This was posted on the Leopold Sierra Group's listserve tonight.

From: Prarie Writers Circle
This Prairie Writers Circle essay argues that we should clean up the largest
sewer in the country -- the millions of miles of drain tiles that lie
beneath fields in the Midwest and carry agricultural pollution to our
waterways.  The author is Janet Kauffman, coordinator of the Water
Monitoring Project for Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central
Michigan.

Headline food for thought:
Midwest agriculture's dirty secret

A dirty river runs beneath it

By Janet Kauffman
Prairie Writers Circle

The Midwest is flyover country, as they say. From 35,000 feet, the landscape
is a lovely patchwork of geometric field shapes, parallelograms stitched
neatly together. But close up, Midwest farmland is not such a pretty
picture.

Farm animals are often packed into factory-size buildings. Next to these are
open-air waste pits as large as small lakes.  They hold millions of gallons
of untreated, liquefied manure.

Just as foul, and completely hidden, are the underground pipes crisscrossing
and draining the watersheds of the Midwest. Pieced together, they're the
largest sewer in the country.

These pipes are called drain tiles. From Ohio to Iowa, in a network
estimated at more than 3 million miles, they underlie most farm fields to
drain away rainwater. But they also carry farmland pollutants directly to
creeks and rivers. They are agriculture's dirty secret.

Across southern Michigan, where I live, 19th century settlers found forests
and swamps. You can't farm in either. So the pioneers cut the trees. And to
make fields from swamps, they dug trenches and buried drain tiles, creating
underground tributaries.

The word "tiles" comes from the early use of foot-long sections of clay
pipe, made in the brickworks of many small towns. Now farmers use perforated
plastic pipe, laser-sighted downhill.

In the Midwest, tiles drain up to 60 percent of agricultural land. When big
confinement dairies were built recently in my watershed, their builders
re-tiled the land where they would dump liquid manure.

In cities, sewers once combined storm water and human waste, creating a
serious problem of contaminated overflows. Now storm water normally drains
through one set of pipes, and human waste flows through another to treatment
plants.

But agriculture has largely ignored its own combined -- and continuous --
contribution of sewage to our waterways.

No wonder -- the problem is huge. The tiles cover vast areas.  Some tile
systems are new, some 100 years old, with fixes from every generation along
the way. In many soils, wormholes -- more than you might think -- and large
cracks are direct pathways, like straws, to subsurface tiles. Liquids can
pour through in minutes.

Across the country, agriculture now contributes more pollution to lakes and
streams than any other industry. The widely reported dead zone in the Gulf
of Mexico is one result of the runoff of excess nutrients from manure and
fertilizers. And now another is forming where streams in my part of Michigan
flow -- in Lake Erie, which had finally recovered from the industrial
pollution of the mid-20th century.

In large livestock confinement operations, animals are never on pasture,
where they would be spread out feeding on grass and where living soil could
use and absorb their drier manure. Instead, the waste is liquefied, pumped
to a lagoon, then sprayed untreated on fields, where it runs quickly into
the tile drains. The liquefying is done with groundwater -- it's polluted
coming and going.

It is time we fixed the plumbing.

Livestock production, like other industries, should be required to treat its
waste. Technologies exist for liquid-solid separation with accompanying
wastewater treatment. There are dry systems for manure handling that are
hybrids of rotational grazing and winter composting.   Agriculture doesn't
have to reinvent the wheel. Better yet, livestock operations can downsize to
farm size. Get lean and green.

From the air, Midwest farmland still looks like a comforting quilt. What you
don't see is what's unsettling. You don't see the animals inside the
confinement buildings. You don't see the waste pits holding millions of
gallons of liquid manure -- they look like innocent lakes from high up. And
you don't see the stream of pollution flowing through subsurface drainage
tiles -- agriculture's unregulated sewers.

###

Janet Kauffman has restored wetlands on her farm in Michigan. She
coordinates the Water Monitoring Project for Environmentally Concerned
Citizens of South Central Michigan. Kauffman wrote this piece for the
Prairie Writers Circle at the Land Institute, Salina, Kan.

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