Star Tribune
Nitrate contamination of Minnesota waters shows little sign of going away, despite years of effort
Minnesota has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and decades of effort to reduce nitrate that’s contaminating drinking water and rivers. The progress so far: negligible.
The main source of the nitrate is nitrogen fertilizer, a pillar of production agriculture that includes animal manure and synthetic chemicals. Farmers apply tens of thousands of tons of fertilizers to their fields every year, and what isn’t absorbed by crops can seep into aquifers and any runoff can end up in rivers.
Despite numerous programs designed to encourage farmers to change their ways, purchases of fertilizer keep growing. In many parts of Minnesota farm country, drinking water wells and streams carry that legacy: A decades-old state law limits how much nitrate is allowed in drinking water, although some researchers now say that level needs to be much stricter to protect people.
The three agencies tasked with keeping Minnesota waters clear of harmful levels of nitrate acknowledge that the situation isn’t improving, particularly for private wells in the vulnerable topography of the state’s hilly southeastern corner. In that region, frustrated residents have called for the federal government to intervene on what environmental groups call a public health emergency — and the EPA recently responded with a directive that Minnesota clean up its act.
A lack of progress
Nitrate levels of 10 milligrams per liter of water or higher have violated federal health standards since the 1960s, since those concentrations are known to cause the potentially life-threatening condition methemoglobinemia, or blue baby syndrome, that starves infants of oxygen.
But there’s a push to reduce the state and federal nitrate standard from the 10 mg/l limit, given growing research around links to cancer and other damaging health impacts from drinking water with nitrate at half the legal maximum concentration, or even lower.
Community drinking water supplies, which serve cities, towns and mobile home parks, are regularly tested to assure nitrate levels are below the state and federal health limit.
While those with the highest nitrate concentrations have taken action to reduce it, about 177,000 Minnesotans still lived in communities with average readings above 3 milligrams of nitrate per liter of water as of 2022, levels considered by health authorities to be caused by human activity, not nature.
At least 400,000 Minnesotans in more than 100 communities live in areas where water has tested at least once for elevated nitrate levels since 2013. They’re mostly spread across central and southern parts of the state.
Separately, there are some 980,000 private wells in Minnesota, according to the Minnesota Well Owners Organization. And people who rely on them for drinking water are on their own to have them tested and, if necessary, find remedies.
Far more Minnesotans could be affected by elevated nitrate levels in their water, but a lack of one central testing agency means it is difficult to gather and compare data.
The volunteer private well tests the Department of Agriculture has helped run show the problem is widespread. In southeast Minnesota from 2008 through 2018, about 8% to 15% of the hundreds of private wells tested each year showed nitrate pollution above the 10 mg/L health limit. In 2021, about 30% of those private wells showed results above 3 milligrams.
In the 14-county Central Sands Region from 2011-2018, about 3% to 5% of the hundreds of private wells tested each year were polluted with nitrate above the 10 mg/L limit.
Public drinking water systems — not private wells — that violate federal nitrate contamination standards must report them to the EPA. Those violations in Minnesota totaled 34 last year in the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Information System and included gas stations, bars and churches.
Impaired rivers and streams
Nitrate also endangers fish and other aquatic life when it leaches into lakes, streams and rivers.
The nitrate entering the Mississippi River contributes to the huge oxygen-starved dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. As part of the Hypoxia Task Force of states up and down the river, Minnesota has pledged to cut the nitrate in the Mississippi by 20% by 2025. But nitrate has actually risen in spots, as it has in most of the state’s major rivers.
Lawmakers directed the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in 2010 to set limits on nitrate to protect fish and aquatic life. It hasn’t happened. It would be too expensive for small wastewater treatment plants, and wouldn’t effectively reduce the nitrate from the farms it has no power to regulate, the agency told the Star Tribune.
About 5% — or 165 miles — of Minnesota’s rivers and streams used for drinking water are impaired by nitrogen and/or phosphorus as of 2022, meaning they don’t meet federal quality standards. In all, the EPA lists more than 300 bodies of water across the state including parts of the Minnesota, Mississippi and St. Croix rivers, as well as other streams and rivers, as threatened or impaired by nitrogen and phosphorus and in need of a restoration plan.
Spending with little impact
Hundreds of millions in federal and state funding has paid for nitrate research, efforts to change farming and other practices and nitrate filtration systems for water supplies in Hastings, Cold Spring, Adrian and four other cities.
That’s paid for Nitrogen Smart farmer training in the past, water research, conservation programs, source water protection work and guidance for farmers on adopting best management practices — and that’s just a few examples. The state covers this list in its five year progress reports on the state’s 2014 Nutrient Reduction Strategy to cut nitrogen and phosphorus in waters.
The state’s Clean Water Fund, part of the sales-tax funded Legacy Amendment, has directed at least $148 million to the nitrate problem since 2010, according to a Star Tribune analysis, and is just one of several spending sources.
None of it appears to have made a dent in the overall demand for nitrogen fertilizer. As cropland has expanded, farmers bought a record high 824,000 tons of nitrogen fertilizer in 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, according to sales tracked by the state Department of Agriculture.
Agency response
The responsibility for reducing nitrate lies mostly with three state agencies: Minnesota Department of Health, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). All said their efforts will pay off eventually.
The MPCA blamed climate change’s effect on precipitation for the failure to show progress on nitrate reduction.
“It will take time to see the benefit of this work, especially as more frequent and extreme weather events caused by climate change are both masking our progress and worsening the nitrate problem by forcing nitrate pollution off lands, into groundwater, rivers, and downstream,” said MPCA spokeswoman Andrea Cournoyer.
The Health Department said 30 years of data doesn’t show increasing nitrate violations in the public water supplies it watches, but that it’s a “different story” for private well owners in certain highly vulnerable parts of the state.
The Agriculture Department agrees that in parts of southeast Minnesota, the nitrate in private water wells “has been going up slowly for decades.”
“Nowhere in the U.S. is a state tackling nitrate issues like Minnesota,” the agriculture department said.
Some in southeast Minnesota, a land of heavy agriculture and a porous karst geography, say they can’t wait any longer for help. A group from Dodge, Goodhue, Fillmore, Houston, Mower, Olmstead, Wabasha and Winona counties asked the EPA to declare a public health emergency because state and local authorities haven’t controlled nitrate pollution of groundwater.
About 80,000 residents in those counties rely on private wells for their drinking water and about 300,000 use public water systems, according to the request for help, filed in April by the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, the Minnesota Well Owners Association and others.
The EPA responded with a letter this month, warning Minnesota’s three responsible agencies of possible enforcement actions if they don’t enact measures to better warn residents of nitrate dangers, provide bottled water and develop plans to reduce nitrate pollution in the region.
Further reading
Sources: Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Minnesota Department of Health, Minnesota Department of Agriculture, Environmental Working Group, Star Tribune reporting and analysis
“DHS and our state and federal partners have seen evidence that kickbacks are happening in Minnesota,” Inspector General Kulani Moti said in a statement. “That’s why we brought an anti-kickback proposal to the Minnesota Legislature last session. We will continue to work with the Legislature next session on ways to strengthen the integrity of our public programs.”
Nuway Alliance, one of the state’s largest nonprofit substance use disorder treatment providers, pays up to $700 a month for someone’s housing while they are in intensive outpatient treatment, the organization’s website states. The site lists dozens of sober housing programs clients can choose from.
Nuway leaders said they got an inquiry from the government about two and a half years ago indicating they are conducting a civil investigation into the housing model.
But officials with the nonprofit said in an email they believe what they are doing is legal and clients need it. More than 600 people are using their assistance to stay in recovery residences, Nuway officials stated. They said having a safe, supportive place to stay is particularly important for the vulnerable people they serve, more than half of whom reported being homeless in the six months before they started treatment.
Health plans knew about, approved and even lauded their program, Nuway leaders said, noting that health insurer UCare even gave it an award.
“The state of Minnesota has been fully aware of our program for a decade,” the organization said. “Since payors are fully aware of, and support the program, we struggle to see how anyone could argue it is improper, let alone fraudulent.”
Mounds View, the first Minnesota city to require homeowners to discharge racist language buried in deeds before they sell their homes, is celebrating a milestone: at least 100 homeowners have completed the process.
Officials say discharging the language is a symbolic step, but an important one.
“How could we call ourselves an inclusive community with the words ‘This home shall not be sold to a non-white person’ buried in the deeds?” Mayor Zach Lindstrom said at the state of the city address Monday.
Racially restrictive covenants, found in deeds around the Twin Cities and Minnesota, were legally enforceable tools of racial segregation for the first half of the 20th century. They barred homes’ sale to, and sometimes even occupancy by, anyone who wasn’t white until 1948, when they became unenforceable. Mapping Prejudice, a University of Minnesota research project uncovering these covenants, has found more than 33,000 of them in Minnesota, including more than 500 in Mounds View.
Many local cities have partnered with Just Deeds, a coalition that helps cities and their residents learn about and discharge covenants. In 2019, the Legislature passed a law allowing homeowners to add language to their deeds that discharges racist covenants but doesn’t erase them from the record. Earlier this year, Mounds View was the first to pass an ordinance requiring it. The city is also helping residents navigate the process.
Just because these covenants are no longer enforceable doesn’t mean they haven’t had long-lasting consequences, Kirsten Delegard, Mapping Prejudice project director, said at a Mounds View City Council meeting this summer: Minneapolis homes with racial covenants are worth 15% more than those without, she said. And neighborhoods with covenants remain the whitest parts of the Twin Cities.
Mounds View residents Rene and Steven Johnson were troubled to learn from Mapping Prejudice that their house, and many homes in their neighborhood, had racially restrictive covenants on them. It took some effort, including a trip to the Ramsey County Recorder’s Office, to find the document, which not only contained race restrictions but barred unmarried couples from owning the home.
The couple got their covenant discharged, and educated the city about the process, Rene Johnson said. That helped lead to the ordinance requiring covenants to be discharged before sale.
ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, MINN. – From his combine on an October afternoon, harvesting dried-out soybeans the color of dust, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his ancestors from Scandinavia homesteaded.
History might be happening again on the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. Not oats for hogs or cows. But oats for humans. He hauled the oats to a miller across the state line into Iowa. A previous year, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the trendy Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
Something of an oat renaissance has been occurring down in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During winters, Larsen — through his job with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — evangelized to fellow farmers on the humble small grain.
His friends and neighbors were listening. As of this fall, over 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres across southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
Star of breakfast food, children’s books and, increasingly, those nondairy lattes, oats are easier on the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in the karst-rich hill country of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“Nitrates come from this,” said Larsen, driving his gray Gleaner combine on a patch of soybeans beneath a hillock just beyond the suburban sprawl of northwest Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.”
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, they’re struggling with a basic marketing question: Who will actually buy these oats they’re growing?
