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Ever since Jacob Leinenkugel discovered spring waters here that were pure enough to brew his famous beer, this small Wisconsin city’s devotion to clean water has been paramount.
That’s why in 1997, when Chippewa Falls utility managers detected potentially dangerous concentrations of nitrates in a well supplying city water, officials acted. They installed new filtration equipment in their treatment system and drilled deeper wells into cleaner aquifers to ensure the water delivered to the city’s 16,000 customers contained nitrates at concentrations less than 10 parts per million, the level deemed safe by federal law. It costs Chippewa Falls $200,000 a year to operate the system.
But what seemed to be a perfectly sensible move to protect public health turned out to be both an act of civic responsibility, and a capitulation. While city residents were supplied with water that met federal safety specifications, most of Chippewa County’s other 67,000 residents consume water from private wells supplied from aquifers contaminated with nitrates, some with concentrations well above the 10 parts per billion limit.
Matthew Boos, who supervises Chippewa Falls’s water treatment plant, is intimately familiar with this city-county disconnect. His own home outside Chippewa Falls is supplied by a well that contains rising nitrate concentrations. “It was 10 when I got there,” he said. “Now it’s 20.”
Boos installed a reverse osmosis filtration system to protect his family. His parents, who live nearby, also tested their well water and discovered similarly high levels of nitrate. They applied for and were awarded a state grant to drill a new well into a deeper and cleaner water supply.
A Hazardous Pollutant
What’s occurring with nitrates in and outside this sturdy Midwest city represents the basic contours of a state and national confrontation with the deluge of contaminated nutrient wastes of industrial agriculture. Billions of pounds of chemical fertilizer and tens of millions of tons of livestock and poultry manure are spread on the crop fields of America’s Corn Belt states, among them Wisconsin.
Nitrates form when nitrogen from farm nutrients are exposed to oxygen. And nitrates are no joke. The highly soluble compound easily flows from fields into surface and groundwater. Nitrates are carcinogenic and are suspected of causing other chronic disease.
And though nitrates are now linked to rising cancer incidence in Corn Belt states with very high levels in surface and groundwater – especially Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa – the compound has almost entirely avoided local, state, and federal mandates to stem the deluge of farm nutrients.
What government has tried, without success, is to convince farmers to use voluntary measures to control runoff. The consequence is that industrial agriculture pours chemical fertilizer and manure onto farm fields virtually without restraint.
“The Corn Belt is an especially acute example of what’s happening around the country,” said Tyler Lobdell, staff attorney with the national environmental advocacy organization Food & Water Watch, who focuses on factory farm pollution. “It’s almost entirely attributable to industrial agricultural practices. That’s why the Corn Belt is the epicenter of our factory farm nation. We’re not regulating the sources despite it being very obvious that we have a growing problem.”
Scarce Oversight
It’s a problem that has been developing for over half a century. The U.S. Public Health Service set the 10 parts per million limit for nitrates in drinking water in 1962 to guard against blue baby syndrome, a potentially fatal condition in infants. That limit was accepted in 1975 as an interim standard for treating municipal drinking as part of the Safe Drinking Water Act, and declared a formal limit in 1992.
The Safe Drinking Water Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to periodically review safety limits for contaminants. The original limit for nitrate has held firm for 64 years, even as scientific and epidemiological evidence of serious harm has steadily mounted and even as water contamination is getting worse. Recent efforts by the Obama and Biden administrations to open formal reviews have been halted by President Trump.
Research shows exposure to levels of nitrates in drinking water from commercial fertilizer and manure has been linked to cancers of the blood, brain, breast, bladder and ovaries. Other studies have found increased risk of colorectal cancers, thyroid disease, and birth defects at levels as low as 5 parts per million.
Of the 14 states with the highest cancer incidence in the U.S., four are in the Corn Belt, including Wisconsin. A prominent study published in the journal Public Health two years ago reported that even at concentrations well below the federal legal limit, nitrate in drinking was associated with a 61 percent to 73 percent higher risk of cancer mortality.
Despite the evidence of accumulating risk, nitrates are everywhere in drinking water. In April, the Environmental Working Group published a national study that found roughly 18 percent of the U.S. population — more than 62.1 million people served by 6,114 community water systems — drank water that tested at or above 3 parts per million for nitrate. In a separate study, the Environmental Working Group found that of the more than 50,000 water treatment utilities across the U.S., 85 percent had no nitrate treatment capacity at all. The group also identified over 6,000 community treatment systems that delivered water to customers with elevated levels of nitrate.
State Encounter
The experience of nitrate contamination in Wisconsin is typical for other Corn Belt states. Nitrate from farm fertilizer and manure is the most pervasive contaminant of Wisconsin groundwater, exceeding safe drinking water standards in tens of thousands of homes, hundreds of schools and businesses, and dozens of communities. Of the private wells tested by state authorities, nearly one in 10 have exceeded the nitrate health standard over the past two decades. Farmers in 2019 applied five times more nitrogen fertilizer than in 1960, according to state reports. And much larger dairy and hog operations are flooding fields with manure.
That has left hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin residents vulnerable to nitrate pollution. Chippewa Falls, and four other much smaller cities in Chippewa County, for instance, provide treated drinking water to roughly 21,000 residents. That means that private wells drilled into groundwater supply most of the county’s nearly 67,000 residents. And in Chippewa County, just as in Wisconsin’s other 71 counties, groundwater is contaminated by nitrates.
In many places, according to state testing, nitrate levels exceed the 10 parts per million concentration federal safety limit. One response that Chippewa County mounted to reduce the risks from drinking water is providing residents with clean water from “refill stations” to fill bottles, jugs, or bulk containers. There are four in the county.
In effect, Chippewa Falls, the center of a $300 million agricultural economy with 1,200 farms, is an outlier in treating water for city residents. “We treat 4 million gallons a day,” said Boos, the city’s water supervisor. “It’s safe to drink. I tell people I would take city water, municipal water, over well water here any day, especially in this region.”
Lead image: The Chippewa River slips by Chippewa Falls on its way from Lake Superior to the Mississippi River. Photo: © Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue
