As a farmer in southeastern Minnesota, I’ve seen my neighbors contract a myriad of entirely preventable diseases related to the water they have been drinking. 

Toddlers in our daycares have experienced birth defects and developmental delays due to preterm births and low birth rates, and it’s likely that our hospitals are filled with those undergoing treatments for entirely preventable cancers. All of this is caused by unsafe levels of nitrates in our groundwater. 

When we talk about groundwater nitrates, we mostly focus on farming practices and how nitrates travel into aquifers. But in doing so, we fail to center the human cost of nitrates and the relation to cancer and birth outcomes. Currently, the Minnesota Health Department follows direction from the Environmental Protection Agency on the safe amount of nitrates in drinking water: 10 mg/L. However, within the past five years there has been compelling research correlating a myriad of cancers, primarily colorectal cancer, to exposure rates as low as 0.7 mg/L. 

In southeastern Minnesota, roughly 8,400 people may be drinking unsafe water (5 mg/L), with an additional 3,760 drinking water that is considered unsafe (10 mg/L) . About 226 of them may be children or pregnant women. 

Taking a closer look at these numbers, the associated cancer risk and the cost of treating a cancer, as well as the cost of developmental delays, it is possible that in southeastern Minnesota private well users have a total health care cost of $627 million. This is a huge economic strain in an area already experiencing significant economic stresses and does not represent the cost of lost work days or the personal toll of a cancer diagnosis.

Many farmers, like myself, try to farm in a way that improves the water that leaves our farms. Minnesota has one of the highest rejection rates of federal soil health programs, due to lack of funds.  And yet, the number of contaminated wells in Minnesota continues to rise, and the toll on Minnesotans continues to worsen.

Southeastern Minnesota’s unique karst geography and its relation to farming practices may be complex and its human and economic toll immense, but a public health solution is by comparison cheap. 

The Minnesota Well Owners Organization estimates that roughly only 20% of private well users test their wells regularly. Users don’t test due to a misinformed fear of government regulations, a lack of trust in government agencies, complex well test instructions, lack of awareness of the importance of well testing and the fear that testing would require a new well. 

In the public health realm, there are healthcare professionals who excel at helping alleviate this kind of hesitance. Community Health Workers (CHW) are trusted community messengers who understand the cultural landscape that the public health problem exists in. 

Employing CHW’s to go door-to-door to test wells for private well users and to provide follow up health education would cost about $1 million a year to operate for southeastern Minnesota representing a cost ratio of hundreds to one. While cancer risks are notoriously hard to determine, private well users should be empowered to make decisions about what level of risk they are comfortable with. 

In order to help with public understanding of associated risk, the Minnesota Department of Health could lower its safe drinking limit to 5 mg/L, or at least indicate that the 10 mg/L level does not include cancer risks. While decisions like this are often a sober analysis of cancer risk gradients, they do not speak to the anxiety associated with watching your children drink contaminated water and not knowing whether or not your driveway will be the next “Cancer Road.”

Given that there’s a 67-67 party split in the Minnesota House, and that the newly elected Republicans from southeastern Minnesota claim to represent rural interests, there is a clear bipartisan path for ensuring that rural Minnesotans have the same basic infrastructure that their urban counterparts enjoy: safe and clean drinking water.  

Dan Wilson is a farmer in Winona County and a participant in the U of M’s Project REACH Program (Rural Experts Advocating for Community Health)

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