Rural Drinking Water Has a Nitrate Problem
And federal water laws don’t make this pollution easy to address.
This story was produced through a collaboration between the Daily Yonder, which covers rural America, and Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group.
The Lower Yakima Valley in Washington state has been home to large-scale animal agriculture for decades, but in 2008 when one dairy operation tried moving onto the Yakima Indian Reservation, the community balked at the proposition.
“The dairies at that time were very bad neighbors,” said Jean Mendoza, a resident of the Yakima Reservation. The community wanted to avoid the issues they’d heard about in Sunnyside, a small town about 50 miles east of the Yakima Reservation. “There was one [Sunnyside] family that had built an outdoor swimming pool for their grandchildren to enjoy, and one of the dairies came in and built a manure lagoon right next to the swimming pool,” she said. The smell from the lagoon made it impossible to enjoy their backyard.
The lagoons, huge pits of animal waste mixed with water, were one of the reasons Mendoza started organizing against the establishment of concentrated animal feedlots (CAFOs) near her home. She later became the executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Toppenish Creek, which advocates for improved oversight of industrial agriculture.
Discharge from these lagoons into groundwater caused nitrate levels to skyrocket in the drinking water of small towns in the Lower Yakima Valley, where many residents get their water from private wells. Serious health effects like cancer and blue baby syndrome – a life-threatening condition that causes low oxygen levels in infants’ blood – can occur when nitrate levels exceed 10 milligrams per liter, the maximum contaminant level set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Despite the health risks, regulating this pollution isn’t easy. Loopholes within drinking water laws and the agriculture lobby’s influence in Congress have prevented substantive policy reform to address the issue, according to food safety experts.
“That lobby has consistently asked for and gotten policies that favor the large and the higher tech and the consolidation – and therefore corporate control – of agriculture,” said Amy van Saun, a senior attorney for the Center for Food Safety. A 2024 report from the Union for Concerned Scientists showed big agribusiness and other food interest groups spent $523 million on farm bill lobbying between 2019 and 2023 – more than what the lobbies for the oil and gas industry and defense sector spent during that time.
Agriculture has become one of the most consolidated industries in the country. Across the board, farms have been merged into just a few big companies that control most food sectors.
The dairy industry is no stranger to this: Between 2002 and 2019 the number of licensed dairy herds in the U.S. dropped by half, but milk production increased, according to USDA data. This suggests that small farms are disappearing in place of concentrated animal feedlots operated by large corporations like Land o’ Lakes and Dairy Farmers of America.
As the number of animals stuffed onto corporate farms increases, so has the amount of waste. And that waste is kept in manure lagoons that are built to leak, according to Adam Voskuil, a staff attorney for Midwest Environmental Advocates.
“Regardless of whether a manure lagoon is earthen-lined or clay-lined or concrete-lined, there is some acceptable amount of discharge directly to the groundwater, to the aquifer,” Voskuil said.
As dairy operations have become more consolidated in the Lower Yakima Valley, it’s made it harder for grassroots organizers like Mendoza to advocate for drinking water regulation. “It removes decision-making from the ground level and sends it up the corporate ladder and makes it harder for neighbors, makes it harder for Friends of Toppenish Creek [to demand change],” she said.
While Mendoza’s organization successfully stopped the 2008 dairy operation from moving onto the Yakima Reservation, they’ve had their work cut out for them because of seepage from other manure lagoons. In June of 2024, the EPA sued three of the area’s dairy operations for failing to comply with a 2013 legal agreement that they reduce nitrate leakage and protect the drinking water of nearby residents.
But it’s difficult to implement effective regulation because water pollution is technically legal under two major laws: the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The Clean Water Act is the main apparatus used to protect the United States’ surface water. While its purpose is to prohibit the discharge of pollutants, the EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System issues permits that allow exceptions to this rule. Most activities associated with farming, ranching, and forestry can be exempted from the Clean Water Act if the operator obtains a permit to pollute.
The law directly regulates “point sources” of pollution, which is when there is a clear source of waste discharge like from a pipe, well, or even a manure lagoon from a concentrated animal feeding operation.
But for “nonpoint sources” of pollution, the law relies on voluntary efforts to control pollutants from various sources that accumulate through runoff. A primary cause of these nonpoint sources is runoff from nitrogen fertilizer on cropland.
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This voluntary approach means the EPA and states don’t have the authority to require that landowners reduce runoff, according to a report from the Environmental Integrity Project. This leaves the work to advocacy organizations.
“It seems like it has fallen to environmental and clean water and agricultural advocacy organizations to raise awareness and make sure people are protected,” said Leigh Currie, the chief legal officer for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy.
The well issue
In eastern Oregon’s Morrow and Umatilla counties, more than 400 households have nitrate levels higher than 10 milligrams per liter, the maximum amount deemed safe by the EPA. All of these houses rely on well water, which is one of the least regulated sources of drinking water in the country.
The counties’ pollution comes from food processing companies in the Port of Morrow. The companies produce nitrate-rich wastewater and funnel it into open-air irrigation ditches that water the area’s farmland. The water is overapplied on these farms and the excess leaches into the groundwater, which is what many local residents rely on for drinking water.
Over the 30 years the state of Oregon has known about this problem, very little has been done to address it. That’s because no one wants to “own the issue,” according to Nella Mae Parks, a farmer and organizer for the nonprofit Oregon Rural Action.
“The state doesn’t want it, the [Port of Morrow] doesn’t want it, and the county doesn’t want it, because it’s gonna be really expensive,” she said in a 2023 interview with the Daily Yonder.
The Clean Drinking Water Act regulates “navigable waters,” which does not include groundwater. This leaves groundwater regulation to the Safe Drinking Water Act, which guarantees protections for municipalities that are on public drinking water systems.
But the law leaves out protections for private wells that support fewer than 25 individuals. About 15% of the U.S. population relies on well water, and the vast majority of them live in rural areas.
This means the well owner has to take on the cost to monitor and treat their water if they find it’s being polluted, a cost that many people can’t afford. A nitrate test costs between $35 and $60, and treating the water requires a reverse osmosis system, which is a filtration device that forces water through a membrane that removes nitrate. Depending on the system, the price can range from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.
Some counties will pay for these tests and filters, but this isn’t the case in every affected community.
For example, in Wisconsin – the dairy capital of the U.S. – rural well owners often choose not to test their wells for nitrate. “That’s because if it comes back that it’s testing high for nitrates, it may not be financially feasible for them to rehabilitate or remediate or dig a new well,” said Voskuil from Midwest Environmental Advocates.
The state’s well compensation grant program will only provide financial assistance to well owners whose water tests at or more than 40 parts per million of nitrate. That’s four times the amount the EPA says is safe to drink.
A need for stronger regulation
Food safety experts say solving America’s nitrate pollution problem will require stronger regulation of the biggest players in the agriculture industry.
“This industry has been able to externalize so much of their costs… so that it’s an artificially cheap product for the consumer,” van Saun from the Center for Food Safety said.
The federal government provides farmers subsidies to protect them from fluctuating revenue year-by-year, but data from the nonpartisan Environmental Working Group shows that 78% of subsidies were given to the largest 10% of farm operations between 1995 and 2021. This means small and mid-size farmers received the fewest benefits, making it harder to stay afloat.
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Some bills have been proposed to address the squeeze of big agriculture, but there hasn’t been substantial progress made on the issue. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s Farm System Reform Act of 2023 proposed a moratorium on CAFOs, expanded country-of-origin labeling, and increased competition and transparency in livestock, poultry, and meat markets. The bill was first introduced in 2019 and reintroduced in 2021 and 2023, but all three times, it languished in committee.
Most of the current reform is coming from more local efforts, like the community organizing in the Lower Yakima Valley that led to the 2024 lawsuit against three dairy farms.
While these local efforts are important, van Saun said they have to occur in combination with federal regulations to effectively address drinking water contamination. “It’s the people who are the least well off in rural areas, and especially communities of color in rural areas, who are the ones paying the biggest price for this [pollution],” van Saun said.
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