News Series - The Environment Report

Asian Carp & the Great Lakes

This week, the Environment Report is taking an in-depth look at the connections between cancer and the environment. When somebody gets cancer, one of the first questions is usually "why?" Does this kind of cancer run in my family? Was it something in the water, or in the air around me? Did I get exposed to something? What would you do, or where would you go to answer these questions?

Asian Carp Invasion

The Environment Report has been covering the introduction of the Asian Carp species since January of 2000, when catfish farms in the south were importing them to control pests. The fish have since spread throughout the Mississippi River system. Millions of dollars of taxpayer money has been spent to try to keep these foreign species from swimming into the Great Lakes. Some scientists say their presence in the Great Lakes would be an "ecological disaster." Today, evidence of an Asian Carp species was found above an electric barrier designed to prevent their movement into the Great Lakes.

Cancer and Environment: Searching for Answers

Coal: Dirty Past, Hazy Future

A five-part series from the Environment Report on the future of coal in this country. Lester Graham, Shawn Allee, and Matt Sepic break down a debate taking place over the public airwaves and in the public policy arena. Can coal be a viable option in the new green economy? Support for this series comes from the Joyce Foundation.

Dioxin Delays

In this series, The Environment Report's Shawn Allee investigates Dow Chemical and dioxin contamination in mid-Michigan. Central Michigan has lived with toxic dioxin pollution in two major rivers and Saginaw Bay for decades. Shawn looks at who's been affected, why it's taken so long to clean up, how the science behind dioxin has played into this, and what the cleanup means for the rest of the country.

Green Burial

A series of reports about efforts to make the burial process more environmentally friendly.

Greenovation

The Environment Report has been following Matt and Kelly Grocoff in their effort to make their Ann Arbor home the oldest net-zero house in America. That means in a year the home will produce as much energy or more than it uses. Matt wanted to show that making an older home an energy efficient showcase made more sense than building new.

Is Fire Safety Putting Us at Risk?

You have flame retardant chemicals in your body. Scientists are finding these chemicals, called PBDEs, in newborn babies, and the breast milk those babies drink. We Americans have the highest levels of anyone in the world. We're exposed to these chemicals every day. They're in our couches, our TVs, our cars, our office chairs, the padding beneath our carpets, and the dust in our homes. They're building up in pets, wild animals and fish. They're even in some of the foods we eat. Doctors and public health experts are worried because hundreds of peer-reviewed studies are suggesting links to neurological and developmental defects, and fertility and reproductive problems.

Life on the Kalamazoo River

Itâs been more than a year since a pipeline owned by Canadian company Enbridge Energy ruptured, spilling more than 843,000 gallons of tar sands oil into Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River. In this three part series, we explore what life is like now for people who live near the river, what the spill might mean for the health of wildlife and the ecosystem, and the status of lawsuits and claims filed against Enbridge.

Pollution in the Heartland

Pollution in the Heartland looks at the impact of farming practices on our water supply and what some people are doing about it.

Swimming Upstream

A special Environment Report series on fish and the fishing industry in Michigan. Are our fish safe to eat, what can they tell us about the health of our lakes and rivers, and what's the future of commercial fishing in the Great Lakes? Reporter Dustin Dwyer traveled around the state and brings us these seven stories. Support for coverage of Great Lakes fishery issues comes from the Great Lakes Fishery Trust .

Tar Sands Oil

We've been reporting on tar sands oil and the oil spill cleanup throughout the year. Here are our stories:

The Collapse of the Salmon Economy

The Great Lakes are changing so fast that the agencies which manage fishing cannot keep up with the changes. Some types of fish populations are collapsing and others are thrivingâ¦ at least for now. In a project between The Environment Report and Michigan Watch, Lester Graham has a series of reports on whatâs happening and why.

Your Choice; Your Planet

Your Choice; Your Planet is a yearlong series of reports on how the consumer choices we all make affect the environment. Many environmental stories look at government regulations and industry failures, but the greater impact on the environment is determined by the choices that we make every day. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium plans to go far beyond the question of 'Paper or plastic?' The series will look at our attitudes about buying, consumer confusion, misleading marketing, and short-term thinking versus long-term effects when it comes to purchasing food, clothes, services and big ticket items. Being an environmentally friendly consumer is not always easy. Your Choice; Your Planet stories help you make better informed decisions.

Interview: Keeping Alien Invaders Out

Asian Carp is one species that is very dangerous to the Great Lakes ecosystem (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Nature never made a connection between the nation’s big rivers and the Great Lakes. But Chicago did. A canal was dug connecting the Mississippi River system – including the Missouri, the Ohio and all their tributaries – to all of the Great Lakes at a point on Lake Michigan. It opened up commercial shipping to the interior of the nation.
But it also opened up both bodies of waters to aquatic life you don’t want traveling back and forth. Invasive species such as the zebra mussel have traveled from one to the other. Asian Carp have already caused havoc in the Mississippi. Some biologists worry the Asian Carp will destroy the four-billion dollar fishing industry in the Great Lakes if it gets in. There’s an electric barrier in place, but some people don’t think that’s enough.
Joel Brammeier is with the environmental group Alliance for the Great Lakes. His group is proposing a barrier that will separate the Mississippi system from the Great Lakes completely, to stop those invasive species. He talked with Lester Graham about the barrier:

Transcript

Nature never made a connection between the nation’s big rivers and the Great Lakes. But Chicago did. A canal was dug connecting the Mississippi River system – including the Missouri, the Ohio and all their tributaries – to all of the Great Lakes at a point on Lake Michigan. It opened up commercial shipping to the interior of the nation. But it also opened up both bodies of waters to aquatic life you don’t want traveling back and forth. Invasive species such as the zebra mussel have traveled from one to the other. Asian Carp have already caused havoc in the Mississippi. Some biologists worry the Asian Carp will destroy the four-billion dollar fishing industry in the Great Lakes if it gets in. There’s an electric barrier in place, but some people don’t think that’s enough. Joel Brammeier is with the environmental group Alliance for the Great Lakes. His group is proposing a barrier that will separate the Mississippi system from the Great Lakes completely, to stop those invasive species. He talked with Lester Graham about the barrier:

Joel Brammeier: Well, ecological separation means no species moving between
the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes. When you consider the problem of
invasive species, unlike chemical pollution, which you can reduce to a certain
safe level, there is no safe level of invasive species. Once two get in, they can
reproduce, and the damage is done, and there’s no going back. So, an
ecological separation means stopping fish, and eggs, and other critters from
moving back and forth between the two systems.

Lester Graham: How do you do that when there’s so much commercial traffic
and recreational boating, and just the water flowing through?

Brammeier: Well, in our research, we found that tech fixes – electrical barriers,
sound barriers, blowing bubbles through the water to try and deter fish from
moving – those things can reduce the risk. But for invasive species, risk
reduction really isn’t enough – you need 100% protection. And to do that, we’re
probably looking at some physical barrier that prevents water and live organisms
from moving between those two great watersheds.

Graham: I can imagine the commercial shippers are not thrilled about that.

Brammeier: Well, I think it remains to be seen. Nobody’s quite sure where the
best place is to put a barrier. We discussed about half a dozen different
scenarios under which you could implement that kind of separation. The
Chicago waterway system does support about 25 million tons, give or take, a
year of commercial commodity traffic – and that’s a significant amount. The
reality is that most of that cargo is internal to the Chicago waterways. So, there
isn’t a huge exchange of cargo between the Chicago waterway and the Great
Lakes. And that’s a good thing. That means we have opportunities to actually
split the system back to the way it historically was, and at the same time, solve
our invasive species problem.

Graham: Now, we can see how that would benefit the environment, but how
would it affect the economy?

Brammeier: Well, again, going back to this issue of commercial navigation. If we
create a separation in this system that has a minimal impact on most of the cargo
in the Chicago waterway, we’re really talking about potentially a very small
impact. And, frankly, there’s an opportunity here to create a benefit for
commodity movements as well. A lot of the cargo transfer facilities on the south
side of Chicago are outmoded, outdated, and not competitive. And, any
investment in this kind of project that changed that and also allowed cargo to
move more efficiently and created new port facilities, could have that kind of
benefit, besides protecting the Great Lakes from invasive species.

Asian Carp Barrier on Low

Asian Carp can grow up to 110 pounds (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

A stronger electric barrier
to keep an invasive fish out of the
Great Lakes is set to be turned on.
But people who travel past the
underwater barrier are worried about
electric shocks. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:

Transcript

This barrier is supposed to keep Asian carp from getting into the Great Lakes.

Those fish escaped from Southern fish farms years ago. They’ve spread up the Mississippi river.
Now they’re near a canal that connects the Mississippi system with the Great Lakes.

Biologists worry the big fish would ruin Great Lakes fishing and the Lakes’ ecosystems. Start up
of ‘The Stronger Barrier’ was delayed because of concerns the electric current could hurt crews
on barges and people on recreational boats as the vessels passed by.

U.S. Coast Guard Captain Bruce Jones recently gave thumbs-up to running the new barrier at
low power.

“ We believe it will continue to keep the Great Lakes protected from carp through the winter, until
spawning season starts.”

But biologists don’t think the barrier will work well enough at low power. And barge operators
don’t want it on at all. They’ll be discussing the concerns at a meeting in Chicago in January.

For The Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Keeping a Big Fish From Butting In

Asian Carp can grow up to 110 pounds (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

There are invasive fish swimming their
way toward the Great Lakes. If they get in,
they could swallow up a multi-billion dollar
sport fishing industry. Mark Brush reports,
officials are investing millions of dollars
to keep Asian Carp out of the Great Lakes:

Transcript

Asian Carp were imported by fish farms in Mississippi and Arkansas to control algae.
But the fish escaped during floods. They swam out of the fish ponds, and into the Mississippi
river. And they’ve been moving north ever since.

(sound of boats)

Thad Cook is on a tributary of the Mississippi River in Illinois. This river is more than
400 miles upstream from where Asian Carp first escaped the fish farms.

Cook is looking
for two types of Asian Carp known as Silver and Bighead Carp. It turns out t’s not hard to find them. He dips an electrified pole into the water – and the fish jump right out of the
river and into the boat.

(sound of fish flopping in boat)

Cook is with the Illinois Natural History Survey. His group, along with several others,
has been making trips like this one for years. They’ve been keeping a close eye on where
the fish are going. He takes a guess at how big this fish is.

“No he’ll go… uh.. he’s probably…”

“Hold him out there Jimmy!”

“Yep, six, seven, eight, nine, ten pounds.” (Laughter)

His fish story could have gone a lot further. Some types of these Carp can get up to a
hundred pounds. There aren’t many fish that can compete with an appetite like that.

Biologists are finding that these carp are pushing native fish species aside as they spread
north through the Mississippi River system. And some fear it’s only a matter of time
before they swim their way into the Great Lakes.

David Jude is a fisheries biologist with the University of Michigan.

“I’m very concerned about what impact they would have in the Great Lakes because
they’re planktovores which means they filter zooplankton from the water column. And, they’re just huge fish. And so they have the potential for having
a tremendous impact on our ecosystems.”

He says the silver and bighead carps are filter feeders. They pass up eating smaller fish –
and head straight for the bottom of the food chain.

Jude says if Asian carp get in, it’ll make a bad situation worse. The Great Lakes are
already losing zooplankton from other invasive species. Asian Carp could
destroy a 4 billion dollar a year sport fishing industry.

(sound of canal)

And here is where the battle line is being drawn. The fish have been spotted thirty miles
downstream from this spot on the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal. A century ago,
engineers blasted through solid rock to connect the Great Lakes with the Mississippi
River system.

Chuck Shea is with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“Any type of fish that would want to move between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi
river basin – has to pass through the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal – there’s no other way to swim through. So, they have to come through this body of water we’re standing in front
of right now.”

Shea is in charge of the construction and maintenance of two electric fish barriers along this canal.
When this barrier is online, machines will pulse electricity into the water. The electric current shocks
the fish – making them swim away.

This barrier hasn’t been turned on yet. There have been delays due to funding shortages. And they’re still
doing safety testing with the Coast Guard.

Right now, the only thing that would keep the carp from getting into the Great Lakes is a temporary electric
barrier built six years ago.

The good news is that there still seems to be a little time. Biologists say, so far, Asian Carp haven’t moved any
closer than thirty miles from the barrier for the last couple of years.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

Teaching an Old House New Tricks

Environmentally friendly architecture is
becoming very common. Architects are designing
innovative, cutting edge, energy-efficient homes,
using renewable resources. But, Lester Graham
reports on another approach that recycles an
entire house:

Transcript

You know, we’re always hearing about new green building construction – new homes with all the
latest. That’s nice, but it’s a little ironic to think about all those resources being used to
build new to save resources.

That’s why I kinda got interested when I read about Matt
and Kelly Grocoff. They bought a modest, century-old house and started making
energy-efficient changes. A lot of them as Matt showed me in the bathroom.

“We have the motion-sensor light. We have the compact fluorescent bulbs. We have a
dual-flush toilet that will use only (flushing sound) use point-eight gallons for a flush.
This is actually a one-gallon-per-minute shower head. It will save you at least $100 in
electricity your first year of having that because of the eleven-thousand gallons of hot
water that you’re going to be saving. (faucet sound) This faucet aerator is also point-
five-gallons-a-minute. It’s plenty of water to wash your hands. Most people will never
notice that they’re using two-gallons-per-minute less in this faucet than another faucet.”

(stairs sound)

And that’s just the bathroom. As the couple took me upstairs, they told me about the really,
really efficient geo-thermal heat. They insulated everywhere. It’s tight. But everything
was off-the-shelf. None of that, ‘oh this is custom, you can’t buy it anywhere’, type
stuff.

Kelly Grocoff says if your house is a statement about you, then having a low-impact on
the earth’s resources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions is part of the statement they
want to make.

“For us, we proclaim loud and clear this is where our values are. And this is where we’re
going to spend our time and it’s incredibly important to us.”

And with all the efficiencies, all the updates, the house looked normal, comfortable. And
the Grocoff’s say that’s the way it should be.

Matt: “One of the things with building green, everyone thinks that you’re going to sacrifice
something, you’re going to spend more money and you’re not going to be as
comfortable. And that is completely not true anymore.”

Kelly: “We have made zero sacrifices. We have gained enormously. And we have no
time to waste. Your house is the number one place where you can make a significant
impact on a daily basis. For me there’s no other choice to be made.”

Matt and Kelly Grocoff say doing something about reducing energy use, reducing the
emissions that are causing global warming, and re-using old lumber and this old house
is just a start for them. They want to help other people do it too. That’s why they’re
launching an online site for do-it-yourselfers called ‘GreenovationTV.com’

Matt: “Uh, through Greenovation TV, we’re going to take everything that we’ve learned from
this house and teach others about it.”

Kelly: “We need that kind of resource there as we’re going through this process. And so there was hours upon hours spent researching things. And that’s kind of the goal with this station.”

Matt: “Once you have the knowlege to do it, it’s really, really easy.”

The Grocoff’s say the one thing holding people back from making their homes more
environmentally friendly is they feel like they have to do it all or it won’t be right. They
say just take the first step. Even if it’s just changing to a lower-energy compact
fluorescent bulb, it’s a good start.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Livestock Farms Get Big

Frank Baffi's barn in southern Michigan (photo by Mark Brush)

Today, we continue our series on pollution in the heartland.
There are fewer farmers raising pigs, cows and chickens these days.
But the amount of meat being produced in the U.S. continues to increase.
So livestock farms haven’t exactly disappeared. They’ve just gotten bigger.
In the third part of our week-long series, the GLRC’s Mark Brush reports these big operations have kept food costs down, but those cheap prices come with consequences:

Transcript

When you picture a typical farm, chances are you probably think of a farm just like Frank
Baffi’s.

(Sound of farm)

He grows corn and oats on his land. He’s got chickens, a couple of horses, two ducks,
about 30 beef cows. And in this fading red barn, he’s got pigs:

(Sound of claps)

“Hey Pig! C’mon! Get up!”

(Sound of pigs)

In fact, the pigs have been the most profitable thing he’s raised on this farm. Baffi says
he used to sell more than fifty thousand dollars worth of pigs every year. It was enough
to make a living on.

(Sound of pigs)

But as time went on, selling pigs became less profitable. In the 1980s, his expenses went
up and the price he could get for his pigs went down. Baffi says he was faced with a
decision. It was the same decision that many small livestock farmers faced at the time:
“I think it was a whole trend that if you weren’t big you had to get out. It was if you had
20 cows it was you gotta be milkin’ 30, or if you were milking 30 it was oh, you gotta be
milkin’ 100. The reason they weren’t making any money is that they’re not making
enough money for what they sell.”

Frank Baffi blames the drop in prices on the increase in global trade. He says US
producers started to compete with operations overseas, where expenses can often be
cheaper. To keep up, producers in the US got more efficient, and as they did so, prices
continued to drop. Baffi says he tried to get bigger, but he just didn’t have enough
money.

But just down the road there’s a pig farm that is making a profit. Frank Baffi’s neighbor
is Bruce Barton. His dad started the family in the hog business in the 1950s. Barton says
early on his Dad could see what was coming:

“He pretty much expanded because he could see that small farmers were struggling to
survive and ya know we had buy the feed in larger lots you sell your hogs in larger lots.
There was going to be less margin for each hog. You just had to have more, more of
them.”

The Bartons raised about 11 pigs when the started out. Now they raise about 100,000.
That may seem like a lot, but their operation is small compared to those that raise over a
million hogs a year.

The size of these big farms trouble many environmentalists. These farms are forced to
deal with large volumes of manure. On average one pig can generate close to two tons of
manure a year. Multiply that by one million and you get the picture. Smaller farms can
spread the manure as fertilizer on their land without much problem and large farms can
use the manure too. It’s just that they need a lot of land to spread the manure on. If they
put too much on a field, it can pollute streams and drinking water wells, and researchers
say, these farms are only going to get bigger.

Jim MacDonald researches farming trends for the US Department of Agriculture. He
says small farmers can make a go of it if they’re able to find a niche market, like
producing organic meat and milk. But MacDonald says the demand for these niche
products is still tiny compared to the demand for things like chicken nuggets and hot
dogs:

“The overall trend so far, I think, continues to be towards larger operations producing
what we might call generic or commodity like products and their prices continue to fall.”

Prices are falling because these farms continue to get bigger and more efficient. That
means fewer and fewer people are farming. So the idyllic picture we have of the small
farmer is fading.

(Sound of Frank’s farm up)

Last year, Frank Baffi lost more than a thousand dollars on his farm. He mainly relies on
his social security check for his income. A row of empty metal crates line his barn:

“This is where I’d have pigs and this is where they would have their babies. There
probably all used up but I just haven’t had the heart to tear them out. Because I always
thought that I could at least get back to where I was. And the way it looks, you know, the
profitability of this thing, it don’t look like I’m going to go there.”

So the choices you make at the grocery store influence how farms are changing. It’s only
normal: most of us pick the cheaper product. But some people who live near these large
facilities say consumers don’t know the full cost of their choices.

For the GLRC, I’m Mark Brush.

Too Much Manure?

Hog manure being injected into the ground and tilled under. The manure fertilizes the crops, but if too much is applied it can foul up waterways. (photo by Mark Brush)

Today, we continue our series on pollution in the heartland.
Dairy farms are getting bigger. Many keep thousands of cows in buildings the size of several football fields. These big dairy operations can make a lot of milk. That translates into cheaper prices at the grocery store.
But some worry these large farms are polluting the land around them. In the fourth story of our week-long series, the GLRC’s Mark Brush visits a big Midwestern dairy farm:

Transcript

Today, we continue our series on pollution in the heartland. Dairy farms are getting bigger.
Many keep thousands of cows in buildings the size of several football fields. These big dairy
operations can make a lot of milk. That translates into cheaper prices at the grocery store. But
some worry these large farms are polluting the land around them. In the fourth story of our week-long series, the GLRC’s Mark Brush visits a big Midwestern dairy farm:

(sound of giant fans)

About a thousand cows are in this building, eating, lolling around, and waiting for the next round
of milking.

There’s a sharp smell of manure hanging in the air. Big fans are blowing to keep the cows cool,
and to keep the air circulated.

Stephan Vander Hoff runs this dairy along with his siblings. He says these big farms are good for
consumers:

“We’ve got something here and we’ve been able to do it in such a way that we’re still producing
at the same cost that we were fifteen years ago. It costs more now for a gallon of gas than a
gallon of milk. And so, that’s something to be proud of.”

Vander Hoff’s dairy produces enough milk to fill seven tanker trucks everyday. They also
produce a lot of waste. The cows in this building are penned in by metal gates. They can’t go
outside. So the manure and urine that would normally pile up is washed away by water.

Tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater are sent to big lagoons outside. Eventually, the
liquefied manure is spread onto nearby farm fields. It’s a challenge for these farmers to deal with
these large pools of liquid manure. The farther they have to haul it, the more expensive it is for
them. Almost all of them put the manure onto farm fields.

It’s good for the crops if it’s done right, but if too much manure is put on the land, it can wash into streams and creeks. In fact, this
dairy has been cited by the state of Michigan for letting their manure get into nearby waterways.

(sound of roadway)

Lynn Henning keeps a close eye on Vander Hoff’s dairy.

(car door opening and closing)

She steps from her car with a digital camera, and a device that measures water quality.

(sound of crickets and walking through the brush)

She weaves her way down to the edge of this creek.

“This is the area where we got E. coli at 7.5 million.”

High E. coli levels mean the water might be polluted with dangerous pathogens. Lynn Henning is
testing the creek today because she saw farmers spreading liquid manure on the fields yesterday.
Henning is a farmer turned environmental activist. She works for the Sierra Club and drives all
over the state taking water samples and pictures near big livestock farms.

Henning says she got involved because more of these large animal farms expanded into her
community. She says when the farmers spread the liquid manure, it can make life in the country
pretty difficult:

“The odor is horrendous when they’re applying –we have fly infestations–we have hydrogen
sulfide in the air that nobody knows is there because you can’t always smell it. We have to live
in fear that every glass of water that we drink is going to be contaminated at some point.”

Water contamination from manure is a big concern. The liquid manure can contain nasty
pathogens and bacteria.

Joan Rose is a microbiologist at Michigan State University.

“If animal wastes are not treated properly and we have large concentrations of animal waste
going onto land and then via rainfall or other runoff events entering into our water – there can
be outbreaks associated with this practice.”

Rose tested water in this area and found high levels of cryptosporidium that likely came from
cattle. Cryptosporidium is the same bug that killed people in Milwaukee back in 1993. Rose
says livestock farmers need to think more about keeping these pathogens out of the water. But
she says they don’t get much support from the state and researchers on how best to do that.

For now, the farmers have to come up with their own solutions.

(sound of treatment plant)

Three years ago, the state of Michigan sued Stephen Vander Hoff’s dairy for multiple waste
violations. The Vander Hoff’s settled the case with the state and agreed to build a one million
dollar treatment system. But Vander Hoff isn’t convinced that his dairy was at fault, and thinks
that people’s concerns over his dairy are overblown:

“If we had an issue or had done something wrong the first people that want to correct it is us. We
live in this area. So why would we do anything to harm it?”

Vander Hoff is upbeat about the new treatment system. He says it will save the dairy money in
the long run.

The Sierra Club’s Lynn Henning says she’s skeptical of the new treatment plant. She’ll continue
to take water samples and put pressure on these farms to handle their manure better. In the end,
she doesn’t think these big farms have a place in agriculture. She’d rather see farms go back to
the old style of dairying, where the cows are allowed to graze, and the number of animals isn’t
so concentrated.

But farm researchers say because consumers demand cheap prices, these large farms are here to
stay and there will be more of them. Because of this, the experts say we can expect more
conflicts in rural America.

For the GLRC, I’m Mark Brush.

Restoring Streams in the Heartland

Settlers dug ditches and straightened rivers to drain the fields they needed for planting. (photo by Mark Brush)

Today, we wrap up our series on pollution in the heartland.
To farm in the nation’s heartland, people first had to drain the water from the land. In a lot of places, that meant dredging rivers to get them to move along faster and carry water off the fields. But straight, fast rivers aren’t healthy rivers. And the rushing water carries pesticides and fertilizers off of fields and deposits them downstream. But in some places, farmers are starting to repair rivers. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams has the final story in our week-long series:

Transcript

Today, we wrap up our series on pollution in the heartland. To farm in the nation’s
heartland, people first had to drain the water from the land. In a lot of places, that meant
dredging rivers to get them to move along faster and carry water off the fields. But
straight, fast rivers aren’t healthy rivers. And the rushing water carries pesticides and
fertilizers off of fields and deposits them downstream. But in some places, farmers are
starting to repair rivers. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams has the final story in our week-long series:

From an airplane, the land below it looks like it was drawn in geometry class. Fields
of corn and soybeans look almost like perfect squares. Rivers seem as straight as a ruler’s
edge.

When rivers have their way, they’re unruly. They have lots of twists and bends, but people have straightened a lot of rivers and streams to make it easier to grow crops
and raise animals. European settlers forging their way West got stuck in huge swamps.
The mosquitoes were terrible. But the settlers’ chances of raising food in the swampland
were even worse.

“In order to reclaim that land, muckland, for raising vegetable crops, they had to drain it.”

Barb Cook owns a farm here in fertile southwest Michigan. Her grandfather farmed here
in the early 1900s, back when the rivers were being straightened.

(sound of river)

Cook’s standing on the bank of the Dowagiac River. Right now it’s as straight as a canal
and it’s moving fast. But it’s about to get some of its curves back.

Barb Cook says she was skeptical when she heard about the plan to coax the river back to
its original path.

“Well, they want to put the wiggles back. Well, why? Were they trying to hoodwink
anyone or were their objectives pure? And I got involved and felt they were really truly
trying to improve things.”

Cook’s now the vice president of the group. It calls itself MEANDRS. It’s made up of
farmers and biologists and fishermen. People who all have a stake in what happens to the
river.

They’re carving out one of the curves the river used to follow.

Jay Wesley is a biologist with the Department of Natural Resources. He says even
though this new meander isn’t connected to the river yet, little springs are bubbling up.

“We’ve actually even seen trout in here since this first part of the project’s been done.
They’ve come up through the culvert from the river and have found their way up here.
So it’s pretty cold, high quality water.”

That’s exciting news for fishermen. A river fed by cold groundwater can be a mecca for
trout. The pools and riffles sculpted into the new meander will give fish places to hide.

These small signs of hope are a pretty big deal. This project is a very long labor of
love 12 years in the making.

That’s because there are lots of hurdles. For one thing, meander restorations are
expensive. Half a million dollars at the low end.

There are piles of paperwork.

And some farmers worry that restoring meanders will flood their fields.

In this project, the MEANDRS group surveyed nearby farmers early on about their
concerns and included them in the planning process. Bill Westraight is the President of
MEANDRS. He’s also a farmer who owns land along the river.

“I think what I say holds more weight with farmers than if somebody had come down and
was mandating that they participate in some way.”

Westraight says they had some major critics in the beginning. But he says they’ve gotten
almost all the neighbors on board. He says it was crucial that they gave everyone a say.
They also commissioned feasibility studies to make sure upstream farmers wouldn’t be
flooded.

All these hurdles mean that projects like these aren’t very common.

Andrew Fahlund is with the nonprofit group American Rivers. He says big projects like
meander restorations almost always need government funding. And that funding’s been
cut dramatically over the past few years. Fahlund says those cuts are short-sighted
because healthier rivers can actually save money in the long run.

“One of the reasons you get such an economic benefit from river restoration is that you
reduce the costs of having to treat water, filter
that water and clean it up for human consumption.”

(river sound up under)

The MEANDRS group says there’s no way they can restore the entire river. But they
hope mending just this small section will help revive the river a bit.

The group points out that this type of restoration won’t work everywhere. They say in
many places, channelized rivers are still crucial for keeping fields drained.

Farmer Barb Cook says even now, she sees this project as an experiment. In a few
months, she’ll get to see whether all her hard work will pan out, when they’ll try to force
water from the straight channel into the new meander.

“As you look at the stream behind us, it’s quite a volume of water. Water has its own
way. Mother Nature has something to say about this too. She may say no.”

Cook says nothing ever runs smoothly. But she says they’ll just be flexible and this time
around, let the river choose its course.

For the GLRC, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Capping Pollution at the Source

A newly dug drainage tile. These underground pipes keep the fields dry, but they're also a pathway for nitrogen fertilizers. (photo by Mark Brush)

Today, we begin a week-long series on pollution in the heartland.
Storm water runoff from farm fields contaminates the lakes that many cities use for drinking water. But rather than making farmers reduce the pollution, the government requires water utilities to clean it up and pass the cost on to their customers. In the first part of our series, the GLRC’s Lester Graham reports on efforts some communities have made to stop the pollution at the source:

Transcript

Today, we begin a week-long series on pollution in the heartland. Storm water runoff from farm
fields contaminates the lakes that many cities use for drinking water. But rather than making
farmers reduce the pollution, the government requires water utilities to clean it up and pass the
cost on to their customers. In the first part of our series, the GLRC’s Lester Graham reports on
efforts some communities have made to stop the pollution at the source:

To a great extent, nitrogen fertilizer determines how big a corn crop will be. But often, farmers
use more nitrogen than they really need. It’s a bit of a wager. If conditions are just right, that
extra nitrogen can sometimes pay off in more bushels of corn. But just as often the extra nitrogen
ends up being washed away by rain.

That nitrogen can get into lakes that are used for public drinking supplies. If nitrate levels get too
high the nitrogen can displace oxygen in the blood of children under six months old. It’s called
‘blue baby syndrome.’ In extreme cases it can cause death.

Keith Alexander is the Director of Water Management for the city of Decatur, Illinois. He recalls
that the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency required his city to give families with babies
bottled water because nitrogen levels exceeded the federal limits.

“For approximately six years, while we went through the motions of determining what was best
for our community, we did issue bottled water on an infrequent basis when the nitrate levels did
indeed elevate.”

The City of Decatur had to get nitrate levels down. So, they piggy-backed on federal and state
incentives offered to farmers to use better management practices. The city gave farmers money
to build terraces to reduce soil erosion. It gave money on top of federal and state tax dollars to
farmers to put in grass waterways to slow water rushing off the fields. The city gave farmers
money on top of federal and state incentives to use conservation tillage methods. They offered to
pay to install artificial wetlands so plants would take up the nitrogen before it got into the public
water supplies. It gave farmers money to use a chemical that help stabilize nitrogen in the soil.

With all that city and state and federal money offered to farmers, was it enough to reduce nitrogen
to safe levels?

“Unfortunately, no.”

Keith Alexander says some farmers did take advantage of the incentives. But not enough of
them.

“We’ve done quite a bit on a voluntary basis with a lot of great cooperation from the agricultural
community, but in spite of all that, we would still at times have elevated nitrate levels in Lake
Decatur.”

The city had to build the largest nitrate reduction facility in North America, at a cost of 7.5 million dollars to ensure its drinking water did not exceed the federal standards for
nitrates.

The people who tried to persuade farmers to sign up for the nitrogen reduction programs say
many of the farmers were skeptical that they were the cause of the problem. Some didn’t care.
And some were just skeptical of government programs and the red tape involved.

Steven John is the Executive Director of the Agricultural Watershed Institute. He’s still working
with farmers to reduce nitrogen runoff in the region. Today, the reason is not Decatur’s lake but a problem farther downstream.

“To a fairly large extent, the driver for addressing nitrogen issues now is loading to the Gulf of
Mexico. And, in one sense, because we’ve been at this for some time here and developed a little
bit of a history of city-farm cooperation– also developed good monitoring data, you know, to be
able to look at trends over time– we’re in good position to use our watershed as something of a
laboratory to test ideas that might be applied elsewhere in the corn belt.”

Nitrogen from the Decatur lake watershed eventually flows into the Mississippi River. Illinois,
just like all or parts of 37 other states drain into the Mississippi and finally to the Gulf of Mexico.
There researchers believe the nitrogen fertilizes algae growth, so much so that when the algae
dies and sinks to the bottom of the gulf, the decomposing vegetation robs the water of oxygen
and causes a dead zone that can be as large as the state of New Jersey some years.

But getting farmers to change their farming practices when it was causing problems for the city
next to them was difficult. Getting them to change for a problem hundreds of miles away is even
tougher.

Ted Shambaugh is a farmer who has changed. He says the reasons farmers don’t take the
nitrogen problem more seriously is complicated, but as far as he’s concerned, it’s part of how
farming has changed in the last few decades:

“This is going to fly against a lot of common thought, I suppose, about the farmer, and it does get
me in trouble sometimes, but the farmer has become inherently lazy in his management
techniques. They’ve even gone to the fact that even though they’ve got a 150,000 or 200,000
dollar tractor sitting there, they hire their nitrogen put on. Why do they do that? Well, a lot of it
is because they then have somebody to blame. That, if it didn’t go on right, ‘Well, I didn’t do
that.’ Well, we kind of think that’s what we get paid for, is management.”

Most people in cities like Decatur won’t say things like that about the farmers in the countryside
about them. The economic well-being of many of the cities in the corn belt are highly dependent
on agriculture. Criticizing farmers is just not done, even when many of those farmers won’t lift
a finger to clean up the water that their city neighbors have to drink.

For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

Cities Cope With Pesticide Pollution

Farmers are using fewer pesticides these days. (photo by Don Breneman)

Today, we continue our series on pollution in the heartland. Farm pollution is one of the biggest contamination problems in the country. But unlike other industries, there are very few pollution restrictions on agriculture. In the second story of our week-long series, the GLRC’s Lester Graham reports when cities clean up pollution from pesticides, the cost ends up on their citizens’ water bills:

Transcript

Today, we continue our series on pollution in the heartland. Farm pollution is one of the biggest
contamination problems in the country. But unlike other industries, there are very few pollution
restrictions on agriculture. In the second story of our week-long series, the GLRC’s Lester
Graham reports when cities clean up pollution from pesticides the cost ends up on their citizens’
water bills:

Every city in the Corn Belt that gets its water from surface supplies such as lakes and rivers has to
deal with pesticide contamination. For the most part, the pesticide levels are below federal
standards for safe drinking water. But water treatment plants have to test for the chemicals and
other pollutants that wash in from farm fields.

Some cities have had to build artificial wetlands or take other more expensive measures to help
reduce pollution such as nitrogen, phosphorous and pesticides.

Craig Cummings is the Water Director for the City of Bloomington, Illinois.

“Well, you know, it is an expense that, you know, we would rather not bear, obviously. We
don’t, you know, particularly like to pass that on to our customers. But, again, it’s understood
that we’re not going to have crystal clear, pristine waters here in the Midwest. But, that’s not to
say that we should stick our head in the sand and not work with the producers. At least here in
our little neck of the woods we think we have a great working relationship with the producers.”

Part of that working relationship is a liaison with the farmers.

Jim Rutheford has worked with farmers in the area on soil conservation issues for decades. He’s
showing me the artificial wetlands that the City of Bloomington is monitoring to see if it can help
reduce some of the contaminants that end up in the city’s water supply. The wetlands reduce
nitrogen runoff and filter out some of the pesticides such as atrazine that otherwise would end up
in Bloomington’s lake.

“The atrazine was used back several years ago in high concentrated amounts. Its effects were if
you get a flush of rain after your atrazine is put on, it comes into the lake.”

Rutherford says for a very long time atrazine has been popular with corn farmers.

“It’s the cheapest, but it’s also gives more problems as far as water quality is concerned.”

Because atrazine has been so popular, a lot of farmers use it and it’s polluted some lakes to the
point they exceeded safe drinking water standards.

In one test during spring applications of atrazine, National Oceanic and Atmospherica
Administration scientists found so much of the chemical had evaporated from Midwest farm
fields that rain in some parts of the East Coast had atrazine levels that exceeded safe drinking
water levels.

But atrazine levels have been going down. It’s not so much because of artificial wetlands or
because farmers are concerned about pesticide pollution, although some of them have expressed
concern. Atrazine has not been as much of a problem because more and more farmers are
switching to genetically modified crops such as Round-Up Ready soybeans and more recently
Round-Up Ready corn. The Monsanto seed is genetically altered so that the Monsanto pesticide,
Round-Up, can be applied to the fields and not hurt the crops. And Round-Up doesn’t cause the
kind of water pollution that atrazine does.

Mike Kelly is a farmer who’s concerned about reducing storm water runoff from farm fields.

“A lot of the herbicides that we’re using attack the plant, not the soil. For example, Round-Up
does not hang around in the soil. Now, I do still use atrazine. It does attach to soil particles. But
there’s where the advantage of no-till–the soil staying put in the field–as you said, we’re not
getting as much erosion, so it stays put and breaks down the way it’s supposed to.”

Kelly use a conservation tillage method that doesn’t plow up the soil the way traditional methods
do. That means less soil erosion so pesticides aren’t as likely to end up in waterways. And Kelly says low-till and no-till methods are beginning to get a hand from nature:

“Definitely conservation tillage and no-till is going to help keep herbicides in the field. Again, he
do see increased infiltration through better soil structure and also through earthworms coming
back, creating holes about the size of a pencil three to four feet deep in our soils. That is a nice
avenue for water to infiltrate rather than run off.”

And if more of the water percolates down into the soil, less of it is going to end up polluting
water supplies such as the City of Bloomington’s lake.

Water Director Craig Cummings says they city encourages voluntary efforts like Mike Kelly’s.
Cummings says the city depends on the farming community too much to point a finger, accusing
farmers of pollution.

“We recognize that we’re in the breadbasket of the world here. And we’re going to see with the
kind of agricultural practices that we have here in the Midwest or United States, we’re going to
see some of these contaminants.”

Cummings says it’s not a matter of eliminating pesticide contamination at the source, but
rather a matter of the city keeping levels low enough that the water is safe to drink.

For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

Congress Rejects Carp Barrier Funding

The Asian Carp is a big eater… and it’s moving closer to
the Great Lakes. Great Lakes states are hoping to stop the carp with electric barriers on the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams reports… a Congressional committee voted against operating money for the barriers:

Transcript

The Asian Carp is a big eater, and it’s moving closer to the Great Lakes.
Great Lakes states are hoping to stop the carp with electric barriers on the
Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal, but as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Rebecca Williams reports a Congressional committee voted against operating
money for the barriers:

It’s estimated the Asian Carp is about 20 miles away from Lake Michigan.
Right now there’s a temporary electric barrier standing in its way, and the
Army Corps of Engineers is building a second, stronger barrier. Great Lakes
states are looking to Congress for money to operate the carp barriers, but a House-Senate
conference committee recently voted against any funding for them. Without federal funding the
state of Illinois will have to come up with the hundreds of thousands of dollars to operate and
maintain the barriers.

Marc Gaden is with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

“We think that this is actually a national problem. The carp escaped from the
southern United States and have been making their way northward and have been causing
destruction on their whole path, so this is something that’s more than just
a Great Lakes or even a state of Illinois issue.”

Gaden says two additional bills before Congress could provide money to
operate the barriers, but he says the carp might move faster than either of
those bills.

For the GLRC, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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