Mapping Underground Rivers

  • DNR hydrologist Jeff Green consults a high-resolution topographic map to figure out which sinkhole is ahead of him. The trees and grass that grow up around the sinkhole form a buffer, allowing water to soak into the soil and filtering any pollutants before it reaches the aquifer.(Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)

Spring in the north is a time of melting snow and running water. It’s the best time of year for people who study underground water flows. Those underground rivers are important, especially where surface water easily drains into bedrock. It can quickly carry pollution long distances. Hydrologists try to map these underground rivers to help protect fragile ecosystems. As Stephanie Hemphill reports, the first step in making these maps is a process called dye tracing.

Transcript

Spring in the north is a time of melting snow and running water. It’s the best time of year for people who study underground water flows. Those underground rivers are important, especially where surface water easily drains into bedrock. It can quickly carry pollution long distances. Hydrologists try to map these underground rivers to help protect fragile ecosystems. As Stephanie Hemphill reports, the first step in making these maps is a process called dye tracing.

When the snow is melting in the woods and fields, Jeff Green wants to know where it’s going.

“We’re going to hike back to two springs.”

Green is a hydrologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and an expert in the limestone geology of Southeast Minnesota.

Green climbs a fence and splashes through a stream that’s flooding a pasture. The stream is bordered by a natural wall of limestone.

Melting snow seeps into the limestone. It runs down vertical cracks to bigger horizontal openings that look like miniature caves. Jeff Green calls these “conduits,” and some are three inches wide.

“You can imagine a pipe that big — water would move very fast, like we’re seeing. So these conduits are what we’re dye tracing.”

Green has traipsed out to this pasture to put what he calls a “bug” in a spring. The ‘bug’ is a small mesh bag about the size of a cellphone, packed with charcoal. The charcoal will capture a dye that he’ll pour into melting snow in a sinkhole a few miles away. He’ll do this in several different spots.

By tracing the paths of different colors of dye, he’ll learn the sources of the water that feeds each spring. That will help him make what he calls a springshed map.

We slog across a corn field that’s dotted with small groves of trees. They’re growing around miniature canyons, about 20 feet deep. Here, you can see how this honeycombed water highway works, and this is where Jeff Green will pour the first dye.

“This is a place where there was a conduit, an opening in the limestone.”

Green climbs down carefully into the crevasse.

“Listen! … All right!”

He’s found some running water.

“Water’s running right here. I don’t know where it’s going but it’s going someplace. So I’m going to try pouring dye here.”

He pours a cup or so of a bright red fluorescent dye into the snow.

Green marks the spot with a GPS unit. This is a place where surface water and groundwater meet.

“That snow-melt is surface water, it’s going into this sinkhole and it’s becoming groundwater as you’re listening to it.”

That means what happens here on the land directly affects the quality of the groundwater.

“In this case, it’s pretty good, you’ve got conservation tillage, lots of corn stalks left to keep the soil from eroding, and then you’ve got grass, permanent cover, around the sinkholes. So this is actually really good.”

There are wonderful trout streams around here. The map Green is making will help protect those streams by pinpointing the source of the water that feeds them.

In a day or two, Green will check the “bugs” he put in the springs, and find out exactly where the dye from this sinkhole went.

He usually finds water traveling one-to-three miles underground before it surfaces.

When the springshed map is finished, he’ll share it with local governments, farmers, and people who want to protect the water in this landscape.

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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Seagrass Beds Declining

  • Recent studies show about a third of all sea grasses have disappeared worldwide.(Photo courtesy of NOAA/Heather Dine)

The Gulf of Mexico is losing sea grass beds at an alarming rate. According to a new aerial survey, Mobile Bay has lost nearly 14-hundred acres of sea grass beds in the last few years. And as Tanya Ott reports, that could affect your dinner plate:

Transcript

The Gulf of Mexico is losing sea grass beds at an alarming rate. According to a new aerial survey, Mobile Bay has lost nearly 14-hundred acres of sea grass beds in the last few years. And as Tanya Ott reports, that could affect your dinner plate.

Americans love shrimp. And shrimp love sea grass beds. But as Tanya Ott reports sea grass beds are dying at an alarming rate.

Each American eats on average four pounds of shrimp a year. But a new aerial survey of the Gulf of Mexico finds the place where shrimp, crab and a lot of different fish find their food is disappearing. Scientists say agricultural runoff and sediment from development are killing off sea grass beds. Dauphin Island Sea Lab scientist Ken Heck says part of the problem is PR. Sea grass beds just are’t as sexy as some other ecosystems.

“Many people know about coral reefs and they know about tropical rain forests. But sea grass habitats are a bit under-loved and under-appreciated.”

Sea grass decline isn’t just a problem in the Gulf of Mexico. Heck is part of team doing a global sea grass census. He says worldwide a third of sea grass beds have disappeared.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tanya Ott.

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Wrangling Runoff

  • So every year, dozens of homes are flooded. That's in part because 28% of the entire watershed in this region around Washington DC is paved over. (Photo by Sabri Ben-Achour)

Stormwater runoff can be one
of the main ways that urban
areas create pollution. In
some cases it can dramatically
suffocate marine life. It
can also cause flooding. One
small town in Maryland is on
the receiving end of its region’s
runoff. As Sabri Ben-Achour reports,
it’s trying to set a national
example with its approach to
solving the problem:

Transcript

Stormwater runoff can be one
of the main ways that urban
areas create pollution. In
some cases it can dramatically
suffocate marine life. It
can also cause flooding. One
small town in Maryland is on
the receiving end of its region’s
runoff. As Sabri Ben-Achour reports,
it’s trying to set a national
example with its approach to
solving the problem:

Anytime it rains, the ground in Edmonston, Maryland quickly becomes waterlogged. Here’s Brigitte Pooley and her mother Maggie.

“When the river gets flooded with rainwater, for example, if it continued raining like this, it literally comes up all over, and then all the debris that comes from upstream, municipalities upstream, as the water recedes it just leaves milk cartons and trash, tires everywhere.”

Adam Ortiz is the mayor of this low income, low-lying town of 1400. He says his town is a trap for stormwater runoff from all the paved surfaces in the area.

“At least 30 to 56 homes would be under water at least once a year because of flooding from parking lots, highways, shopping centers and streets.”

So every year, dozens of homes are flooded. That’s in part because 28% of the entire watershed in this region around Washington DC is paved over. But flooding isn’t the whole story.

“If a watershed is more than 10% paved you’re going to have impaired water quality.”

Jim Connolly is Executive Director of the Anacostia Watershed Society. He says stormwater smothers or poisons aquatic life, and causes erosion.

“It’s all the oil or grease that comes out of cars, the trash we throw in the streets, the pesticides we use in our lives. Stormwater is the base cause of all the problems in our urban rivers.”

So the town of Edmonston decided to do something about it. A new pumping station is keeping floods down, but the town wants to be a model for how to prevent stormwater runoff in the first place. So with federal Recovery Act money, the town is rebuilding its main street from top to bottom. Mayor Ortiz sidesteps a bulldozer to show off what’s now a construction site on the roadside.

“This is a bio-retention treebox, so instead of the water going directly into the drains and into the river, it will go directly into this bed.”

In that bed will go native trees grown in gravel and compost – to absorb and filter water. The street itself is going to be repaved with permeable concrete to let some water pass right through.

“The water’s going to filter naturally into the water table, so everything will be taken care of onsite as it was a few hundred years ago.”

85-90% of run off will be trapped by this system. But what about cost? Dominique Lueckenhoff directs the Office of State and Watershed Partnerships for this region at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“It is not more costly with regards to the refurbishing and additional greening of this street.”

But this wouldn’t have happened had this community not organized to fight for it. Allen Hance is with the Chesapeake Bay Trust. He says that to have a major impact, many more communities will have to follow Edmonston’s example.

“We want this to become a matter of course in how people build streets, and how they design streets.”

Edmonston will be putting all of its designs, and experiences online for other communities to use as a blueprint.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sabri Ben-Achour.

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Atrazine in Our Water

  • Downstream view of Roberts Creek, IA, where USGS scientists conducted a study of the degradation of atrazine, a herbicide, in streams. (Photo courtesy of the USGS)

People have been concerned
about farm chemicals getting
into drinking water supplies
for a long time. A recent report
showed that the chemical atrazine
peaks, in many areas, in concentrations
much higher than previously thought.
Julie Grant reports there are
things you can do to protect your
family. But, finding out if you
have a problem is harder:

Transcript

People have been concerned
about farm chemicals getting
into drinking water supplies
for a long time. A recent report
showed that the chemical atrazine
peaks, in many areas, in concentrations
much higher than previously thought.
Julie Grant reports there are
things you can do to protect your
family. But, finding out if you
have a problem is harder:

Bob Denges is worried. His water is discolored. So he’s
called a water purification company to test it.

(sound of running water)

They’re running water in the basement utility sink. It’s kind
of orange-y looking. So, it’s an easy diagnosis: too much
iron.

“You can probably see in the toilet, upstairs just on the first
floor, that there’s some brownish, reddish discoloration
around the toilets.”

That’s not great. But at least you can tell when there’s iron
in the water. You cannot see or taste other water
contaminants such as weed killers like atrazine.

Tom Bruusema is the water filter expert at the National
Sanitation Foundation. They test and certify water filtration
devices. He says the first place you can check is your local
municipality – the folks that monitor water in your area.

“That would be the place to start. They are required, by
federal law, to measure a number of contaminants, produce
an annual report for their consumers.”

But recently an investigative report by the New York Times
revealed water contamination can spike in some places –
and local water officials might not even know about it.

That weed killer – atrazine – is applied on farm fields and, in a
lot of places, you also find a lot of atrazine in the water
during that time.

If you’re looking for it at the right time.

Sometimes it spikes for longer than a month. But some local
water officials only test for atrazine once a month, or only
once a year, and often it’s not during that peak application
season.

So people can’t really find out about atrazine levels for their
drinking water in those places.

Some water systems are spending lots of money to treat
drinking water to get atrazine levels down to what the federal
government considers safe levels.

But that might not be enough, according to some of the new
scientific evidence about atrazine.

Five studies published in peer-reviewed journals recently
have found evidence suggesting that small amounts of
atrazine in drinking water causes health problems. Even at
levels considered safe by federal standards, atrazine might
be associated with birth defects. Things like low birth
weights in newborns. Skull and facial malformations and
misshapen limbs.

Forty-three water systems in six states — Illinois, Indiana,
Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi and Ohio — recently sued
atrazine’s manufacturers. They want to force the company
Syngenta and its partner Growmark to pay for removing the
chemical from drinking water.

Steve Tillery is an attorney in the lawsuit.

“Some of them have gone to the expense to cleaning it
completely out of their water supplies, so that it doesn’t exist
at all. And they should, in our view, be entitled to
reimbursement of expenses for cleaning it completely out of
their water supplies.”

But, some water systems are not cleaning out atrazine
completely. And, as we mentioned, there are times when
some don’t know they exceed the federal safe drinking water
levels.

There is something pretty easy you can do if you’re worried
about your water.

Tom Bruusema of the National Sanitation Foundation says a
simple carbon filter can remove atrazine. Those are the
filters you can attach to the faucet or the pitchers you refill.

“So it’s a good investment. Certainly can help them if they
have those kinds of concerns, and particularly those living in
an area that’s known to have potential contaminants in the
water supply.”

But first people have to be aware of a possible problem.
And, too often, they are not.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Where Nothing Can Survive

  • Shrimpers have seen their catches dwindle down from thousands of pounds of shrimp a day to very little due to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Every summer, thousands of
square miles of the Gulf of
Mexico die. The Dead Zone is
caused by pollution that flows
down the Mississippi River. It’s
runoff from factories, sewer
plants, and farms. And it causes
a lot of problems for fishermen
in the area. This year, the Dead
Zone is projected to be huge –
maybe the largest ever. Samara Freemark explains:

Transcript

Every summer, thousands of
square miles of the Gulf of
Mexico die. The Dead Zone is
caused by pollution that flows
down the Mississippi River. It’s
runoff from factories, sewer
plants, and farms. And it causes
a lot of problems for fishermen
in the area. This year, the Dead
Zone is projected to be huge –
maybe the largest ever. Samara Freemark explains:

Imagine for a moment you’re a shrimp fisherman. Every day you send out your fleet to the same waters you’ve fished for decades. And your boats pull in a lot of shrimp- thousands of pounds a day, millions a year. And then one day, a normal summer day, you send the boats out, and they come back empty.

“You go from about 5000 pounds to nothing. It’s dead. That’s why they call it the dead zone.”

That’s Dean Blanchard. He runs the largest shrimp company in America- Dean Blanchard Seafood. 


Blanchard started seeing the dead zone about five years ago, but it’s not a new phenomenon. For a long time, nutrient fertilizer from upstream has run into the Mississippi River and from there, into the Gulf. It fertilizes big algae blooms– and when the algae decays, it sucks oxygen out of the water, making it impossible for fish to live there.

What’s new is how much fertilizer there is now.

“It’s not natural.”

Nancy Rabalais is a marine biologist at LUMCON. That’s Louisiana’s center for marine research. She says that over the past several decades there’s been a surge in fertilizer use in the Corn Belt states. That eventually ends up in the Gulf.

“We’re having 300 times more than we did in the 1950s. And it’s just over loaded the system.”

Rabalais predicts this year’s dead zone will be almost three times as big as it was twenty years ago – more than 8000 square miles.

Of course, the bigger the zone, the further out shrimpers like Dean Blanchard have to send their boats. That means a lot of wasted time, fuel, and wages.

And the zones might mean even bigger problems. Don Scavia is a professor at the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan.

“There’s a half a billion dollar shrimp industry in the gulf. And the shrimp depend on that habitat. And what we’re concerned about is that if the dead zone continues or even grows, that fishery may collapse.”

Congress is taking some measures to address the problem. Conservation programs in the Farm Bill work to reduce how much fertilizer farmers use, and how they apply it.

But there’s something else in the Farm Bill too – a lot of subsidy programs. Those pay for ethanol production. Which means more corn. Which means a lot more fertilizer.

“And what is debated every 5 years is how much funding will go into those conservation programs, relative to funding going into subsidy programs. And, by far, the subsidies win.” (laughs)

Scavia says for every $1 spent on conservation programs in the Corn Belt, $500 go to subsidizing crops.


Shrimper Dean Blanchard says he’s not sure how long he can live with that balance, especially as he watches the dead zone grow.

“How big is this thing going to get? If we kill the oceans we have problems. We have serious problems.”

But Don Scavia is hopeful. He says we know exactly how to reduce nutrient runoff – in fact, the basic programs are already in place. It’s just a matter of Congress choosing the right funding priorities.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Greening the Capital City’s Rooftops

  • This high-rise green roof in Washington DC required a large crane to lift the soil and gravel onto three floors. (Photo courtesy of DC Greenworks)

Green roofs are increasing in popularity across the US, especially in cities, where
there’s not a lot of space for gardens. Sabri Ben Achour explores the trend in
Washington, DC, where the city government is promoting the practice for it’s
environmental benefits:

Transcript

Green roofs are increasing in popularity across the US, especially in cities, where
there’s not a lot of space for gardens. Sabri Ben Achour explores the trend in
Washington, DC, where the city government is promoting the practice for it’s
environmental benefits:

In Washington, you can see flowers and vegetables growing on top of homes,
businesses, even government buildings throughout the city. DC officials say
Washington has nearly 70,000 square feet of rooftop greenery. Only Chicago has
more.

One big fan of these so called green roofs is a popular small hotel, Tabard Inn, just a
few blocks from the White House.

“There’s about 10 varieties of sedum on this roof.”

Sarah Murphy is giving a tour. She’s a horticulturalist.

“This is a very pungent oregano here on the corner, it looks heavily used.”

The city of Washington pays building owners about one-fourth of the cost of
incorporating greenery on rooftops. One big reason? Rainwater runoff.

Sarah Loveland works for an environmental consulting non-profit called DC
Greenworks.

She says Washington has what’s called a combined sewer system. The sewer
system doesn’t just take in what’s flushed down the drain, but also all the rain
running off roofs and streets.

“If you imagine that our sewage treatment plant has a dam, and the sewage system
combines with the storm water system before the treatment plant.”

So, when there’s a heavy rain, that dam at the sewage treatment plant overflows.

“You have both raw sewage and runoff from the streets going directly into the river
untreated.”

Three billion gallons of it a year, at one point.

The EPA sued the District of Columbia.

The city had to spend $150 million to address the problem. Part of that money goes
to green roof grants.

The green roofs slow down rain water – give it some place to soak instead of just
running off straight down the gutter. The city says roofs in the city prevent a million
gallons of storm water runoff from entering the Potomac River.

The roofs also insulate buildings – especially during the summer. Some studies
show they reduce energy costs by 20-30%. And they reduce the heat island effect in
the city, since they don’t get blisteringly hot like traditional roofs.

Green Roofs even offer some habitat for creatures, like bees.

Sarah Loveland with Greenworks, the consultant agency, says rooftop gardens are
also increasingly popular for growing food.

“Veggies are really popular, herbs are really popular – this is a trend that’s taking off
in the restaurant industry. There’s a lot of buzz around it.”

Blueberries and herbs abound in the rooftop gardens of the Tabard Inn, where Paul
Pell is executive chef.

(sound of celery chopping)

“Yeah, we go up and get whatever we want, so it’s fresh. We just climb out the
window when we need it. Chocolate basil goes with ice cream, nasturtiums go with
soups and salads.”

Washington has an advantage over some larger cities in its promotion of rooftop
gardens because federal law prohibits skyscrapers in the nation’s capital, so most
buildings don’t cast shadows over their neighbors.

As a result, most rooftops are sunny – all they need is greenery to soak up the rays.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sabri Ben-Achour.

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Whose Grass Is Really Greener?

  • Molly Aubuchon and Stefan Meyer survey their lawn. (Photo by Julie Grant)

Many Americans love full, lush
lawns. Fertilizers and herbicides
might help. But there’s concern
about water pollution from lawn
chemicals. Julie Grant reports
that some experts say you can use
them, just don’t over-use them:

Transcript

Many Americans love full, lush
lawns. Fertilizers and herbicides
might help. But there’s concern
about water pollution from lawn
chemicals. Julie Grant reports
that some experts say you can use
them, just don’t over-use them:

Molly Aubuchon and her husband Stefan Meyer aren’t sure
what they’re going to do. Their two little kids are running
around the yard. Stefan wants a lawn of thick, soft grass for
them to play on. But that’s not what he’s got.

Stefan: “As you can see, there’s no grass here.
I don’t know what some of this stuff is. Some kind of moss.
I think even the moss died, so now we have dead moss
that’s like yellow and brown.”

Molly: “It’s not attractive dead.”

Stefan: “No. I just think, when I’m out here cutting my grass,
I’m like, man, if I lived across the street, I’d be like, ‘hey look,
they’re cutting absolutely nothing again. They’re just running
that lawn mower over bare spots.’”

They see their neighbors, with those thick, green lawns,
spreading chemicals a few times a year. Molly and Stefan
don’t want to do that.

Molly: “Well, the fact that I’ve got kids running around here
all day. And the fact that it seeps into the water supply and
the rivers, that’s a concern to me.”

There are lots of people who are concerned about lawn
pollution. Lawns have gotten a bad wrap in some places –
because of the fertilizers and other chemicals people use on
them. In much of Canada, lawn chemicals have actually
been banned.

Lou DiGeranimo is General Manager of Water in Toronto.
He says lawn chemicals were damaging the water quality.

“People were over-fertilizing, they were using commercial
pesticides. That chemical ended up in the rivers and ended
up in the lake. We passed a bylaw that prohibited that.”

But some experts say the chemical bans in Canada are
extreme.

David Gardner is professor of turf grass at the Ohio State
University. He doesn’t think banning lawn chemical will do
anything to improve the environment.

“Based on the work that I have seen, based on the research
that has been conducted, I believe that if there is a unilateral
ban on the use of pesticides it will make absolutely no
impact on our environmental footprint.”

Gardner says compared to
other sources of pollution, like cars and over-use of
chemicals on farms, the impact of lawn care is miniscule.

Still, Gardner says people like Molly and Stefan can keep
nice lawns – without using a lot of chemicals.

He says you’ve got to cut the grass and water regularly.
He also recommends fertilizing lightly in the spring and more
heavily in the fall.

That’s what Gardner does at his house – and he uses only 6
to 8 ounces of herbicide a year.

“Putting it another way, if I were to go to a store and buy one
of those gallon jugs of ready-made herbicide, that would be
enough to last me for about 16 years.”

Gardner says the herbicide will hit its expiration date before
he has a chance to use it all.

But Molly and Stefan just aren’t sold. They don’t want to use
lawn chemicals just to appease the neighbors.

Stefan: “I just want to feel good about the way my yard
looks for my own satisfaction. I would like to cultivate some
grass that looks good, you know, with my hands.”

Besides, Stefan says, they don’t have the worst looking lawn
on the street and they’d just rather not add unnecessary
chemicals into the environment.

Stefan: “We don’t have the worst lawn on the street. Our
street is not that long. It’s only four blocks, five blocks long –
there’s a house down there and their yard looks worse than
ours.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Dollars and Streams

  • A creek runs through Melvin Hershberger's farm in Holmes County, Ohio. He was able to clean up the water with money from the Alpine Cheese Company. The company needed to offset phosphorous pollution from its factory, so it pays farmers to reduce their manure runoff. (Photo by Julie Grant)

When you hear about dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes, they’re largely caused by pollution draining from the farm belt. It can take a long time and a lot of money to reduce pollution at factories. So they’re starting to pay farmers to cut pollution instead. Julie Grant explains:

Transcript

When you hear about dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes, they’re largely caused by pollution draining from the farm belt. It can take a long time and a lot of money to reduce pollution at factories. So they’re starting to pay farmers to cut pollution instead. Julie Grant explains:

When you eat cheese, you might not realize that something so delicious creates a lot of waste. And that waste – that pollution – ends up going into the drain. It eventually ends up in rivers and lakes.

(sound of a factory)

We’re at a cheese factory in Holmes County, Ohio where they make nearly 60,000 pounds of cheese a day.

The big stainless steel vats look immaculate. But our shoes are wet.

Bob Ramseyer is CEO of the Alpine Cheese Company.

He says the floors are covered with water because the equipment is constantly being washed.

“We have a pre-rinse – that goes to drain. We have a final rinse, and that goes to drain. And we have all the floors that are flushed down and so forth, so that all ends up as part of the wastewater.”

The cheese factory’s wastewater includes not only those caustic chemical cleaners, but wasted milk by-products. One milk nutrient is the chemical, phosphorous.

About a decade ago, the Environmental Protection Agency told Ramseyer that the cheese company had to reduce the phosphorous it was releasing into the nearby river. Ramseyer was concerned.

“The equipment alone was going to cost a half million dollars. We projected it was going to cost between a half million dollars and a million dollars a year in operating costs. So we were looking for any way we could to reduce that cost. That’s where we got into the nutrient trading program.”

Alpine Cheese was among the first to negotiate what’s called a nutrient – or water quality – trading program. Instead of reducing the phosphorous coming from his factory, he pays farmers to reduce manure – another source of phosphorous – from washing from feedlots into the river.

(sound of cows)

Mervin Hershberger is an Amish dairy farmer with 125 acres and 54 milking cows.

(sound of a stream)

His farm looks like a postcard – beautiful hilly green pasture.

But a lot of the manure was washing off his farm into the streams. Herberberger says the cows were grazing right around the water.

“With the cows being in the creek we could see dirty water. The rocks were covered with dirt from cow’s waste. You walk through the stream, you’d kick up dirt and waste from the cows.”

Hershberger didn’t like it, but he didn’t have money to change it.

So when the County Soil and Water Conservation District held a neighborhood meeting to explain that Alpine Cheese was going to pay to reduce pollution from nearby farms, Hershberger saw a way to afford to clean up his farm.

He did about a dozen projects to reduce manure run-off into the water, like building a fence to keep the cows out of the stream.

And the little creek is bouncing back:

“As of now, it’s just totally clean, what you see. For the minnows and all the critters that are in the creek.”

Hershberger gets paid for the amount of phosphorous he keeps out of the water.

About 25 other farms in Holmes County are doing similar projects to reduce water pollution. And Alpine Cheese foots the bill. In exchange, the company doesn’t have to clean up wastewater coming from the cheese factory.

It’s a lot like a cap and trade program on water pollution.

There are a growing number of small programs like this around the country. But some people are trying to create water trading projects on a much larger scale.

That would mean a factory in one state might be able to pay farmer in another state. Eventually, all of the thousands of factories in just one river basin could pay farmers enough to reduce dead zones like the one in the Gulf of Mexico and in some of the Great Lakes.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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The “Enviropig” Cuts Pollution

  • Researcher Cecil Forsberg created the first Enviropigs in 1999. Their meat may soon be available at American supermarkets. (Photo by Julie Grant)

At factory farms, cows and
pigs produce a lot of manure, and
that sometimes causes a lot of
pollution. Julie Grant reports that
one scientist says he’s got a solution:
genetically modify pigs so they produce
less pollution. But to be successful,
people have to be willing to eat
genetically modified meat:

Transcript

At factory farms, cows and
pigs produce a lot of manure, and
that sometimes causes a lot of
pollution. Julie Grant reports that
one scientist says he’s got a solution:
genetically modify pigs so they produce
less pollution. But to be successful,
people have to be willing to eat
genetically modified meat:

Murray Borrello says pig and cow poop is killing everything
in some of the water he studies. He’s a geologist and has
been researching water pollution with chemists and
biologists at Alma College in Michigan. Borrello says there’s
no fish in parts of the river – because of all the animal feces
running off of nearby farms.

“It’s very obvious. It’s this kind of brown, mucky,
murky looking substance.”

That poop is full of phosphorous, nitrogen, and other things
that cause pollution problems. It creates algae that clogs up
waterways and sucks out all the oxygen.

Borrello says some of the farms house more than
10,000 hogs. Farmers sometimes hold 20 million gallons of
pig manure in lagoons. They liquefy it and spray it on the
fields for fertilizer. But Borrello says it’s too much manure,
so it runs off the land and into the waterways.

In some places, it’s the same water is used for drinking
water. And the same rivers drain into the Great Lakes.

On the northern side of the Lakes, a Canadian scientist says
he’s found a possible solution to this pig pollution problem.

(sound of a pig barn)

It’s called the Enviropig.

Cecil Forsberg has genetically modified pigs so they produce
less pollution in their waste.

I met him at his research barn at the University of Guelph in
Ontario.

There are no windows – just a ventilation system. And,
wow, it’s hard to concentrate – the smell of pig waste is so
strong.

He introduces me to a group of Enviropigs, they’re about a year and
a half old. He says they have no detectable difference from
regular pigs.

“They have four legs, two ears, a snout, and they like to dig
in the shavings.”

But while most pigs poop out a lot of polluting phosphorous,
Forsberg has made the Enviropig into a much better
machine for digesting phosphorous.

He’s no Dr. Frankenstein. But to do it, he did use DNA from
a mouse. He says it’s considered a safe technique, but he
knows it makes people cringe.

“There’s no mouse in these pigs, except for a little fragment
of DNA.”

The mouse DNA allowed Forsberg to add a bacterial gene to
the pigs. It’s that bacteria that triggers the pig’s salivary
glands to start the digestion of phosphorous.

Forsberg says the waste from these pigs does a lot less
damage to the environment than most pigs.

“There’s a reduction in the phosphorous in the manure by up
to 60%. And that’s important because phosphorous is the
component in manure that is the first one that’s problematic.”

And it’s part of what chokes the oxygen out of the waterways –
killing fish and other aquatic species. Forsberg wants to see
Enviropigs bred on the global scale to reduce pollution from
the growing number of large scale hog farms.

Back in Michigan, water specialist Murray Borrello
says reducing phosphorous pollution from giant hog farms
will benefit water quality, but he does not think a genetically
modified pig is the answer.

“The problem is that does not address the issue of all the
other stuff that is very concentrated going into surface water
and ground water.”

Stuff, such as nitrogen and ammonia.

Borrello says a better solution is to reduce the size of hog
farms, so there aren’t so many pigs concentrated in such
small spaces.

But the Enviropig is starting to get some traction.

When Forsberg and his colleagues created the first
generation of Enviropigs, nearly 10 years ago, the question
was: could they do it?

Today, seven generations of pigs later, the question is: will
people eat it?

Until recently, the US government hadn’t allowed the sale
of genetically modified meat. But, the Food and Drug
Administration recently published guidelines for it. And
some industry analysts say you could be eating pork from
animals like the Enviropig as soon as 2011.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Tag-Teaming the Dead Zone

  • It is predicted that the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the size of the state of Massachusetts (Photo courtesy of NASA)

A scientific panel wants two
federal agencies to start working together,
to reduce pollution. Fertilizer pollution
is causing problems for the Mississippi
River system and contributing to a ‘Dead
Zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:

Transcript

A scientific panel wants two
federal agencies to start working together,
to reduce pollution. Fertilizer pollution
is causing problems for the Mississippi
River system and contributing to a ‘Dead
Zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:

Nitrogen and phosphorus come from fertilizers used on lawns and farm fields. The chemicals
pollute water throughout the Mississippi River Basin and down to the Gulf of Mexico. The
National Research Council has been studying the problem.

David Dzombak is an Engineering Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and helped the
council write a new report. He says the biggest recommendation is for the US Environmental
Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture to team up.

“This is a very large scale problem. It’s taken many years to develop and will take many years to
turn around.”

And Dzombak says the two agencies need to get started. The report recommends the federal
agencies work with states to restrict the amount of fertilizer that can go into streams and rivers. It
also calls for a network of experiments to filter or buffer the fertilizer runoff in badly-polluted
watersheds.

For The Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links