How are nitrates affecting health in Southeast Minnesota?

Feb. 24—DODGE COUNTY, Minn. — Scott Glarner grew up around nitrates.

The Dodge Center man, 61, lived his first 50 years on a family farm about a mile north of Berne, Minnesota, on Dodge County Road B — what some call "Cancer Road." The family raised livestock such as cows, pigs, chickens and horses. The crops planted were mostly corn and hay.

"Mom had cancer," Glarner said. "I can't remember what kind. I had non-Hodgkin lymphoma."

Glarner was diagnosed 19 years ago, when his son was in kindergarten. Today, the family farm has been sold. Glarner lives in Dodge Center. He works at the post office in West Concord. But the health effects from five decades on the farm follow him to this day.

"I'm still supposed to have yearly checkups," he said. "It's treatable but not curable. I'm a ticking timebomb. It's not a matter of if I get cancer again, but when I get cancer again."

While Glarner said his cancer was attributed to other problems with the local farm environment — "I was part of the Roundup lawsuit," he said — nitrates in groundwater can be connected to other contaminants also found in the groundwater.

If you have nitrates in your groundwater due to agriculture runoff, it's likely that same groundwater is contaminated by herbicide and pesticide residue and bacteria, for example.

If you want to have an in-depth conversation about nitrates, groundwater, human health and farming, Sonja Eayrs is ready to talk.

Eayrs, who grew up in Dodge County and has fought against large-scale feedlots, a source of manure that serves as a nitrate fertilizer for crops, often spends time at her husband's family home not far from where Glarner grew up.

"We've got 12 swine farms within a three-mile radius," Eayrs said. "That's 1.1 million gallons of manure (per facility) that gets spread on the land."

Eayrs has said that the water at her family home is not drinkable due to the nitrate levels of the water coming from the tap.

Eayrs has worked for nearly two decades to fight against large-scale feedlots with some of those neighbors, many of whom formed the Berne Area Alliance in the early 2000s. The goal was to stop the permitting of a gestational swine farm. Those neighbors fought back, but eventually lost their battle in the Minnesota Court of Appeals to stop the permitting of the farm.

"Dodge County officials have been completely irresponsible," Eayrs contends.

Glarner was part of the Berne Area Alliance. Both his son and wife suffer from asthma. He said a farrowing operation would only aggravate their conditions.

"The county had an ordinance that if someone was proposing an operation, they could not do it if it was detrimental to the neighbors," Glarner said. "The county board, planning commission, did not want to hear anything on that."

Then, he said, there's the cancer cluster.

Both he and Eayrs named several people, many who lived on County Road B, who had developed cancer.

Were the nitrates to blame? Eayrs said yes. Glarner isn't certain.

"A lot of us did (have cancer)," he said, though his own cancer he blames on the herbicide, Roundup. "What was the common figure in that? Possibly the high nitrates. You can't pinpoint it for sure. No expert will say it for sure."

Carly Griffith certainly sees high nitrates as a problem when it comes to human health. As water program director for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, Griffith is at the lead of an effort to clean up groundwater and ensure safe drinking water for Minnesotans, especially in the karst region of Southeast Minnesota.

Citing the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act, on April 24, 2023, the MCEA and 10 other groups filed a petition with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency asking the agency to enforce the nitrate standards that requires less than 10 milligrams per liter (10 parts per million) for drinking water.

In the wake of the petition, the EPA conducted inspections at two feedlots in the region — a dairy farm in Viola, Minnesota, and a cattle operation near Altura, Minnesota — on Nov. 2, 2023.

The next day, the EPA sent a letter to the state — specifically the Minnesota Department of Health, Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency — directing the state to address the issue of high nitrates in drinking water taken from private wells in the eight-county karst region.

From 2013 to 2019, the state of Minnesota conducted the Township Testing Program, which took voluntary water samples in 344 townships across 50 Minnesota counties. The final results showed of the 28,932 wells tested, 4.7% had nitrate levels above the maximum allowed. But some townships had a much higher percentage of wells above 10 mg/L. For example, major portions of Winona, Wabasha and Fillmore counties had townships where more than 10% of the wells tested were above the state limit for nitrates.

Griffith said she can point to 27 peer-reviewed studies that link high levels of nitrates to cancer.

"There are studies in Denmark and Spain where the link is to exposure above 3 to 5 mg/L," Griffith said.

For many years, the concern when it came to nitrates was a condition known as methemoglobinemia, otherwise called "blue baby syndrome," according to the MDH. That condition became prevalent in the 1940s when commercial fertilizer became more common. But after 146 cases and 14 deaths of infants in the late 1940s, the condition declined. Since methemoglobinemia is not a reportable condition, the state does not track cases. But an independent study of hospital discharge and emergency department records showed just 10 total cases in infants from newborns to less than a year old between 2000 and 2016. The Department of Health does not indicate whether any of those cases resulted in death.

Adults can also develop methemoglobinemia, but the condition presents differently, the MDH states. For example, adults may experience increased heart rate, nausea, headaches and abdominal cramps. The agency noted that the cancer risks are linked to gastric cancer, "but there is yet no scientific consensus on this question."

On Dec. 1, 2023, the state responded to the EPA's directive with a three-part plan. Phase I includes educational outreach to private well owners with known nitrate concentration levels above the maximum level and an effort to provide an alternate water source to vulnerable populations. Phase II involves a "public health intervention to ensure safe drinking water for private wells." Participation in both phases is voluntary.

Griffith says she's fairly happy with phases I and II. It's phase III that concerns her. That phase calls for "Enhanced long-term environmental and conservation strategies to reduce nitrate concentrations in the aquifers that provide drinking water."

The devil is in the details, something lacking thus far for phase III, she said.

"One important piece for (phases) I and II is a fund for private well mitigation," Griffith said.

That fund would go to testing private wells and either repairing them or replacing them with newly drilled wells when nitrate levels are too high. The price tag, she said, in just the karst region is about $40 million. The money, she said, could be raised by a fee on fertilizer.

Phase III, she said, will come with some additional costs as well.

Griffith was pleased to hear Minnesota Agriculture Commissioner Thom Petersen talk about reviewing the state's feedlot rules for best management practices. For example, she favors increased setbacks for manure application. She'd also like to see a lower threshold for feedlot inspection. Currently, only feedlots of 1,000 animal units or more routinely get inspected when it comes to manure storage and handling. She's like to see feedlots with lower total animal units — say, down to 300 AU — be required to have nine months of manure storage, and to file plans for manure application.

Griffith said a lack of required long-term manure storage often puts pressure on farmers to overapply manure or apply it at the wrong time of year.

All that added oversight will require the hiring of more feedlot officers at both the county and state levels.

Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, Thom Petersen says Minnesota was already headed in the right direction long before the MCEA-led petition and long before the EPA showed up for a day in November.

He pointed to programs such as the decade-old Minnesota Agricultural Water Quality Certification Program.

Petersen, who said his career in agriculture leadership has spanned more than two decades, pointed to changes such as the buffer laws that require strips of grassland along waterways to prevent erosion and runoff, the Groundwater Protection Rule for water recharge areas, restrictions on fall application of fertilizer, education about cover crops and no-till farming, nutrient reduction strategies and loan programs for well replacement.

"Legislators from the cities said you haven't done anything," he said. "But we have a couple of hundred acres per farm in some areas enrolled (in the Ag Water Quality program). We restrict fall application on 1.1 million acres in those eight counties. Most of the farmers understand that's the right thing to do."

With the lack of snow this winter, he said, it's easy enough to drive around rural Minnesota and see all the fields planted with cover crops.

All this, Petersen said, is real progress.

The problem is that nitrates are a lagging indicator. The way water moves in aquifers, especially in the karst region, nitrates drawn from a well today could have been from fertilizer applied to a field five years ago or 30 years ago.

The damage, he said, started 50 years ago or more when farming practices were not as advanced as today. So seeing a change in groundwater contamination will also take time, and there are no shortcuts that can change that.

"We could put all eight counties in CRP (a program that pays farmers to plant acres with native prairie grasses) and still have an increase in nitrates for a few years," he said.

That said, Petersen plans to talk with farmers and others about which programs are seeing results in nitrate and field runoff management so Minnesota can better focus on what is working.

Petersen said while there are certainly "bad actors" among the farming community, he's not fan of taxing or penalizing farmers as a whole to fix the nitrate problem.

"One thing I hear people say, 'Make the polluter pay,'" Petersen said. "I have issues with that."

He said many farmers have made real changes, but "because of the karst, you can't just flip a switch. It's going to be a process of working this."

Petersen did agree with Griffith that proper enforcement of feedlot rules and other nutrient management practices is a big piece of future success. But, again, he stressed that the majority of farmers have moved to better practices, and education will be an important component of reducing nitrate contamination.

State Rep. Steve Jacob, R-Altura, said he is working with DFL legislators on a bill that uses tax breaks instead of fees or taxes. His bill was developed with input from Petersen and recently got support from seven DFL legislators including House Agriculture Finance and Policy Committee Vice Chair Kristi Pursell, DFL-Northfield.

The bill would give a tax credit of $5 per acre for anyone who is Ag Water Quality certified. Jacob, whose own farm has been certified in the program for 10 years, said that the program requires farmers to follow best practices.

"I'm trying to genuinely address this problem through the carrot approach," Jacob said.

He's also working on another bill that would use low-interest loans to help farmers fix their wells either through repair or replacement. He said rather than a handout, he believes it's important for well owners to "have some skin in the game."

His tax credit bill, he said, in the karst region would cost about $1 million. If the program is successful, he'd like to see it expanded to more of the state.

Aside from its affordability, Jacob said his bill comes with the benefit of attacking the water contamination problem beyond just nitrates.

"It helps for any runoff that would come off a field," he said.

By encouraging and empowering well owners to make positive changes on their own, he said, they can see the same results he enjoys on his own farm. Jacob said feedlot owners already have wells that are to code because it is required for their animals.

"My well is 670 feet deep," he said. "We've had nothing but low (nitrate) readings."

Jacob said often the conversation on nitrates unfairly revolves around the large feedlots of 1,000 AU or more. Those farms, he said, are the ones that are following the rules.

Griffith, rather than pointing fingers at feedlots — big or small — said the problem developed over time as farmers concentrated on corn and soybeans to the detriment of other crops.

As for Petersen, he said he wants to avoid more regulation of farmers. "We want to see if farmers can continue the trajectory they are on," he said. "My goal is to really engage the people of Southeast Minnesota."

Eayrs, meanwhile, puts the focus on what she calls factory farms. She'd like the state to put an immediate moratorium on constuction of large feedlots. As for those "factory farms" that do exist, she wants more oversight, including more monitoring staff such as feedlot officers, and "significant fines" for anyone who is not in compliance. She'd also focus on regulation and oversight of the application of manure as a crop fertilizer.

Her old neighbor, Glarner, while concerned about farming practices, said he'd rather counties and the state just use a little more common sense about where feedlots are built.

"Am I against ag?" he rhetorically asked. "No, because I like to eat meat. But there's a place for stuff to be built, and it's got to be in lower-density areas."

Here's a quick rundown on what you should know about nitrates. For more information, contact MDH.

What is a nitrate?

A nitrate is a compound that occurs naturally and also has many human-made sources, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Nitrates are in some lakes, rivers and groundwater in Minnesota. When nitrates are found in Minnesota groundwater, it is typically at low concentrations. But some groundwater has nitrate concentrations that present a health risk, MDH says.

Is there a way to tell if there are nitrates in my water?

No. You cannot taste, see or smell nitrate in your water.

What's a safe level of nitrates in my water?

Drinking water with concentrations of nitrate below 10 milligrams of nitrate per liter of water is considered safe, MDH says.

How often should I test my well water for nitrates?

MDH recommends testing well water for nitrates once a year. The health department also recommends testing water for nitrates if you are planning on becoming pregnant or if infants will be using the water.

To get your water tested you should "contact an accredited laboratory to get sample containers and instructions, or ask your county environmental or public health services if they provide well water testing services," MDH says. After the laboratory analyzes the water sample, the laboratory will send you a report with the test results.

Be on the lookout for free testing chances at your local county fair or through your local water/soil department.

For additional questions on testing, you can reach out to the Well Management Section at 651-201-4600 or health.wells@state.mn.us.

How can I prevent contamination?

MDH recommends keeping nitrate sources — fertilizer, septic systems, and animal waste — away from wells. It's also recommended to construct wells in a safe spot and to regularly inspect the well for damage.

What do I do if high levels of nitrates are detected in my water?

MDH says to get drinking water from another source, like bottled water. Babies under 6 months old should not drink the well water. Additionally, don't try to boil the nitrates out of the water. MDH says boiling the water will make nitrates more concentrated. Also, find and remove any potential sources of nitrate contamination.