Rural midwesterners contend with well water tainted by livestock waste
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Marin Scotten
March 6, 2024
Nitrate-fouled water from concentrated animal feed operations causes a host of medical problems for nearby residents
For nearly three decades, Jeff Broberg couldn’t drink water from his tap.
He lives on a sprawling, 170-acre grain and legume farm in Winona county, a rural part of south-east Minnesota saturated with animal agriculture. Like most properties in the area, Broberg’s has a well connected to his faucet. On a whim, when Broberg first moved in in 1986, the now 69-year-old retired geologist started testing his water for nitrate – an invisible, odorless and tasteless compound found in animal manure and commercial fertilizer. Consuming it in high quantities has been linked to a variety of health risks.
Initially, his at-home tests showed that his water was safe to drink, but after four years, testing showed that his well water had reached a contamination level at the threshold of federal safety limits.
Unable to safely drink the water from his tap, Broberg started transporting eight empty jugs every week to a friend’s property in Saint Charles, Minnesota, to fill them with clean water. He eventually tired of this and bought a reverse osmosis filtration system that would clean his well water at home. For now, it’s effective at filtering out the nitrate – but it’s not a permanent or entirely effective solution.
To read the full article, click here:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/06/animal-agriculture-nitrate-water
