Rice harvesting in Fort Bend County, Texas (Photo by David Nance, courtesy of the USDA)
The US is not farming as much land. Kyle Norris reports farmland equal to the size of the entire state of West Virginia has been taken out of production in the last few years:
Transcript
The US is not farming as much land. Kyle Norris reports farmland equal to the size of the entire state of West Virginia has been taken out of production in the last few years:
The United States Department of Agriculture surveyed farmers from 2002 to 2007.
During that time farmers stopped planting more than 16 million acres of farmland.
In some cases farmers retired. Or they just decided not to plant crops. Or sold the land to developers in sprawling areas.
Don Buckloh is with the American Farmland Trust. He says what happens to farmland should be important to people.
“They should be interested in whether good farm land is remaining available to produce the food they’re interested in eating. And then secondly just how strong is agriculture in the community as an economic force.”
While less land is being farmed, the USDA says there are more farms. The survey counted 291,000 new farms during that time. Most of those new farms are smaller operations.
There is a concern that pharma-crops may contaminate food crops
(Photo courtesy of the USDA)
The Bush Administration wants to
put new rules in place before its term
ends. Rebecca Williams reports one group
is worried about a proposed rule they say
could leave doors open for drugs in our food:
Transcript
The Bush Administration wants to
put new rules in place before its term
ends. Rebecca Williams reports one group
is worried about a proposed rule they say
could leave doors open for drugs in our food:
The US Department of Agriculture recently proposed new rules about
genetically engineered crops. That includes crops grown to produce drugs.
It might be something like a human gene grown in rice, or a vaccine grown
in corn.
They’re being tested in the field now, and they’re often grown near regular
food crops.
Doug Gurian-Sherman is with the Union of Concerned Scientists. He says
there’s not enough oversight in the new rules.
“If it does take off and these things are grown year after year and widely, I
think under these kind of regulations the chances for contamination will be
you know, very good.”
He says a couple years ago, a grain grown for pig vaccine got mixed into
normal grain. It was caught just before going to market.
But Gurian-Sherman says these genetically engineered crops should be
grown indoors to prevent contamination of food crops.
A study finds farm fields may not be the best environment for toads (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
A new study connects chemicals from
farm fields to mutant toads. Rebecca Williams
has more:
Transcript
A new study connects chemicals from
farm fields to mutant toads. Rebecca Williams
has more:
This study looked at toads that live near farm fields and toads that live
near other kinds of not-so-pristine areas like parking lots.
The researchers found in areas with more agriculture – and more farm
chemicals – there were more mutant toads. They found male toads with
both male and female parts. Not ideal when it comes to mating.
Louis Guillette is an author of the study, in the journal Environmental
Health Perspectives.
“It may in fact be a mixture of chemicals along with who knows what
other variables, nutrition, other stressors, that may be leading to these
problems.”
He says next they’ll try to figure out what chemicals are at play, and
exactly how the toads are being turned into hermaphrodites.
Alan Roberson's pond traps sediment. Before the pond was built, silt washed into a creek and caused problems farther downstream. (Photo by Lester Graham)
Soil erosion from farmfields causes siltation in creeks, rivers and lakes. The soil particles also carry fertilizer and pesticide pollution with them. (Photo by Lester Graham)
Since the dust bowl days of the 1930s Depression, the government has been working with farmers to reduce erosion. Today, soil conservation is better. But fields still lose a lot of topsoil because not all farmers use the best conservation methods. Dirt is washed away by rain. That silt clogs up streams, rivers and lakes. But one region is trying to intercept the silt before it gets to the river system. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
Since the dust bowl days of the 1930s Depression, the government has been working with
farmers to reduce erosion. Today, soil conservation is better. But fields still lose a lot of
topsoil because not all farmers use the best conservation methods. Dirt is washed away
by rain. That silt clogs up streams, rivers and lakes. But one region is trying to intercept
the silt before it gets to the river system. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports:
Farm fields in all or part of 38 states drain into the Mississippi River. Some of the
tributaries of the Mississippi are so silted that dredges have to operate around the clock to keep river
shipping lanes open.
The Sangamon River in central Illinois is not big enough for shipping cargo, but it does
run into the man-made Decatur Lake. The city of Decatur gets its water from that lake
and often has to dredge it to keep the water inlets from clogging up.
Keith Alexander is the Director of Water Management for the city of Decatur, Illinois.
He says a little soil erosion on enough farms adds up:
“And the drainage area that runs into the lake is 925 square miles of some of the world’s
best topsoil. We have literally a half-a-million acres of corn and soybean fields that flow
into our lake that we use for drinking water purposes.”
Not only does the silt clog the lake, it also carries fertilizers and pesticides with it,
polluting the lake. The city has offered farmers financial incentives to reduce soil
erosion. But it hasn’t gotten enough participation from farmers to solve the problem. So,
the City of Decatur decided to try another approach. They would offer money to landowners to build ponds. Those ponds would be located in key drainage areas next
to farm fields.
Shannon Allen is a watershed specialist with the Macon County Soil and Water
Conservation District. He says it turned out to be a pretty popular program:
“The landowners wanted it for recreational purposes, obviously fish, maybe swimming
or whatever. We’re putting them in so we can collect sediment from the farm fields
above them so they don’t go into the river system.”
Shannon Allen says the ponds work a lot better at keeping silt out of creeks and rivers and lakes
than other methods to reduce erosion.
“Basically ponds collect 90% of the silt. And, so anytime you can put up a pond, you’re
doing better than a grassed waterway or a terrace that don’t reduce sediment loads by that
much.”
The city offers up to 5,000 dollars to landowners, but that’s well short of the actual cost. A typical pond
can cost 20 to 25,000 dollars to build. But landowners have been taking the city’s offer.
Alan Roberson owns a few acres at the bottom of a sloping corn field. About 42 acres
drains onto his property and then into a creek. He says when he moved there, there was
just a big ditch where stormwater from the neighboring farm fields washed a bigger and
bigger gully, carrying sediment to the creek:
“There was places eight, ten feet deep. We’ve lived here almost 20 years and it just kept
getting deeper as it went along. I hated to even come down here and look at it because it
was getting so bad. So, I’m glad that program came along to take care of it. As you can
see, it’s not doing that anymore.”
Roberson took advantage of the city’s pond program. Where the gully used to be, a carpet
of green lawn now borders a picturesque little pond.
Alan Roberson says the pond has a pipe in the bottom of it, kind of like a bathtub plug. It
was part of the design required to get the matching funds from the city. When the pond
fills up with silt, Roberson will be able to drain it and dig out the soil:
(Sound of water trickling)
“See this valve down here? You can actually pull that up. It could very well be 20 years
from now they’ll get enough silt in here where a person will have to bring it down. But
like I said, it’s designed to do that.”
That silt is some of the richest dirt in the corn belt and could be sold back to farmers or
used for gardens or flower beds. The landowner will have to pay the cost of digging it
out, but it’s that much more silt that won’t have to be dredged from the lakes or the rivers
that feed them, where people get their public water supply.
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.
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.
The lynx was recently considered extinct in Michigan until a
trapper caught one. (Photo courtesy of USFWS)
For years, federal and state governments have cut funding for wildlife protection. That’s led to complaints from biologists who say they don’t have enough money to adequately do their jobs, but it’s also led to a new movement. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee reports on how citizens are starting to take over duties once performed by trained scientists:
Transcript
For years, federal and state governments have cut funding for wildlife
protection. That’s led to complaints from biologists who say they don’t
have enough money to adequately do their jobs, but it’s also led to a new
movement. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee
reports on how citizens are starting to take over duties once performed by
trained scientists:
Ray Rustem says wildlife biologists these days are often chained to their
desks.
“Years ago, when I first started with the Department of Natural
Resources, wildlife habitat biologists spent quite a bit of time in the field
actually doing fieldwork. With the types of things that are going on now,
they’ve become much more in getting the planning done and we’ve had
to shift some of that fieldwork done to the technician level. Frankly,
yeah, we could always use additional people out there.”
Rustem is with the Wildlife Division of the Michigan Department of
Natural Resources. He says state funding has fallen steadily for years,
and one way he’s made up the difference is by involving Michigan
citizens. Rustem says the DNR uses dozens of volunteers for its frog and
toad survey in the early part of the summer.
“This is our tenth year and we’ve got at least 120 people who’ve been
doing this all ten years. That’s a tremendous amount of data that’s being
provided for us on information about species and where they’re located.”
Many groups are now using so-called citizen scientists to collect data.
Sally Petrella is a biologist who works with the non-profit organization
the Friends of the Detroit River.
“We’ve cut out so much of the funding for regular science that there’s a
real lack, and citizen scientists can cover far more areas than
professionals can, at a much lower cost.”
Petrella is standing beside the murky, reed-choked waters of the Rouge
River Watershed. It’s home to six species of frogs and toads. Every
summer, Friends of the Detroit River enlists the help of 700 people to
listen for the creatures as they call to each other from the marshy
grasses.
Petrella is standing beside one of her more loyal volunteers… Al Sadler.
Sadler admits that part of the appeal is the walk along the banks of the
river… but he also believes that public participation in wildlife
protection has become an absolute necessity.
“I think that it’s required if we plan on keeping any wildlife areas
around. I think that if citizens don’t get involved, I think that people
won’t know what they’re going to miss, and before we know it, there
won’t be much wild places left.”
Sadler is a fairly typical citizen scientist. He has a day job as an engineer
and volunteers in his spare time, but there are also people with advanced
degrees in biology and wildlife management who are called citizen
scientists simply because they don’t work for the government.
Dennis Fijakowski is one of those people. He’s the executive director of
the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy.
“We can’t count on the government to do everything for us. We have to
be a part of the solution.”
Fijakowski says ordinary people have made important contributions to
wildlife conservation. He says the lynx was considered extinct in
Michigan until a trapper caught one, and a rare Great Gray Owl was
discovered on a national wildlife refuge last spring by a photographer.
“You look back at the conservation history of our state and it was citizen
led. All of the important, the milestone decisions, legislation… it was
citizen led.”
John Kostyack with the National Wildlife Federation says involving
citizen scientists is great, but…
“They’re not really a substitute for having staff in the wildlife agencies…
state and federal and tribal. Because they are the ones who are going to
take this initial data, which is going to be very rough from volunteers,
and then use it to decide upon where to take the research next.”
And there have been cases in which citizen scientists have clashed with
state and federal governments. They are consistently at odds with government
officials over issues related to global warming and the Michigan Wildlife
Conservancy is locked in a bitter battle with state biologists over whether
the state is home to a viable cougar population.
The Conservancy’s Dennis Fijakowski acknowledges that the union
between government biologists and citizen scientists may not always be
an easy one, but he says the involvement of residents in the protection of
their state’s wildlife can only be a good thing.
“Because all anyone of us wants is that we pass on a wild legacy to our
children and grandchildren… and we’re not going to if we don’t get our
acts together.”
Many organizations offer citizens the opportunity to get involved in data
collection, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Later this month, a group of students and professors
in the Great Lakes region are holding a national conference aimed at creating more diversity in the environmental field. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:
Transcript
Later this month, a group of students and professors in the Great Lakes region are holding a national conference aimed at creating more diversity in the environmental field. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:
The Minority Environmental Leadership Initiative at the University of Michigan is holding the conference. It’s for students, leaders of environmental non-profit groups and government agencies, and environmental faculty at universities.
Professor Dorceta Taylor says the conference will look at why the level of minority hiring in the environmental field is still so low, and what can be done about it.
“The environment affects everyone, and it could be a far more effective movement if it involved a larger cross section of the population.”
Taylor says many environmental organizations say they’d like to hire more minority graduates, but don’t know how to find or recruit them. Organizers say they hope the conference will connect employers with minority students looking for jobs.
Scientists say a newly-dedicated computing system called the Open Science Grid could improve research on the environment. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
Scientists say a newly dedicated computing system called the
Open Science Grid could improve research on the environment. The Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Computer grids allow users in one group to tap into another group’s
computer data. Several Midwest universities have been working with
federal agencies on a grid for physicists, biologists, and others to be
used in scientific applications.
The hope is that the Open Science Grid will help different fields of science connect. Dane Skow is with the Fermi National Laboratory near Chicago. He says researchers might combine satellite images of crops with data on water quality.
“You may be able to track algae plumes so that you can see fertilizer runoff patterns from fields. There’s a whole bunch of things people are doing, looking at, and tying this kind of data together.”
Skow says creators of the Open Science Grid have put in controls to try to limit who has access to the system. He estimates the grid costs about ten million dollars to build.
According to the Audubon Society report, the population of the Bobolink, which nests in hayfields and other U.S. grasslands, has fallen to about 11 million birds — half its earlier recorded numbers. (Photo by S. Maslowski, USFWS)
Road-to-road agricultural fields like this one decrease the amount of natural grasslands. This may be one of the reasons why bird populations are declining. (photo by Brad Mering)
A new report warns that nearly a third of North America’s bird species are in trouble. And it says habitat loss is to blame. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams has more:
Transcript
A new report warns that nearly a third of North America’s bird species are
in trouble. And it says habitat loss is to blame. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Rebecca Williams has more:
National Audubon Society researchers analyzed data on more than 650 bird
species. They found that since 1966, certain bird populations have been
declining in all habitats.
Birds that thrive in grasslands are especially at risk. The study found 70
percent of grassland bird species are declining significantly.
Greg Butcher is the study’s lead author. He says today’s farming practices
have reduced available bird habitat.
“In the 50’s, field sizes were small, there was a lot of variety of crops
being planted, there were a lot of hedgerows and field edges that were good
for bird populations. Most farming is done road to road now. And so, in the
1950’s, agricultural landscapes were very favorable for bird populations,
and today, they’re just not.”
Butcher says creating grass buffers around farm fields can help some
grassland species. But he says other species need larger areas of land to
succeed.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Rebecca Williams.
Rice harvesting in Fort Bend County, Texas (Photo by David Nance, courtesy of the USDA)
