The arguments in favor of undermining environmental review seem to change every session. Everything from “economic competitiveness”  to “our responsibility to feed the world” has been used as a rationalization for making it so local citizens have virtually no say over having millions of gallons of liquid manure as a neighbor. And every year LSP members and other citizens make it clear they do not want environmental review weakened.

Now supporters of unbridled development are seeing if the “permitting efficiency” argument sticks. That should have a ring of familiarity to our neighbors to the east. A few years ago, siting of large-scale livestock operations in Wisconsin was greatly “streamlined” by taking away the right of local communities to have much of a say in where large-scale livestock operations were located. Relax, leave it to the state, citizens were told.

Well, for a hint as to how weakening the permitting process in the name of “efficiency” has worked in the Dairy State, check out a recent investigative series in the Wisconsin State Journal. According to the Journal’s investigation, Wisconsin is efficiently issuing factory farm permits at a record pace, and is just as efficiently doing little follow-up to determine how all that manure is being handled. (One article in the series, “Dairy lobbyists shape policy,” provides a frightening look at what happens when one powerful group gains control over not only how environmental laws are fashioned, but how they are executed.)

The bills currently before the House (Rep. Melissa Hortman) and Senate (Sen. Linda Scheid) would be the first steps toward making Minnesota’s permitting system as “efficient” as Wisconsin’s. Here’s what they would do:

• Set a blanket goal of 150 days for issuing all environmental permits from the time a completed permit is submitted. In many cases such a timeline is unrealistic when it comes to complicated environmental reviews of major developments, and it could result in severely shortchanging citizen input and giving full consideration to the potential environmental harm of a proposal.
• When challenging an environmental review decision in court, citizens would not deal with the District Court in their area (as they do currently), but the Minnesota Court of Appeals in the Twin Cities. This not only increases the expense of filing a challenge, but limits citizens’ participation by forcing them to travel to the Twin Cities or a satellite courtroom to have their day in court. On the other hand, factory farm lawyers will reduce their carbon footprints by not having to do all that driving to rural counties to argue their cases.
• Tie up diminishing state agency resources with reporting and paperwork, distracting these agencies from actual environmental protection. The bills would require two reports a year from the Department of Agriculture, Pollution Control Agency and the Department of Natural Resources. Each report would have to detail how long it took to issue environmental permits, if they met the permit issuing goal of 150 days (see first bullet) and if not, why. Nothing says government efficiency like writing detailed reports on the process of “serving the public”, rather than actually getting out there and doing the job.

As Alan Muller recently wrote, in this case “efficiency” is a code word for “curtailing public participation.” S.F. 2761 has been sent on to the Senate Environment and Natural Resources; H.F. 3079 is in the House Environment and Natural Resources Finance Division. Contact your representatives in the Senate and House, and tell them these bills represent the kind of efficiency we can’t afford.

To a certain point, such catastrophic erosion events are inevitable when rivers like the Minnesota give the land a good hydraulic hammering. But in the big scheme of things, more troubling is the runoff that occurs on a routine basis in our agricultural watersheds. A few tons off that acre and a few tons off this acre adds up when spread across millions of those acres.

In fact, the amount of sediment the Minnesota River is dumping into Lake Pepin has increased ten-fold during the past 150 years. You get one guess as to what land use change has occurred in the river basin during the past century and a half.

In a sense, the ancient history of the Minnesota River valley makes it a prime candidate for dumping huge amounts of sediment into Lake Pepin. After all, around 12,000 years ago floods from glacial meltwater lowered the valley bottom by almost 230 feet in places. That means the tributaries feeding into the river have had to carve out sharp valleys to reach the river— producing a lot of sediment, and a lot of sediment-scouring hydraulic power, in the process. The bottom line is that today the Minnesota River is responsible for 25 percent of the flow into Lake Pepin, but 85 to 90 percent of the sediment load.

This geological accident has prompted some to argue that almost all of the sedimentation seen today in the Minnesota River is inevitable and completely natural, and has little to do with the fact that over 90 percent of the basin’s land is planted to annual row crops.

Unfortunately for the all-soil-erosion-is-natural crowd, we have Lake Pepin, which serves as a perfect collection basin for all that gets dumped into the upper reaches of the Mississippi. Eroded soil preserved in the cold muck of a lake bottom doesn’t lie. During the past several years, scientists have been taking core samples from the lake’s bed, unearthing a connection between human use of land and water quality deterioration that can’t be dismissed.

The results of this research were summarized nicely by a special “Mississippi River” package of eight papers published in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Paleolimnology. The studies show that yes indeed, the Minnesota River’s geologic history has made the basin a “natural” source of soil erosion—something not likely to change until the next round of glaciers grind through.

But the Journal of Paleolimnology also paints a pretty incriminating picture of how even though humans’ role in erosion history is relatively brief, it’s been inordinately powerful—core samples show a dramatic increase in sediment accumulation beginning with European settlement in 1830.

Just as the Minnesota River contributes more than its share of sediment to Lake Pepin, certain tributaries of that river are overachievers in their own right. Research shows that although the Blue Earth and Le Sueur watersheds only account for one-fifth of the Minnesota’s drainage area, these heavily farmed regions contribute as much as half of the basin’s sediment erosion.

And with that sediment has come other pollutants such as phosphorus, an important crop nutrient that causes major ecological problems once it finds its way to water. Phosphorus accumulation in the lake’s sediment has increased 15-fold since 1830, increasing from 60 to 900 metric tons annually. Overall, current sediment-phosphorus concentrations are approximately twice those of pre-settlement times.

Roughly 17 percent of the lake’s volume has been replaced by sediment since 1830. At current rates, in 340 years the lake will be just one big, flat field of mud. Midwestern rice paddies, anyone?

As the Journal of Paleolimnology papers show, the increase in sedimentation and phosphorus loading correlates almost perfectly with the plowing of the prairie and the replacement of perennial plants and wetlands with row crops. Not only do these row crops leave the soil vulnerable to erosion, but they don’t hang onto rainfalls and meltwater as efficiently as deep-rooted grasses, trees and other perennials. In addition, all those high-yielding corn and soybean fields wouldn’t be possible without tile drainage, which sends water rocketing into our waterways, short-circuiting natural percolation systems.

The result? More water than ever is moving more quickly than ever through the watershed, making it difficult for soil, and whatever is attached to that soil, to stay in place. And fast moving water is a powerful scouring agent, exacerbating any “natural” erosion already taking place in the basin.

To be fair, all the fingers of blame can’t be pointed at row crop agriculture. For example, total phosphorus accumulations in Lake Pepin’s sediment also correlate pretty directly with increased discharges from wastewater treatment plants. It’s Lake Pepin’s bad luck that it sits below the mouth of the Minnesota River as well as downstream of all those flushing toilets in the Twin Cities. Now there’s a farm-city connection.

Speaking of the farm-city link and ecological destruction, one of the most vexing  Journal of Paleolimnology papers is one by Laura D. Triplett, Daniel Engstrom and Mark Edlund, which describes the history of sedimentation and phosphorus loading in the St. Croix River. It turns out that basin also has a perfect place—Lake St. Croix— to read land use history. Core samples there show that by the period between 1950 and 1960, sedimentation was eight times what it had been a century earlier.

Perhaps thanks in large part to the waterway being designated a National Scenic Riverway in 1968, sedimentation levels have dropped significantly in the past 50 years or so. That’s the good news. But phosphorus pollution in the St. Croix, which jumped sharply after 1940, is still roughly four times what it was before European settlement.

Intense logging and moldboard plowing may no longer be a threat to the St. Croix, but poorly planned development is. In fact, in 2008 both Minnesota and Wisconsin declared Lake St. Croix to be an “impaired water” under the Federal Clean Water Act because of excess phosphorus. And just a year ago, American Rivers named the Lower St. Croix one of the 10 most endangered rivers in the U.S. because of uncontrolled urbanization.

As Daniel Engstrom points out in a Journal of Paleolimnology editorial, so much for the St. Croix’s reputation as a pristine waterway.

The St. Croix example shows that severely reducing agriculture’s presence in the Minnesota River watershed is not the way to save Lake Pepin (and the Mississippi in general). For one thing, the soil in this region is much too rich to not be put to work producing food. And if we don’t farm there, it’s likely that an unsustainable land use such as urban sprawl will just move in to take the place of row crop agriculture.

No, the answer is to diversify the farming systems in the basin, to make that land once again able to retain runoff efficiently. As research conducted in the Minnesota River watershed by the Multiple Benefits of Agriculture Project has shown, farming and good water quality can go hand-in-hand. But it will require the kind of agricultural systems that rely on diverse crop rotations and perennial plant systems such as pasture.

A graphic example of that is in the latest Land Stewardship Letter, where Loretta Jaus describes a rainstorm event on the land she farms with her husband Martin in west-central Minnesota:

“There had been three inches of rain in a couple hours time. Martin charged into the house and says, ‘You gotta come see this!’ He took me to the beginning of the drainage ditch a half-mile down the road. The heavy rain flowed across the neighboring row-cropped field and carried with it its load of topsoil. The water gushing out of the tile outlet was brown and frothy. We proceeded 200 yards farther along the ditch, and found the second tile outlet that drained the adjacent field, spewing its load into the already brown water.

“There was the beginning of a river of thick chocolate-colored paste. The deterioration in water quality in just 200 yards was startling. I wondered just how many of these tiles were emptying into this ditch system between here and the Minnesota River, 25 miles away—how many more along the banks of the Minnesota as it flows into the Mississippi where how much more sediment with its load of fertilizers and toxic chemicals was pouring into the river?

“Marty and I then crossed the road to check the tile exiting our pasture. Perennial vegetation was holding the soil in place and soil organisms had built a living soil structure. That meant the pasture was slurping up the rainfall and holding it in place for the plants to use later.”

And the St. Croix? Sustainable agriculture holds the key there as well. If communities could start seeing the value of keeping acres in sustainably-managed farmland, rather than subdivisions and malls, then runoff of all kinds—including phosphorus—could be reduced. In order for people to place such a value on farms, efforts such as the St. Croix River Valley Buy Fresh Buy Local initiative must succeed.

In this age when we seem—for now—to be able to use technology to make even the dirtiest water potable, it seems that telling people they must support sustainable agriculture because it will keep Lake Pepin from filling up three centuries hence probably won’t fly. They’ve also got to see a connection to something even more immediate and close to home: good food on their supper table.

It’s easy to see why the veteran organic vegetable farmer is so excited about his first foray into farm-to-school marketing last year. After all, he didn’t start delivering produce to the district’s cafeterias until after Labor Day, which is near the end of his growing season. But in a few short weeks the district’s schools became major wholesale customers for the farmer.

And it didn’t hurt that he got some very positive feedback on the quality of the food from food service managers and, most importantly, schoolkids. That’s why Reynolds already has plans to supply the school in 2010.

Reynolds’ thumbs-up assessment is particularly interesting given his background: he already has a well-established customer base via Twin Cities restaurants, food co-ops and CSA members. He doesn’t necessarily need to seek out yet another client. But after having such a positive experience, he thinks it’s worth the trouble.

And those reasons go beyond monetary. As the farmer explained Saturday, there is increasing evidence that feeding schoolkids good food improves their performance and behavior significantly. Now there’s a nice perk to supplying a certain niche market.

Every town of any size has a school, and every one of those schools serves food. Even though the school year and the Minnesota growing season don’t overlap much, there are still lots of opportunities for selling fresh, local food to cafeterias, especially in the fall. And as Reynolds pointed out, Hopkins officials found that even after the farmer stopped delivering late last fall, many of the kids kept eating fruits and vegetables. Their brief exposure to real food had gotten them hooked on healthier eating.

Go to the national Farm to School website and you’ll soon learn that experiences likes this are becoming increasingly less rare. From California to New York, schools and farmers are proving that cafeteria food can be fresh, local and healthy. Of course, there are some huge barriers to overcome before onion rings stop qualifying as a major vegetable serving in most school lunchrooms, but some exciting models are being created. We even have good examples right in our own backyard—Willmar’s farm-to-school effort has spawned more than healthier kids, it’s resulted in a nice toolkit resource for others wanting to pursue something like this.

Reynolds’ presentation Saturday was preceded by a summary of what JoAnne Berkenkamp has learned in her discussions with all the “lunch ladies” around the state that are dipping their toes into farm-to-school efforts. As you can hear on LSP podcast episode 75, she’s come up with a nice 10-point checklist that should prove useful to any farmer considering approaching a school district.

Both Reynolds and Berkenkamp emphasized the importance of creating a relationship with school officials, teachers and, most importantly, students. That relationship goes beyond just delivering a crate of carrots once a week.

Reynolds has already been meeting with the district’s food service staff this winter and he has plans to bring students out to the farm and to help one of the school’s start a garden. The farmer is even going to visit a classroom to talk about where those delicious carrots and potatoes come from.

As Greg put it: “It’s all about building that relationship between the people that are eating that food, and the people that are selling it.”

“You’re money ahead to buy the local food that your residents are going to eat, rather than spend the money on the item that comes off the truck that you’re going to end up throwing out,” Gaines told me in her typically blunt manner during an LSP Ear to the Ground podcast interview (episode 69).  “It’s wasted money and it sends your food costs up. So you might as well buy something that people are going to eat.”

Gaines is not exactly shy about offering up an opinion on a wide range of topics (it was hard to edit our conversation down to 10 minutes), but she knows what she’s talking about when describing the advantages of serving local food in an institutional setting.

She is an assistant administrator and vice president for support services at Bartels Lutheran Home in Waverly, Iowa. Bartels is setting out to prove that food served in an institution does not always have to be a bland, tasteless product shipped in from hundreds, or even thousands of miles away.

The 200-bed facility provides retirement, nursing, assisted living, skilled and Alzheimer’s care in the midst of some of the richest farmland in the world. However, before 1999 next to none of the 600 meals served daily were sourced locally. This is particularly ironic considering that many of the residents are former farmers.

During the past decade, Gaines has worked to change that. She started out buying tomatoes and sweet corn. The facility’s local food efforts got a kick-start several years ago when it began working with Kamyar Enshayan at the University of Northern Iowa’s Local Food Project. The project helped them figure out how to find farmers who could provide the quantity and quality of food they were looking for.

As Gaines and Bartels chef Tracy Wilson explained to me, the original goal of the facility was to buy at least 10 percent of its food from local farmers. By 2004, the facility had spent 15 percent of its raw food budget on local products.

And by 2008, that percentage was well over 25 percent. Almost all of that local food travels less than 25 miles to get to the facility’s kitchen. Bartels now buys a variety of fruits and vegetables, as well as beef and dairy products from at least 17 different farms.

It hasn’t always been easy. Significant obstacles such as seasonality, transportation efficiencies, processing resources and even food safety concerns have limited the facility’s ability to increase its local food purchases even more. Gaines and Wilson can’t even buy local eggs because of the requirement that they serve their residents expensive pasteurized ones. On the bright side, they have successfully ignored the many myths out there about what local foods a facility like theirs can buy.

Despite the obstacles, Bartels remains committed to buying as much food from the community as possible. The kitchen is getting rave reviews from residents on the taste and quality, and other health care facilities in the Midwest have approached Gaines about ways they can begin sourcing more of their food locally.

Her message? Start out small and work your way through the growing season step-by-step. Don’t plan on going totally local from May to October the first year— it will be a disaster for the staff, the farmers and the people you’re feeding.

Gaines also has another bit of advice that goes back to her feeling that in the end local food makes sound fiscal sense in more ways than one: view that purchase from a local farm as a long-term investment in the community. One side benefit to serving locally-sourced food is that the Bartels staff feels good about the fact that they are supporting the local farm economy.

“It’s kind of like we’re invested in the farm too,” Gaines says. “We’re invested in the farm, we’re buying from them, we’re helping them to succeed.”

The title and subtitle of Pollan’s new book are not meant to be ironic; from its physical size (it’s small enough to fit into a pocket), to its pithy writing (few of the 64 “chapters” are longer that 200 words; a few are only a sentence and it took me less than an hour to breeze through the whole thing), it’s clear this is a book meant to be used as a quick reference. But I don’t think Pollan means for people to keep the book in the kitchen or the shopping cart like some sort of culinary field guide, referring to it every time a food choice is brought up.

Rather, these rules are meant to be internalized. The secret to that is to come up with phrases that are easy to recall, even in today’s world of information overload. To do that, Pollan relies on a mix of old standards you may have heard your parents or grandparents mouth and new ones he’s apparently made up. An example of the former is, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.” One of Pollan’s own phrases he uses here was actually introduced in his book In Defense of Food: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

But do we really need such clever phrases to remind us how to eat? Yes, unfortunately. As Pollan made clear in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and, before him, Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, we have made our food system entirely too complicated—an estimated 17,000 new products show up in supermarkets annually.

And there’s a lot of money to be made from the hurly-burly that greets eaters whenever they walk into a grocery store, turn on the television, flip through a magazine or even drive down the street. The more you process food, the more profitable it is for the processor.

“Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health,” Pollan writes, providing a clever way of describing the importance of avoiding foods that are backed by mega-advertising campaigns.

So yes, we do need a reminder of the basics: eat whole foods as much as possible, consume them sitting down at a table (preferably with other people), and know the source of those foods.

But, for the sake of our sanity, we need to also keep in mind Pollan’s last rule: “Break the rules once in a while.” An occassional Twinkie won’t kill you, and when it is enjoyed as a treat rather than as a regular part of your diet, then it’s much more enjoyable anyway.

As Pollan writes: ” ‘All things in moderation,’ it is often said, but we should never forget the wise addendum, sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde: ‘Including moderation.’ “

Like nuclear energy, one of factory farming’s Achilles Heels is the waste. Of course, liquid feces doesn’t have a half-life measured in tens of thousands of years, but it can make life plenty miserable when too much of it collects in one place.

Just ask the families living near the Excel Dairy who were told to evacuate the area by the Minnesota Department of Health because of repeated hydrogen sulfide violations. During the warm months of 2008 and 2009, the dairy violated hydrogen sulfide standards almost 800 times; at one point the level was 200 times higher than what is considered safe by the state.

The operation has the dubious distinction of being one of the few “farms” in the nation to be officially declared a public health hazard. The facility, which at one time housed 1,545 cows, has operated in violation of state law almost from the time it opened five years ago, according to Minnesota Public Radio.

I recently talked to Julie Jansen, who fought her own battle with hydrogen sulfide-emitting factory farms in Renville County several years ago. She has traveled to Thief River Falls and helped the Excel neighbors measure hydrogen sulfide levels, among other things. She was shocked by the levels that were being documented on a regular basis. Coming from a veteran of the Renville County Hog Wars, that’s saying something.

The MPCA’s announcement that it would no longer issue permits for Excel Dairy is long overdue, and the agency’s inability to get a flagrant violator of state law to even give it the time of day is a travesty. Fortunately, the ability of Excel to operate illegally for so long is not going unnoticed. Last week the Senate Health, Housing and Family Security Committee held a hearing on Excel. There, rural families told how the operation has made their lives hell, and lawmakers wondered aloud how things had gotten so out of hand.

That’s a good start toward accountability on this unfortunate incident and setting in place the infrastructure needed to make sure this doesn’t happen again. However, the immediate problem is that millions of gallons of liquid manure is sitting there in overflowing pits, waiting for spring thaw.

Excel neighbor Jeff Brouse told the Star Tribune that the MPCA’s preliminary decision to shut down Excel for good will mean little until he actually sees the manure pits destroyed. Keep in mind that the cows have been gone from the facility since last winter, and yet all the fetid waste left behind has still been making people sick.

When and by whom will those pits be cleaned up? I have a bad feeling that question will be debated for quite some time, while a lot of lawyers get rich and more northwest Minnesotans get sick.

Often when a factory livestock operation is proposed in a community, concerned citizens ask a basic question: what happens if the operation goes out of business or just leaves town? What will happen to the mess that’s left behind? The typical response by factory farm operators and their supporters is one of derision: “You don’t know anything about farming, so shut up.”

Only raising livestock on this scale is not farming—it’s an industrial process where a valuable plant food, manure, is produced in such quantities that it becomes a waste product to be gotten rid of, instead of an integral element in the nutrient cycle.

And that’s the real tragedy here. You see, unlike nuclear waste manure can be applied to the land safely and in a way that greatly benefits the soil and what is grown on that soil. Farmers in this state and throughout the Midwest have been proving for generations that systems with the right balance of crops, animals and (just as importantly) people can make a very sustainable use of manure.

But the Excel example reminds us that the industrialized model of livestock production is inherently flawed. Excel appears to be a particularly bad actor here—I doubt even agribusiness’s most faithful boosters could defend its actions these days.

But there’s a danger that policymakers will see Excel as an anomaly, a unique situation where raising many, many animals in confinement didn’t work out quite like it should. Once this dairy is shut down and the proper people are punished, then things can go on as before, right?

Let’s hope not. For years, the MPCA tried to find technical solutions to Excel’s polluting manure pits. None of them worked. Was it because Excel has incompetent management? Maybe. But sometimes it’s time to admit the obvious: even the most well-run factory farm is a threat to human health and the environment. As we’ve reported in this blog before, such operations are causing problems across rural America, not just in Thief River Falls.

Throwing some straw on top of a manure pit (0ne of the “technical” fixes that is often attempted on factory farms) is like putting a Band-Aid on a patient who keeps drinking poison—it’s not getting at the source of the problem. CAFO livestock production is a technology whose time has passed. If Excel helps lawmakers, government officials and the general public become aware of that, then at least some of the anguish those rural residents in northwest Minnesota have experienced won’t be in vain.

As was reported on the Science News website today, one analysis done by Northern Illinois University found that from 1970 through 2009, average high temperatures at study sites in Iowa and Illinois during July and August were between .5 and 1 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than they were between 1930 t0 1969. And average rainfall for July and August from the 1970s through 2009 was around .33 inches higher each month when compared to the period covering the 1930s through the 1960s.

There’s a link between the cooler temperatures and the wetter summers: it turns out humid air warms more slowly. There also may be a link to that wetter air and the agronomic transformation of the Midwest. Around 57 percent of farmland in the region was planted to row crops in the 1930s; today that figure is more like 97 percent. Corn and soybeans pump tremendous amounts of water from the soil into the air, making for more humid summers, and thus a whole lot of air that heats up slowly.

Interestingly, the trend of  placing row crop seeds in more dense planting patterns may also be increasing farmland’s ability to moisturize the atmosphere. In fact, the Northern Illinois researchers say this technique has increased the numbers of water-pumping plants per acre by around 60 percent over the years.

If that wasn’t enough, all that increased irrigation taking place in the Great Plains in recent decades is pumping even more water into the air, according to a Rutgers University study that was presented at the American Meteorological Society meeting. A lot of that unfettered groundwater is used by crops, evaporates into the air and then moves downwind to the Midwest and beyond to form rain clouds.

“The result has been an approximate doubling of the surface water available for evapotranspiration, most of which evaporates rather than runs off or returns to groundwater. Using gridded precipitation observations covering 1900-2003 over North America, we show that this enhanced evapotranspiration has increased precipitation by 25-50% downwind of the Ogallala Aquifer during July,” concluded the Rutgers scientists.

So what? That just means lower air conditioning bills and an economic stimulus package in the form of higher umbrella sales, right? Well, as with any natural cycle, we short-circuit this one at our own risk. Unforeseen consequences start popping up real quick.

For example, I recall a visit I had with southeastern North Dakota grain farmer David Podoll a few years back. He was finding that it was getting increasingly difficult to raise small grains such as wheat and rye because of the rise in moisture-related diseases he was seeing in his fields. (He was also finding that doing field work was an increasingly unpleasant task, as all those wet spots were producing hatches of mosquitoes he’d never seen before.)

Many of Podoll’s neighbors saw it as a temporary wet phase, one that would pass as quickly as a summer thunderstorm. It hasn’t. And somehow Podoll, an obsessive observer and record keeper of the land’s comings and goings, knew it wasn’t.

That’s why several years ago he and some other like-minded farmers began working with plant scientists in North Dakota and Minnesota to breed some “natural resistance” back into small grains like rye, oats and wheat so that they can better weather this new climate situation.

Will Podoll and company develop grains that consistently produce during cool, wet summers? Who knows. But I feel a little better knowing that at least one farmer noticed before the sceintific “experts” that things were out of whack with the natural scheme of things.

This review, which was done with the help of Department of Health and Pollution Control Agency scientists,  was originally due out in October. When it didn’t make that deadline, the new release date was set for December. Now, it comes out on a Friday afternoon in the middle of January.

It’s a common public relations truism that if you want coverage of your report to be one-sided,  you release it to the media on a Friday afternoon—especially on one that falls at the end of a very busy news week locally, nationally and internationally. That’s the time when journalists are calling it quits for the week or are hard at work putting the finishing touches on weekend stories. That makes it more likely your press release describing the report will run pretty much as it was written—sans opposing viewpoints.

And there are opposing viewpoints out there, as LSP showed in a report we released Tuesday, Jan. 5, in conjunction with Pesticide Action Network North America: The Syngenta Corporation & Atrazine: The Cost to the Land, People & Democracy.

Which brings up another interesting issue of timing. Because of the LSP/PAN report, the past week has been full  of media coverage in which atrazine’s perception as a safe, irreplaceable corn production tool has been seriously questioned. Perhaps the pro-atrazine community decided it was time to get an MDA press release out that reassures the public that there’s nothing to worry about when it comes to this controversial herbicide.

What better excuse to issue a release than the unveiling of a report that up until now no one in Minnesota government seemed in a particular hurry to lay before the public’s eyes?

The atrazine review will be officially posted on the state register Jan. 19, which will mark the beginning of a 60-day public comment period. The next two months should be interesting.

As the report illustrates, such front-liners like Sobocinski deserve the best information available on agrichemicals, particularly ones as controversial as the weed killer atrazine. But they aren’t always getting that information. That’s why it’s so important that the EPA doesn’t blow its current review of the herbicide by giving its primary manufacturer, Syngenta, most-favored-client status.

That’s what happened earlier this decade. The Syngenta Corporation & Atrazine: The Cost to the Land, People & Democracy documents how the EPA review process that led to atrazine’s U.S. re-approval a few years ago was marred by numerous closed-door meetings involving the Syngenta corporation and EPA officials. That review was also characterized by a lack of independent research and suppression of scientific studies that showed significant health and environmental problems associated with the herbicide.

An examination of how that review took place shows a troubling pattern emerging, one in which the EPA treated Syngenta like a valued customer—you know, the “customer is always right” kind of customer. When that kind of atmosphere exists, people who dare to point out that giving a favored client’s product a free pass may not be in the best interest of the public find themselves running afoul of powerful people in both government and business. We here in Minnesota know all too well what risks scientists take when they dare to cross the Big Boys—just ask Paul Wotzka and Tyrone Hayes.

In short, Syngenta’s bottom line took precedence over the public good during the last approval process. And oh what a bottom line. Since it first went on the market in the U.S. half-a-century ago, atrazine has become one of the most widely used herbicides in the country. An estimated 76.5 million pounds of atrazine are used in the U.S. each year, with 86 percent used on corn. The Syngenta corporation is the chemical’s primary manufacturer, its most aggressive defender/cheerleader and its number one financial beneficiary.

The corporation has a 35 percent market share in corn herbicides, is the global leader in selective herbicides and is number two in non-selective herbicides. Atrazine is one reason Syngenta’s net profits grew 75 percent in 2007, and another 40 percent in 2008.

Unfortunately, atrazine has a big presence in another important category: it is the most commonly detected pesticide in our state’s surface and groundwater. Atrazine contamination has been found from agricultural communities in southeast Minnesota to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

That’s a concern when one considers that there is an increasing body of science showing that exposure to the herbicide at even extremely low levels could pose significant health risks to humans and animals. As we noted in this blog a few weeks ago, recent research linking atrazine exposure and birth defects is particularly troubling.

The current EPA review of atrazine was launched in October and will continue until fall 2010. An EPA scientific panel will kick-off the first round of reviews Feb. 2-5; the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency were scheduled to release their own joint review of the herbicide last fall, but nothing has emerged as of yet (the EPA’s announcement of its own review may have thrown a monkey wrench into  Minnesota officials’ plans).

The new EPA review is a chance for the agency to use science in the public’s best interest and regain the trust of farmers and others who are on the front lines of agrichemical use.

One way to get it right is for government decision-makers, as well as the public, to ignore claims that atrazine is an irreplaceable corn production tool. As the LSP/PAN report shows, farmers right here in Minnesota are raising corn without the controversial herbicide, as are farmers in the European Union, where atrazine is banned. And Wisconsin remains a top corn producing state, despite some of the toughest atrazine restrictions in the nation. Farmers are too innovative to allow one production tool to limit their choices when it comes to raising a crop.

The LSP/PAN report does not call for an outright ban of atrazine or any other herbicide. Many LSP farmer-members use pesticides in their cropping operations. But that means they rely on the EPA to use a transparent process when registering pesticides, one that is guided by science and focuses on protection of human health and the environment, as well as production considerations.

In a Jan. 5 letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, LSP and PAN, along with 14 other farm and rural groups, call for an atrazine review that sets a standard for vetting the safety of agrichemicals. The EPA can do that by:

• Ensuring 100 percent transparency. That means no closed-door meetings and making all studies that are considered part of the review open to scientific and public scrutiny.
• Making sure critical data is not hidden from the public or from independent scientific examination under the guise of “it’s confidential business information.” Peer review is the gold standard for scientific publication and should be a critical element in re-examination of atrazine.
• Studies funded by Syngenta should not dominate the review. As the LSP/PAN report documents, the corporation has engaged in undue influence on the atrazine registration process in the past. There is strong evidence that during the last review of atrazine the corporation hampered sound decision-making by submitting deeply-flawed studies that in some cases led EPA officials on wild goose chases.

That last point illustrates an important fact: because atrazine is such a major source of profit for Syngenta, the corporation has a major conflict of interest when it comes to this review. As Tyrone Hayes told me recently, “As long as we continue to do science, they are going to keep attacking that science.” By default, any research the corporation submits in this area must be taken with a huge grain of salt. (Speaking of salt, Hayes’ research showed that atrazine caused reproductive abnormalities in frogs at levels of 0.1 parts per billion—that’s equivalent to one, one thousandth of a grain of salt in a fish aquarium.)

The safety of rural Minnesota’s drinking water should not be sacrificed for the sake of one corporation’s profit margin. That’s why, if after review the science indicates atrazine is a threat to health and/or the environment, the EPA must take swift and clear action to protect farmers and the public.

The people that produce our food deserve at least that. So do the people who drink our water. They may not be multinational corporations, but they’re important clients just the same.