin, which includes the Le Sueur, Watonwan and Blue Earth watersheds that flow through rich farm lands and high bluffs, have long been the cause of massive amounts of sediment containing phosphorous, nitrogen and other pollutants.
The pollutants flow into the Minnesota River, the Mississippi River and fill in Lake Pepin, eventually contributing to the "Dead Zone" in the Gulf of Mexico.
The latest study, by the University of Minnesota, University of Kansas and University of California-Irvine, showed the best and most cost effective way to reduce sediment and nitrogen runoff would be wetland restoration. The study pinpoints places along the Le Sueur River and tributaries that would be ideal locations, some of them upstream from St. Clair and Beauford.
The project also will be able to take advantage of some $2 million in funding approved by the Legislature. A group connected to the Board of Soil and Water Resources will help administer the plan and communicate with all the farmers and other stakeholders. Mankato-based ISG environmental consulting company will be developing a plan for the Le Sueur River watershed which will take about two years.
The new research is indeed a watershed moment for a practical and economically feasible way to clean up the rivers. It deserves robust support from funding organizations, governments and the public.
