Safe drinking water must be a shared value in Minnesota

Proposed rules on agriculture fertilizer would help protect groundwater.

It’s hard to persuade residents of a state whose very name bespeaks an abundance of water to worry about water quality. Maybe that’s why three successive governors did little to implement a 1989 statute empowering state agencies to “promote best practices … to the extent practicable” to minimize groundwater pollution.

Then again, Govs. Arne Carlson, Jesse Ventura and Tim Pawlenty were in office before Minnesotans knew the extent to which nitrate is contaminating groundwater, the drinking water source for 75 percent of Minnesotans. Nitrate causes a potentially fatal condition in infants and is a suspected source of other health disorders.

The bigger worry in 1989 was pesticide pollution. Only since enactment of the Legacy Amendment in 2008 was funding available for tests that found that dozens of community water systems and, in a southeastern Minnesota sample, one in 10 private wells contained potentially unsafe nitrate levels. Although nitrate is a naturally occurring substance, elevated levels in water have been linked to farmers’ use of fertilizer to boost production of this state’s two big cash crops, corn and soybeans.

Unlike his predecessors, DFL Gov. Mark Dayton is not spared that knowledge, and he’s trying to do something […]

Full article: Safe drinking water must be a shared value in Minnesota

More about the Boundary Waters and Minnesota:

‘Our water is our diamond’

Top Teen 2017 finalist: Joseph Goldstein uses his voice for Boundary Waters

Researcher crusades for policies to protect water: Dr. Deborah Swackhamer

The Effect of Clean Water on the Economy