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Editor’s note: A previous version of the story referenced a grant Cassville obtained through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. We removed that reference after learning the village obtained the funding without a formal application, making the information irrelevant to this story.

Wisconsin’s small communities could obtain slices of the billions of federal dollars allocated for infrastructure and renewable energy projects, such as upgrading drinking water systems or purchasing electric buses.

But the Republican-controlled Legislature has rejected a recent proposal to help staff-strapped towns and villages circumvent the greatest barriers for bringing home such funds: the federal government’s time-consuming application and record-keeping requirements.

In his two-year budget proposal, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers pitched the creation of a five-person resource team to help local governments identify and apply for federal and state grants.

“This is a small amount of state money that can help local units of government access large amounts of federal funds,” Milwaukee Rep. Evan Goyke, the ranking Democrat on the state’s budget-writing committee, said during a June hearing. “And what those federal funds can do locally can be transformational, but those locals have to know the opportunity is there and they have to have the technical assistance.”

However, the GOP-controlled Joint Committee on Finance rejected the $960,000 measure along party lines before sending the budget to the full Legislature.

Evers on Wednesday signed the budget, vetoing 51 items from the $99 billion plan mostly authored by Republicans, including scaling back a major income tax cut and extending school funding increases for more than 400 years. But because the state grant team under his original proposal would have created new positions, Evers could not write them back into the budget with his veto pen.

Small communities struggle to manage grants

Wisconsin cities and villages, where the median population is about 1,500, often lack the staff capacity to track, apply for and manage grants.

“Wisconsin is a state of small towns. We need to recognize the limitations,” said Jerry Deschane, executive director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities. “They simply don’t have a bunch of bodies sitting around waiting to do federal paperwork.”

In southwest Wisconsin, the village of Cassville, population 777, contracts with a local engineering firm for grant administration.

Keevin Williams, who retired as village president earlier this year after 27 years in public service, said grant applications and recordkeeping would be significantly harder to handle without outside assistance. A state team could be of great use to communities lacking that resource, he said.

But even for small municipalities that employ staff with expertise, federal programs aren’t always relevant to their needs.

“Much of the funding at the federal level tends to be for projects that we just don’t have,” said David Carlson, administrator of Lancaster, a city of 3,907.

He pointed to a recently announced program that seeks to increase connectivity in rural areas, funded under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which allocated $550 billion dollars in new spending for water, transportation, energy and broadband internet projects. The rural connectivity program requires proposals to have a regional impact, according to grant criteria.

“Let’s face it, most small communities don’t have transportation projects that have regional impacts,” Carlson said.

Environmental lobbyists who backed the grant resource team found most lawmakers actually supported the proposal and observed a need for it within their own communities. But a majority on the Joint Committee on Finance nonetheless opposed creating additional government staff positions.

“It’s the very communities this was most supposed to help that are going to be most hurt by this rather political decision,” said Jennifer Giegerich, government affairs director with Wisconsin Conservation Voters.

Committee co-chairs Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, and Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, did not respond to requests for comment.

Ultimately, the communities and states that aggressively invest in staff capacity will be the ones that reap the federal funding, Giegerich said.

“My hope is that in the next year, there’s just gonna be so many opportunities coming down and so many communities in Wisconsin who are not able to take advantage of them, that legislators will see the error of their ways and hopefully include this in our next budget.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Republican lawmakers reject proposal to help Wisconsin communities access federal grant programs is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

After a developer began eyeing rural northwest Wisconsin for a large swine farm, five small towns enacted ordinances aimed at curbing environmental and health impacts.

Then, the state’s biggest business and agricultural interest groups fought back. They engaged disaffected residents. Some locals sued. Others ran for political office. New leaders in one Polk County town rescinded regulations on concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.

Now, officials in the remaining towns with livestock regulations wonder whether they, too, are in legal crosshairs. 

The Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation and Wisconsin Dairy Alliance have filed a far-reaching public records request for documents from an advisory group that shaped the municipalities’ CAFO rules.

In 2019, a developer proposed an operation, known as Cumberland LLC, that would have housed up to 26,350 pigs — the region’s first swine CAFO and what would be the largest in Wisconsin. Residents later formed the advisory group, believing that state livestock laws insufficiently protect health and quality of life.

In October, two farm families, represented by WMC Litigation Center, sued one municipality in the advisory group: Laketown, population 1,024. The town’s livestock, crop and specialty farms make up almost two-thirds of the landscape.

The plaintiffs, later joined by the Farm Bureau, argued that Laketown’s ordinance diminished property values and prospects for future expansion, a government overreach that could “essentially outlaw mid-to-large sized livestock farms.”

Scott Rosenow, the Litigation Center’s executive director, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

The records request follows the dismissal of that lawsuit, but some residents wonder if the lobbying organizations are “fishing” for another case, the latest effort to prevent local governments from regulating farming in America’s Dairyland.

Pig farm proposal roils northwest Wisconsin 

Cumberland’s proposal sparked heated public meetings, dozens of letters to newspapers and the formation of a nonprofit opposition organization.

The CAFO would be constructed in Trade Lake, north of Laketown in neighboring Burnett County. Sows would be bred and piglets trucked elsewhere after weaning, where they would grow until slaughter.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources rejected Cumberland’s application in March. The developer recently pitched a scaled-down project that would house 19,800 swine.

CAFO opponents in Laketown include back-to-the-landers, who view such farms as inhumane to animals. Others fear the health impacts of the millions of gallons of manure facilities generate annually, to be spread on farm fields.

About 90% of all nitrate groundwater pollution in Wisconsin comes from fertilizer and manure application, according to the DNR. The naturally occurring nutrient helps crops grow, but scientists associate exposure in drinking water with birth defects, thyroid disease and increased risk of developing certain cancers.

Other concerns are rooted in economics. Some Laketown farmers say CAFOs threaten smaller operations; others fear shrinking property values.

“It’s nothing more than big corporations getting together with the government and putting the screws to the little people,” said Vietnam Army veteran and recently ousted Laketown supervisor, Bruce Paulsen, who, like many opponents, speculates that the pork will be exported to China.

Laketown’s ordinance explained 

The town ordinances regulate not where, but how CAFOs operate.

Laketown’s rules applied to new operations housing at least 700 “animal units,” the equivalent of 1,750 swine or 500 dairy cows, and required applicants to submit plans for preventing infectious diseases, air pollution and odor; managing waste and handling dead animals.

It also mandated traffic and property value impact studies, a surety for clean-ups and decommissioning and an annual $1-per-animal-unit permit fee — atop costs to review the application and enforce the terms of the permit.

The ordinance did not affect existing livestock facilities as long as the farms did not change owners, alter their animal species or expand beyond 1,000 animal units. But several residents believed the strict requirements amounted to a CAFO ban that would bar existing farms from growing.

Others protested government spending on the advisory group. Some said the smell of manure comes with living in a rural area.

Polk County Supervisor Brad Olson asked why farming gets blamed when excessive road salt and wastewater treatment plant overflows also taint water.

“I don’t think anybody denies that agriculture is part of the problem — or has the potential to be part of the problem in pollution,” said Olson, who farms crops and used to be a dairy farmer. “If we’re going to look at pollution, let’s look at the bigger picture.”

Clothing-optional campground owners Jen and Scott Matthiesen initially signed onto the lawsuit before attorneys requested they withdraw out of concern their business — “we’re not a nudist camp,” Jen said — would distract from the case. The couple worried that singling out farming could pave the way for special regulation of other businesses.

New Laketown Sup. Ron Peterson ran on the promise of overturning the ordinance. He believes it unlawfully superseded state laws. Those laws ban local authorities from regulating livestock more strictly than the state — unless they can prove a need to protect health or safety.

“The Wisconsin Legislature has been very clear in the statute that it’s their intent that they want uniformity in the regulation of animal agriculture,” said Peterson, a former attorney.

Gaps in DNR regulations 

But supporters of Laketown’s ordinance say it merely corked regulatory leaks.

The DNR acknowledges it lacks legal authority to manage how livestock farming affects odor, noise, traffic and other issues unrelated to water quality. The agency also has struggled to keep pace with the proliferation of CAFOs, defined as farms holding at least 1,000 animal units.

The vast majority of Wisconsin’s 337 operations form the backbone of the state’s dairy industry. Just a dozen house swine.

As the DNR sees more proposals for large farms in recent years, staff shortages and turnover have fueled a backlog in permitting, delays in CAFO inspections and inconsistencies in violations enforcement, according to legislative reports.

As of June, the DNR’s permitting backlog totaled 20%, slightly less than this spring when administrators said they would need an additional 2.25 full-time-equivalent staff to handle the growing workload.

Sidestepping ‘right-to-farm’ protections

Wisconsin’s “right-to-farm” and livestock facility siting laws protect farmers from nuisance claims and generally rebuff local control over CAFOs.

Regulating livestock operations, but not banning them or restricting their locations, could enable communities to sidestep the laws — with major implications for the state’s $104.8 billion agricultural industry.

The strategy, successfully deployed in 2016 in Bayfield County, appears to be spreading. Facing the prospective expansion of a dairy CAFO in Pierce County, about 60 miles south of Laketown, residents are urging county supervisors to enact a CAFO moratorium until they can develop an ordinance.

“The problem is, we’re a disease for them,” said Trade Lake resident Rick Painter, a retired attorney who opposes Cumberland’s construction. “We’re a cancer, and they can’t afford for the cancer to metastasize.”

When confronted with legal threats, Laketown was among the few Wisconsin local governments to stand its ground, perhaps due to the deep expertise of its full- and part-time residents.

Trade Lake property owner and trial lawyer Andy Marshall and his brother David agreed to represent the town at no cost. If the other towns requested assistance, Andy Marshall said he would offer his services. Without money for a good legal defense, he said, small towns can get “steamrolled” by wealthy interest groups.

“It shouldn’t be the community that suffers because these companies can’t safely operate,” Marshall said.

Farmers want expansion options 

Farmer Sara Byl views the anti-CAFO chorus with increasing skepticism. 

Her family owns Northernview Farm, growing about 600 acres of corn and alfalfa to feed their herd of Holsteins in Laketown. Before Sara and her parents sued over Laketown’s ordinance, she served on the town’s livestock facility licensing committee, which studied whether it needed CAFO regulations.

Byl felt the effort evolved into a push against all large-scale farming rather than one hog CAFO.

“It was all about the hog farm — hog farm this, hog farm that,” she said. “Then they left off the word ‘hog’ and they just kept saying ‘farm.’ ”

The Byl family, three generations of farmers, doesn’t operate a CAFO, but Sara says the farm might grow if her son, nieces or nephews pursue agriculture careers. 

Farmers expand for multiple reasons, said Michael Langemeier, a professor in the agricultural economics department at Purdue University.

Farm expansion and consolidation help lower production costs, increase efficiency and satisfy demands for safe, low-cost and uniform agricultural products. Larger farms also can financially support multiple owners and obtain favorable prices on supplies. 

But CAFO opponents argue the consumer gains are offset by the federal policies that support large livestock farms, including taxpayer funded subsidies, and other costs resulting from their health and environmental impacts.

Bracing for next lawsuit

Although newly elected Laketown officials rescinded the rules in April, the CAFO regulations of four other towns remain intact.

That same month, the Dairy Alliance submitted public records requests to all towns in the advisory group for communications from current or former town supervisors about the group’s work. The Farm Bureau also requested records from all advisory group members related to its work, as well as its expenses.

Asked for comment, Cindy Leitner, the Dairy Alliance’s president, ceased correspondence with Wisconsin Watch after being provided with questions. H. Dale Peterson, general counsel to the Farm Bureau, did not respond to interview requests.

“I see it as a great opportunity to show the Farm Bureau all the great work we’ve done,” quipped Lisa Doerr, the advisory group’s chairperson.

Doerr, who grows forage on her 80-acre Laketown farm, contends the group was not a governmental body and lacked decision-making powers, so its members aren’t subject to Wisconsin’s public records law. She denied Peterson’s request.

“If they want to push me, then bring it on,” Doerr said.

Bone Lake town Chairman Andy Brown already fulfilled the records requests.

“I don’t have anything to hide,” he said. “If they want to see my emails back and forth about how to make this happen, then fine.”

With a defense team at the ready, Brown says he isn’t worried. “This is an important test case, and somebody’s gonna have to be in front of that firing squad some time or another,” he said.  “And so if it’s us, it’s us.”

Wisconsin towns brace for next fight on local control over large farms is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is part of the series A Changing Basin from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. Take a quick survey and let us know how extreme weather is affecting you.

A dusty Nick Stanek stepped off his tractor after an evening of round baling hay.

Conditions in La Farge, Wisconsin, are currently great for the crop, but not much else. The weather has been so dry, the grass crunches beneath Stanek’s feet.

Members of a three-generation farm family, he and his brother also grow corn and soybeans across 400 acres.

But the weather isn’t cooperating like the siblings do.

A recent rain shower coaxed some of the soybeans to germinate, but it wasn’t enough; many have struggled to emerge from the “bone dry” ground.

“Of course, if we don’t get any rain, our crop will be a complete loss,” Stanek said.

Farmers are struggling all across the Corn Belt. Drought expanded rapidly throughout the Midwest in June — doubling within the first week after significantly less rainfall than normal. Forecasters say the region is not likely to get relief anytime soon.

Through September, arid conditions are expected to persist or even expand in eastern Iowa and Missouri, Illinois and Wisconsin. 

More than 80% of corn and soybean crops in Illinois and Iowa — which together produce more than a quarter of the nation’s total — face drought conditions. Farmers are gritting their teeth as their crops dry up and deteriorate.

“Although it’s probably too early to declare massive losses in crops just yet, that potential is certainly there unless we get some decent rainfall,” said Mark Fuchs, a hydrologist at the St. Louis National Weather Service forecast office. 

But most of the Midwest, excluding Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, can expect an inch of rain or less in the next seven days.

“It’s not a jaw-busting outlook,” he said.

Todd Shea, with the NWS forecast office in La Crosse, Wisconsin, said dry weather can beget more dry weather “because you don’t have as much water around to add to the atmosphere which can help fuel thunderstorms.”

Circumstances in Missouri are among the worst in the Midwest, with nearly 16% of the state under extreme drought.

“We’ve heard a lot from farmers and ranchers, especially ranchers who are having to sell off cattle before they wanted to because they don’t have enough food, hay, grass — things cattle usually feed off of — to sustain their herds,” Fuchs said.

But Stan Nelson is holding onto optimism.

The southeast Iowa native farms just 12 miles west of the Mississippi River near Burlington and serves as the first vice president on the Iowa Corn Promotion Board.

In his 40-plus-year career, this drought is one of the earliest he recalls. Nelson sees nearby producers irrigating their fields a month earlier than they typically do. And the variety of corn he plants is currently 10 to 20 inches shorter than it should be at this point in the growing season.

“Our crop is being hurt,” he said. “I just don’t know how much.”

But new varieties of row crops can compensate for a lack of water, Nelson said.

“I’m not panicked yet.”

Conditions are not yet so dire as those experienced in late 2022 when persistent drought disrupted Mississippi River barge traffic and drew salt water from the Gulf of Mexico upstream, threatening New Orleans’ drinking water supply. But other impacts are evident.

U.S. Geological Survey water gauges have measured below-normal streamflow throughout the upper Mississippi River basin compared to this time last year, including all-time lows at St. Cloud, Minnesota, on the Mississippi River, and in Valley City, Illinois, along the Illinois River.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard has begun issuing safety advisories for barge traffic.

Low water has impacted the size and capacity of barge loads, driving up costs, according to Deb Calhoun, senior vice president of Waterways Council Inc., a national lobbying group. 

“But many in the industry believe there is the capacity to compensate for the inefficiencies in the near term,” she said in an email. 

Dredging within the vicinity of Memphis, Tennessee, an occasional bottleneck for Mississippi River barge traffic, is expected to help.

It’s not possible to specifically attribute the current drought to climate change, scientists said, but it falls within a pattern of more extreme weather events.

Models project that in coming years both precipitation and precipitation variability will intensify in some Midwestern states.

The region overall could get wetter at longer timescales, according to University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign researchers, with more intense month-to-month fluctuations, leading to increasingly frequent flooding or periods of drought.

A world of extremes leaves open the possibility of a meteorological rebound. And forecasters already predict some improvement this summer in parts of Minnesota along with the western halves of Iowa and Missouri.

“Hope is not lost because we could certainly regain rainfall back to normal, or potentially even surplus,” said Steve Vavrus, interim Wisconsin state climatologist.

If the worst comes to pass in Wisconsin, though, Stanek hopes to “ride it out” and make do with the money he earns from hay and repairing antique tractors, trucks and cars. He doesn’t have crop insurance. 

“It’ll be nip and tuck,” he said.

He must pay a monthly $2,000 mortgage on several properties he owns, and his savings will only last until October.

But, “soybeans are very tough,” Stanek said. “They can sit in the ground for a couple of months and still sprout.”

Tough, just like him.

Tegan Wendland contributed to this story.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Midwest drought: Corn and soybeans suffer as forecasters expect no quick relief for farmers is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was first published by Investigative Reporters and Editors in a special pollution-themed issue of The IRE Journal  in 2023. 

When radio reporter Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco traveled to the Iowa-Illinois border in early November, he found many residents unaware. They hadn’t heard that their drinking water might be contaminated with PFAS, and a major local employer was responsible.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had just announced that PFAS contamination from a large 3M factory north of Cordova, Illinois, created “an imminent and substantial endangerment” of drinking water supplies for nearly 300,000 people. In a November EPA order, Minnesota-based 3M agreed to investigate contamination in private wells and public water systems.

PFAS (short for “per and polyfluoroalkyl substances”) are a class of more than 12,000 human-made compounds that accumulate in the environment and human bodies over time. Increased testing is revealing PFAS in public drinking systems, groundwater and surface waters nationwide. Scientists link two of the most widely researched chemicals, PFOA and PFOS, to a range of health problems that include altered hormone levels, decreased birth weight, digestive inflammation and ulcers, high cholesterol, hypertension in pregnancy and kidney and testicular cancers.

PFAS are ubiquitous in consumer and industrial products, such as fabric stain protectors, firefighting foam, food packaging, lubricants, non-stick cookware, paints and waterproof clothing. Most Americans encounter them through the foods they eat, dust, and hand-to-mouth contact with PFAS-treated products.

Local public officials, 3M and the EPA could not or would not provide a definitive answer to a basic question asked by Ramirez- Franco and others reporting on the 3M Cordova contamination: Is the water safe to drink?

Instead, they recommended that residents contact their health care providers, consider installing home filters or surf the EPA’s website for answers. For consumers, PFAS are ripe with confusion. For journalists, too.

When the EPA’s press release came out, it initially appeared to be a local story. But one of our local editors at the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, a consortium of 16 news outlets from the headwaters of the river to the delta, saw regional significance. The EPA’s order has echoes in the Twin Cities, where 3M previously contaminated groundwater with PFAS near its Cottage Grove plant in the East Metro.

After the 3M story broke, an ad hoc team of reporters and editors joined a video call to discuss coverage plans. The group included Chloe Johnson, our Star Tribune reporter; Ramirez-Franco, from WNIJ Northern Public Radio in DeKalb, Illinois; Erin Jordan, a veteran environmental reporter at The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Bennet Goldstein, an investigative reporter at Wisconsin Watch in Madison, Wisconsin, who has extensive experience covering the emerging contaminants; with editors James Shiffer of the Star Tribune and Tegan Wendland at the Desk.

Johnson authored the first story with reporting help from the team, focusing on the basics of the case and the national context. Ramirez-Franco produced a short radio newscast story to accompany the print article and we used stock art from the Star Tribune. Four outlets picked up the piece.

After Ramirez-Franco’s subsequent reporting trip, he produced a feature-length radio report for broadcast on NPR stations in our distribution network. Goldstein produced a print version of the story with additional reporting. Wendland and Shiffer edited both works. Meanwhile, Johnson was working on a follow-up.

The Desk is trying to do something novel: conceive of an ecological region (that spans 31 states and two Canadian provinces) as a news region.

Defining what a “regional story” is has been somewhat of an experiment. We make that determination based on a few factors: Does it impact a lot of people in the basin? Does it help audiences understand local issues within a broader context? Is it helpful, inspiring and informative?

Based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, in collaboration with Report For America and the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Desk works with 10 environmental reporters who report on agriculture and the environment and then shares that content for free. Members have weekly editorial meetings and talk constantly on Slack.

Reporting on emerging contaminants brings a particular set of challenges. Often, regulation has not caught up with the science, and the science can be contentious or companies might make it sound like it is.

The federal government recently issued guidelines that indicate no amount of PFOA and PFOS are safe for consumption, along with proposed rules that would limit their presence

in public water systems. However, companies and municipal governments often stress that the science is new and changing and that the EPA’s analysis is flawed.

Several trends emerged as the Desk’s reporters tackled the 3M stories.

It was difficult to obtain answers from the EPA, city leaders and 3M alike. To their credit, the

entities helped us nail down a timeline of events and provided technical details pertaining to the investigation. But we struggled to obtain more specific information that could help residents on the ground.

We often encountered responses like: “EPA cannot comment on an ongoing or potential enforcement matter.” “Our continued engagement with the EPA will build on our strong existing foundation of progress and investment, and we are committed to keeping our communities and neighbors informed of our progress.” “We will update residents whenever we have new information.”

PFAS exist under a patchwork of confusing regulations that make them difficult to compare across state lines. Some states enforce drinking water limits for, perhaps, two or three of the chemicals, while others might regulate a cluster of others. Still others regulate none. And even states that limit the same PFAS in drinking water often have differing safety thresholds. This leaves the public with little standard guidance, and reporters with the responsibility of making sense of the science.

We were challenged to report this series on deadline when it came to obtaining expert sources. Academics can be slow to respond, especially when they are teaching. Fortunately, seasoned journalist Jordan already had an established relationship with a source.

Since the Desk launched in June 2022, covering breaking news has been a goal and a challenge. With such a large and dispersed team, the production of multimedia and in- depth features has been our strength. But our goal is to provide relevant, timely coverage to news outlets throughout the basin, especially to smaller outlets in news deserts. Breaking news is an essential part of that service.

The expertise of our team, and the sheer number of reporters we have on the ground, benefit all of our partners. We experiment with different ways of configuring mini-teams to cover breaking stories. When news breaks, we collaborate with photographers at some of our outlets. We draw on the knowledge of our journalists, mentors, and also from long-time staff editors at partnering newsrooms. Print reporters also benefit from radio production training.

We’re one of many innovative news collaborations in the U.S. today. Other climate collaborations exist, but we’re doing something a little different by covering the river basin as a

discrete region, attempting to draw connections up and downstream that help readers understand how issues in middle America impact those living on the coast.

Since launching, we have published more than 400 stories while continually experimenting with different methods of storytelling and reader engagement. We can’t purport to know the best way to cover complicated breaking stories as a collaborative team, but we hope that sharing our experience and challenges provide insight for others pursuing the same kind of journalism.

Investigating 3M and PFAS pollution: How the Mississippi River Ag & Water desk collaborated is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

A new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposal issued Tuesday would tighten limits on toxic “forever chemicals” in Wisconsin’s drinking water.

If finalized, the rule would establish the first national standard for PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, in public water supplies, bringing uniformity to a jumble of state regulations.

States like Wisconsin, where PFAS limits are less stringent than the proposed standards, would have to revise them to match or surpass the federal standard. States without any limits must enact their first PFAS drinking water rules.

Though long sought by environmental and health advocates, the regulations may increase water rates in PFAS-contaminated communities as utilities upgrade filtration technology or drill for cleaner water sources.

“We anticipate that when fully implemented, this rule will prevent thousands of deaths and prevent tens of thousands of serious PFAS-related illnesses,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters at a press conference Tuesday.

What are PFAS?

PFAS are a class of more than 12,000 human-made compounds. They accumulate in the environment and human bodies over time and do not easily degrade, which is why some people call them “forever chemicals.” Increased testing is revealing PFAS in public drinking systems, groundwater and surface waters nationwide.

Why should I care about PFAS?

Scientists haven’t studied most PFAS deeply, but they link two of the most widely researched, PFOA and PFOS, to a range of health problems. Those include altered hormone levels, decreased birth weight, digestive inflammation and ulcers, high cholesterol, hypertension in pregnancy, kidney and testicular cancers and reduced vaccine effectiveness in children.

In June 2022, the EPA released health advisories for four types of PFAS, including updated draft advisories for PFOA and PFOS. The agency warned against consuming more than 0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) and 0.02 ppt of the two compounds, respectively. That equates to about 4 drops and 20 drops of water in 1,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, suggesting that virtually no amount of PFAS is safe for consumption.

Where do PFAS come from?

PFAS are ubiquitous in consumer and industrial products, such as fabric stain protectors, firefighting foam, food packaging, lubricants, non-stick cookware, paints and waterproof clothing. Most Americans encounter them through the foods they eat, dust, and hand-to-mouth contact with PFAS-treated products. Tap water is typically the main source of exposure for people living near contaminated sites.

After they started using the chemicals in the 1940s, PFAS manufacturers learned, and concealed, the hazards for decades. Wisconsin is among a host of states suing the 3M Company, DuPont and other manufacturers of PFAS-containing materials, alleging that they failed to alert the public of the risks.

What does this proposed regulation require?

Public water suppliers must begin testing for the chemicals. The draft rule proposes maximum contaminant levels, or MCLs, of 4 ppt for PFOA and PFOS — the lowest reliable threshold of detection. Those who find more would be required to notify the public and upgrade treatment technologies or take other action. The proposal also regulates any mixture of one or more of four other PFAS — PFNA, PFHxS, PFBS, and GenX Chemicals.

Would the rule affect private wells? 

No. Neither the EPA nor the state regulates private water wells. The 1.7 million Wisconsinites who use them, roughly one-third of residents, bear responsibility for testing and treating their own water for PFAS or other contaminants. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources offers general recommendations for well testing here. Many laboratories can test water for PFAS for a fee.

Why is the federal government doing this?

The Safe Drinking Water Act empowers the EPA to set limits on contaminants in public water systems — utilities that serve at least 15 connections or 25 people or more. Those include 148,000-plus public water systems in the United States that provide drinking water to 90% of residents.

This would be the first time EPA has regulated a new chemical in drinking water since the 1990s.

Why are the EPA’s proposed limits higher than its health advisories? 

Health advisories are distinct from drinking water standards. For one, advisories are not regulations, nor are they legally enforceable. Unlike advisories, standards consider the availability of treatment technologies and implementation costs. That is why drinking water standards often are less stringent than health advisories.

“That is how our regulations are set,” said University of Iowa professor David Cwiertny, director of the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination. “We define what is an acceptable level of risk, because we’ve developed a regulatory framework where we think it is unreasonable to eliminate all risks from a water sample.”

Why is a drinking water standard important for states?

PFAS drinking water regulations form a patchwork nationwide, with states imposing differing standards for different kinds of PFAS. A federal standard offers water utilities regulatory certainty.

“In general, water utilities prefer to have clear standards,” said Lawrie Kobza, a Wisconsin lobbyist for the Municipal Environmental Group — Water Division. “From that perspective, it is positive that we’re moving towards federal enforceable standards for PFOA and PFOS.”

How does this differ from Wisconsin’s current regulations?

In February 2022, the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board approved a drinking water standard of 70 ppt for PFOA and PFOS individually and combined, well above the EPA’s draft regulation. The state has no enforceable limits for the other four PFAS EPA identified.

States may impose stricter standards than the EPA’s, but those with weaker regulations must at least match the federal rules. Wisconsin would initiate a rulemaking process to comply, which typically takes 31 months.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources already requires PFAS monitoring for PFOA and PFOS. If federal regulations are approved, impacted municipalities already will have identified PFAS contamination and possibly taken action, said Adam DeWeese, the department’s public water supply section chief.

What do we currently know about Wisconsin water supplies?

Due to staggered deadlines for PFOA and PFOS testing, only a fraction of Wisconsin utilities have submitted initial results to the DNR. All utilities must publish their test outcomes, which can be viewed online.

As of March 14, more than three dozen water utilities had detected PFOA or PFOS during routine monitoring. Wausau saw the highest result: 8 ppt of PFOA detected in January.

What has the EPA done until this point?

The Biden administration previously committed to releasing draft PFOA and PFOS standards by fall 2022 and finalizing them one year later.

Critics call the delay emblematic of a broader trend within Biden’s EPA, which has missed several self-imposed deadlines targeting PFAS in waterways and air.

The agency is hosting community engagement sessions to review its PFAS initiatives.

How long would utilities have to comply?

The agency will accept public comments at www.regulations.gov, and the final regulation could differ based on that feedback. A virtual public hearing is scheduled for May 4. Register to attend or speak here. September 2024 marks EPA’s statutory deadline to finalize the rule, but Regan said he hopes to do so sooner.

Utilities would have three years to comply.

“Water systems are going to need time to upgrade their treatment technology, their monitoring programs, their laboratories to be able to measure this,” Cwiertny said. “There’s going to be some time before we see the actual effect.”

How might this affect water rates?

Nationwide, the rule could cost anywhere from $772 million to $1.2 billion to implement each year, depending upon interest rates, according to EPA estimates. But it would also deliver $908 million to $1.2 billion in health and economic benefits — including avoided treatment for ailments linked to PFAS. The agency acknowledged a range of uncertainty in estimating costs and benefits.

The American Water Works Association, however, pinned costs in excess of $3.8 billion annually.

Water systems that detect too much PFAS may need to raise rates. That happened in Wausau after the city’s utility constructed a new water treatment plant, which came online in late 2022. Wausau already planned to build a new facility when PFAS were discovered in all six of the city’s wells. It plans to add a $16.8 million system to remove PFAS using activated carbon. Both projects contributed to rising water rates.

“PFOS and PFOA, they aren’t the only emerging contaminants that we’re worried about,” said Wausau Mayor Katie Rosenberg. “Being able to remove all of it, that’s my goal, personally.”

Eau Claire, Wisconsin, another community with PFAS contamination, could spend an estimated $24 million to upgrade its treatment plant.

Similar stories could play out nationwide.

Congress has allocated billions of dollars for water upgrades through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. In Wisconsin, public water utilities can apply to federally funded loan programs.

“We recognize that that’s not enough for every single water utility in the country, but it’s a shot in the arm,” Regan said.

The standards — and EPA’s calculations — are not without critics.

“We have serious concerns with the underlying science used to develop these proposed MCLs and have previously challenged the EPA based on the process used to develop that science,” said the American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers. “The EPA’s misguided approach to these MCLs is important, as these low limits will likely result in billions of dollars in compliance costs.”

Some say polluters should bear treatment costs rather than taxpayers.

“It’s great to see the administration stand up and say, ‘We’ve got a PFAS problem’ and to dedicate billions of dollars toward it, but we have to remember that’s our money — that’s the victim’s money,” said attorney Rob Bilott, whose lawsuit against chemical company DuPont for PFOS dumping in rural West Virginia was the subject of the film “Dark Waters.”

“We need to be holding the people responsible who caused the problem in the first place,” he said during a February press conference.

What EPA’s nationwide PFAS rule means for Wisconsin drinking water  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Commercial fisher Bryan Bainbridge can net several thousand pounds of whitefish or herring from Lake Superior during a successful run, but his greatest gratification comes when he returns to the dock.

Sometimes people ask if they can have some fish. He takes pride in being able to provide.

The operation is more than just business for Bainbridge, 45, a former tribal chairman of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, one of six federally recognized Ojibwe tribes in Wisconsin.

“It’s a part of who we are and what we do to live,” Bainbridge said.

But a recent study highlighting the potential dangers of “forever chemicals” has raised questions about the impacts of consuming fish exposed to toxins in the nation’s waterways, including the Great Lakes. For Indigenous nations like the Red Cliff band, where fishing is central to tribal lifeways, culture and sovereignty, contamination could pose disproportionate health burdens. 

Yet, oversimplifying or overstating the risks carries consequences.

For decades, state governments have advised the public to limit the amount or types of Great Lakes fish they eat due to the presence of mercury, a neurotoxin, and carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls. 

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, have more recently triggered fish consumption advisories. The class of more than 12,000 chemicals, some linked to health problems, don’t break down in the environment — hence their “forever chemical” moniker.

Bainbridge believes Lake Superior’s advisories misleadingly brand all fish as unsafe.

“Lake Superior is still one of the most pristine resources for consumable products,” he said. “It’s really not fair on how that can affect our market.”

Experts say he has a point. When inadequately communicated, fish advisories might stigmatize fish consumption.

“That’s a harm to give someone the wrong impression and discourage them from doing something that should otherwise be healthy,” said Matthew Dellinger, an associate professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, who studies risk communication and health literacy.

Still, when fish contain contaminants, the public should understand the risks. Those who issue recommendations walk a tightrope as they balance the needs for transparency and stigma avoidance.

Acknowledging health benefits of fish 

Environmental health agencies generally base fish consumption advisories on an “average” consumer’s diet. Those guidelines don’t necessarily reflect the heightened toxic exposure faced by communities of color, low-income communities or Indigenous peoples.

Great Lakes region residents consume more than twice the fish as the average American, according to some estimates, while tribal nations consume up to 13 times more.

Giving up fish is not possible when people lack an alternative.

“For a county (Ashland) that’s economically oppressed, we have relied on the land and the water to feed our families,” said Edith Leoso, retired tribal historic preservation officer with the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. “A lot of our tribal members have a very low income” and “are strongly dependent on fish, deer meat, wild rice — anything they can get harvesting.”

And when other options exist — often, processed, shelf-stable foods — they aren’t typically as nourishing. 

Researchers link the loss of traditional foods to nutritional health risks for Indigenous people. 

“In a world where our number one killers are mostly related to cardiovascular issues, at least when it comes to chronic health conditions, you don’t want to adopt a public health strategy that’s just going to blanketly reduce consumption of a healthy food item,” Dellinger said.

Across Indigenous communities in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, cardiovascular disease is the second leading cause of death, after cancer. It occurs at a rate significantly higher than among white residents of those states, according to the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Epidemiology Center.

Context matters in fish advisories

Ojibwe tribes have long resisted federal and state efforts to restrict their access to fish on the Great Lakes and inland.

In the mid-1800s, the United States forcibly acquired Ojibwe lands and waters through a succession of treaties. But the tribes expressly retained hunting, gathering and fishing rights in a region known as the Ceded Territory, encompassing portions of Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and three Great Lakes. States subsequently disregarded or rejected the treaties outright. 

Tribal citizens filed multiple legal challenges over the ensuing decades, achieving a major victory in Michigan in 1971. Later court rulings required the other two states to likewise recognize treaty rights.

Encouraging people to reduce their consumption of certain fish risks simultaneously disconnecting them from a healthy food source along with tradition, history and culture, Dellinger said.

He repeatedly encounters such worries during focus groups with Ojibwe people.

“What’s the purpose of a fish consumption advisory?” Dellinger said. “Is it to tell people not to eat fish, to not engage in this activity, to not value the Great Lakes and all it has to offer? Or is the purpose to try to help guide them so that they can make their own decisions and navigate the risks and benefits so that they can partake of this part of life?”

History of fish advisories

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency delegates the responsibility of setting fish consumption advisories to states. The details vary. Even neighboring states adjacent to shared water bodies sometimes issue contradictory guidelines.

Michigan issued the nation’s first advisory in 1971, prompted by the discovery of mercury in fish from the St. Clair River, south of Lake Huron.

Thousands more advisories followed. As of 2011, the final year in which the EPA compiled advisory data, more than 5,627 were active across 4,821 water bodies nationwide.

“The idea behind fish consumption advisories was that they were going to be temporary until things could be cleaned up,” said assistant professor Valoree Gagnon, director of university-Indigenous community partnerships at Michigan Technological University’s Great Lakes Research Center. “Many people don’t even question their existence as much anymore.”

An EPA illustration underscores that point. It depicts four cartoonish fish with the caption: “One fish. Two fish. Don’t fish. Do fish.”

“A play on Dr. Seuss,” Gagnon said, “as if having advisories is just a normal part of life and growing up.”

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources regularly publishes guidelines, urging fishers to “choose wisely.”

“We strongly encourage folks to continue to go and fish,” said Sean Strom, a DNR fish and wildlife toxicologist. “But we just want them to be aware of any advisories that might be in place for their given body of water.”

In advisories, federal and state regulators usually cite elevated risks for children and people who are pregnant, seek to become pregnant or who are breastfeeding.

But some scholars say fish advisories unfairly direct people to avoid risk by changing their behavior, rather than requiring polluters to reduce risk by cleaning up contamination.

“We could envision a world without them,” Gagnon said. “If we thought about that, maybe we’d try harder to get on that path.”

Presenting fish advisories differently

But until cleanup occurs, people need information to make informed choices, according to the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. The federal advisory committee recommends disseminating culturally appropriate and specific material.

Experts have developed methods of conveying risk that incorporate the importance of fishing to Indigenous communities.

Dellinger helped develop a mobile app, called Gigiigoo’inaan, “our fish” in the Ojibwe language, to encourage consumption within government-established safety limits.

The personalized recommendations account for age, sex, weight and portion size and rank fish from “more beneficial” to “less beneficial.” The advisories are based on data from tribal harvests and apply only to the 1836 Ceded Territory portions of the Great Lakes, which excludes several urban areas.

Gigiigoo’inaan incorporates mercury and PCB contamination in its recommendations, but not PFAS. Dellinger has reasons.

In 2022, the EPA updated draft health advisories for two PFAS — PFOA and PFOS — to levels so low as to suggest no amount of the chemicals are safe for human consumption.

Duke University and Environmental Working Group researchers considered those levels when analyzing freshwater fish sampled nationwide by the EPA from 2013 to 2015.

The study reported that consuming an 8-ounce serving of sampled fish at the median PFOS level would raise the concentration of PFOS in blood serum to a level 2,400 times greater than the EPA’s latest health advisory — equivalent to drinking contaminated water for one month. If all fish consumption advisories incorporated the EPA’s guidance, the authors wrote, nearly all agency-sampled freshwater fish would be considered unsafe to eat.

While such conclusions make for splashy headlines, Dellinger said, they might overstate the risks of PFOS when additional research is needed: scientists still are determining appropriate risk benchmarks, major exposure routes and hotspot locations. Unclear is whether the EPA-sampled fish represent the species most people consume or swim in the locations where most people fish.

“I’m not saying there isn’t a risk,” Dellinger said. “There almost certainly is because they found these fish. But we would need to know more about where exactly these fish are coming from.”

David Andrews, EWG senior scientist, did not respond to a request for comment.

Although Gigiigoo’inaan does not provide PFOS advice, an updated version of the app will direct fishers to local resources.

The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, a natural resource management organization that works with 11 tribes in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, offers guidance to promote safe eating of ogaa (walleye) and maazhiginoozhe (musky). The commission publishes maps for inland lakes within the Ceded Territory that suggest a maximum number of meals per month specific to each lake for a 20-inch-long fish, offering flexibility that acknowledges traditional consumption patterns.

“We try to emphasize that the smaller the walleye, the more you can eat,” said Caren Ackley, GLIFWC environmental biologist.

Commission staff provide tribal citizens with maps when they register for the fish spearing season.

“Because GLIFWC tribal members rely on fish for subsistence and cultural lifeways, we have to be mindful about how we communicate safe fish consumption to them,” said Hannah Arbuckle, GLIFWC’s outreach coordinator. “People live off of these fish.”

Why fish consumption advisories in Great Lakes states like Wisconsin carry their own risks is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Listen to reporter Bennet Goldstein discuss this story on WORT.

The ensnared fish seemed to materialize from the opaque water. Thrashing, wriggling, they rose, enfolded by mesh.

The lift reeled in the gillnet into the arms of a waiting crew, who hoisted it atop a table. Lake herring flopped weakly as the men gripped and untangled them from rope and nylon fiber. Iridescent scales popped into the air like confetti.

“When the floor is shiny with scales, we know we are making money,” said commercial fisherman Donny Livingston, grinning widely.

Shortly before dawn, the fish tug, Ava June, pulled out from Duffy’s Dock, on the tip of northern Wisconsin’s Bayfield Peninsula. The vessel churned through Lake Superior’s chilly waters for 2 1/2 hours.

Waves slapped the boat after it left the shelter of the Apostle Islands near the main shipping channel. Snow drifted from the cloud-choked November sky. The fishermen finally reached the nets they set the previous day.

Livingston is a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, one of six federally recognized Ojibwe tribes in Wisconsin. His family has fished for generations and holds one of the original licenses issued to Red Cliff tribal citizens.

But Livingston’s access to Lake Superior fish was never a foregone conclusion.

Ojibwe, Ottawa and Potawatomi communities, who also call themselves Anishinaabe, have fished in the Great Lakes for centuries. But in the mid-1800s, the federal government, desiring to open the Wisconsin Territory to lumbering and mining, forcibly acquired Ojibwe lands and waters through a succession of treaties. 

The bands retained hunting, gathering and fishing rights across what’s now called the Ceded Territory: portions of three Great Lakes and millions of acres stretching across northwestern Michigan and its Upper Peninsula, northern Wisconsin and northeastern Minnesota. The final treaty established reservations for four of the Wisconsin Ojibwe tribes.

States spent a century disregarding or rejecting treaty rights — fining or arresting tribal citizens who exercised them. After several citizens sued, a series of court rulings, starting in 1971, would affirm their reserved rights within the Ceded Territory, including the right to fish on Lake Superior.

But many see toxic pollution in the Great Lakes as a continued encroachment on how Ojibwe communities exercise those rights. 

Alongside mercury, a neurotoxin that can harm the brains and nervous systems of developing fetuses, and carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), are the latest contaminants of concern — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

The “forever chemicals” are a class of more than 12,000 compounds that accumulate in the environment and human bodies. Scientists link two of the most widely researched — PFOA and PFOS — to a range of health problems, including cancer.

The failure of state and federal governments to keep contaminants out of the environment, scholars and environmental advocates say, calls into question their commitment to fully protect Indigenous rights.

“It’s a modern way of denying access and destroying foodways,” said Katrina Phillips, an associate professor of history at Macalester College and a Red Cliff citizen. “It’s through chemicals and pollutants instead of treaties and court cases.”

Tribes aim to fill regulatory vacuums through their own natural resources department projects, input on cross-government management committees and litigation. Now, those efforts may get support from a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposal that elevates consideration of treaty rights when states set water quality regulations.

Fish are vital for Ojibwe communities

Livingston, 42, supposes he is one of the youngest commercial fishers in Red Cliff.

The work is grueling. Profit margins, narrow. Crew, tough to find. 

When he’s not out fishing, Livingston stays busy mending nets.

“It ain’t a 9 to 5,” he said during the November fishing trip, “I’ll tell ya’ that.”

Livingston tried other careers but always returned to fishing.

“It’s something I know how to do,” he said. “It’s something I can depend on.”

Livingston and his three-member crew worked a nearly 12-hour shift on Lake Superior, or Anishinaabe Gitchigami in the Ojibwe language.

The Red Cliff Reservation flanks the lake’s southern coastline, marked by blazing sandstone cliffs, wetland sloughs and rivers.

Coyotes and bobcats roam its 15,000-plus acres. Whitetail deer bound through rolling forests, dense with conifers and hardwoods. Bald eagles soar overhead, and ospreys dive to prey on fish.

These relatives — the plants and animals, the land and water — sustain Ojibwe communities, as Chief Flat Mouth, of the Pillager band from Leech Lake in Minnesota, articulated in 1837 while negotiating one of the treaties. He questioned the fairness of the federal government’s proposed compensation for taking control of Ojibwe territory. 

“You know that without the lands, and the rivers and lakes, we could not live,” the chief told government officials. “We hunt and make sugar and dig roots upon the former, while we fish and obtain rice and drink from the latter.”

Giigoonh, or fish, are important for subsistence, culture and business. But climate change threatens many species, and contaminants long released into the Great Lakes, the health of people who eat them.

“The community getting impacted by something in the environment, that’s something that has been happening to us from day one of European onset,” said Edith Leoso, retired tribal historic preservation officer with the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

A Great Lake for fishing

Livingston and his business partner, Bryan Bainbridge, grew up in and around Red Cliff.

More than 7,600 people are living tribal citizens, about 16% of whom live on the reservation. A few hundred reside just 3 miles south in Bayfield, a destination for lake-loving tourists.

The tribe is the largest employer in the county, providing jobs to about 300 people — many in tribal administration and the Legendary Waters Resort and Casino.

But at its heart, Red Cliff is a fishing community.

“That’s what everybody’s family has done around here,” said Bainbridge, 45, a former Red Cliff tribal chairman. “I grew up on fish.”

Bluegills, perch, suckers — a fish every day, whatever they caught.

Livingston and Bainbridge teamed up about a decade ago shortly before Bainbridge acquired the tug from an old fisherman in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Constructed in the mid-1940s by the Burger Boat Company in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, the diesel-powered boat measures nearly 50 feet from bow to stern. Bainbridge christened it the Ava June.

“My niece had a little baby that died just before I got the boat,” Bainbridge said, “so when I got back here, we named it.”

In their day-to-day business operations, Bainbridge handles the duo’s paperwork. Livingston does most of the captaining. “He can catch fish like no one else,” Bainbridge said.

With SiriusXM radio blasting during the November fishing run, the crew worked quietly, tossing freshly caught fish into stacked plastic boxes. They laughed whenever one chucked a herring at the other.

That day, they sold their catch to the Red Cliff Fish Company, a tribally owned fish processor and seller, but they also distribute fish to markets as far away as New York.

After decades of overfishing from the late-1800s through the 1930s and the introduction of invasive species, Lake Superior’s fish populations have rebounded enough to sustain a consumer market. Among tribally licensed commercial fishermen, whitefish, salmon, lake trout, trout and lake herring constitute the bulk of the catch. 

The combined commercial fish harvest of 11 Ojibwe nations that are members of the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, an inter-tribal natural resource management organization that helps oversee the implementation of off-reservation treaty rights, annually exceeds 2 million pounds.

PFAS in Great Lakes water and fish 

For much of the 20th century, manufacturing plants generated mercury- and PCB-containing wastes and dumped them directly into the Great Lakes or its watershed. Power plants and incinerators also spewed air pollution that tainted waters, and they continue to do so.

Their concentrations have declined significantly in Great Lakes waters since the 1970s due to efforts of the U.S. and Canadian governments, states and industry to reduce toxic emissions. Yet lingering mercury and PCBs bioaccumulate in animals at levels high enough to warrant fish consumption advisories.

PFAS also are drawing greater scrutiny as their harms come into focus. In 2021, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources issued Lake Superior’s first PFOS advisory, warning against eating too many smelt. 

PFAS, which are added to products ranging from fabric stain protectors to firefighting foam to food packaging, enter water bodies through wastewater, airport and fire training runoff and the atmosphere.

“You find these chemicals everywhere,” said Christy Remucal, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies PFAS contamination in the Great Lakes. “I don’t think we’ve ever not measured them in a water sample.”

Researchers have yet to develop effective methods for destroying PFAS at scale, and Lake Superior’s gargantuan proportions would make doing so impossible.

Compared to the other Great Lakes, the concentration of PFAS in Lake Superior water is lower due to less development within its watershed. But virtually no amount of PFOA and PFOS is safe for human consumption, according to the EPA, which in 2022 updated draft health advisories for the two chemicals.

A recent study from Duke University and Environmental Working Group researchers found large concentrations of PFOS in freshwater fish sampled nationwide by the EPA from 2013 to 2015, with the highest levels found in the Great Lakes.

If all consumption advisories incorporated the EPA’s latest health guidance, the study found, nearly all sampled fish would be “considered unsafe to eat.”

The impacts of such pollution and climate change create “an elevated level of environmental anxiety” in Ojibwe communities, said Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, associate director of Northland College’s Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute and a former Bad River tribal council member.

“Once these things go away, they don’t come back,” Jennings said. “It’s about our life.”

Anishinaabe cultures embedded in places  

Leoso, the former Bad River tribal historic preservation officer, grew up on the reservation in her grandparents’ house near the Kakagon River.

Her grandmother grew angry when children threw things into the water to watch them wander with the seiche. She told them never to spit into the river.

“It was putting the thought into my mind: should I spit in the river?” Leoso said. “Would I like to be spit on?”

One day, Leoso’s grandmother decided to teach the young girl to pray for the water by placing tobacco into it. Leoso, then about 8 years old, had been raised Catholic.

“Don’t do anything disrespectful on this water or to this water,” her grandmother told her. “Because it’ll take care of you, and everything you need is here.”

Indigenous origin stories, histories, languages and cultures are embedded in the land, said Phillips, the historian.

“For Ojibwe people in northern Wisconsin, Lake Superior and the northern part of Wisconsin with Red Cliff and Bad River, these places define who we are,” she said.

The Anishinaabe migration story, which recounts the journey from the East Coast to the Great Lakes, is just as much about place as it is people; and those places and the beings living there are considered precious. 

While Biblical cosmology frames mankind as “masters over the fish in the ocean, the birds that fly, the livestock, everything that crawls on the earth and over the earth itself,” Ojibwe communities invert that pyramid, said Mike Wiggins Jr., Bad River tribal chairman.

“Human beings, we as people, are the most pitiful,” he told listeners during a Wisconsin Historical Society storytelling event. “Without Mother Nature, we go away. Without human beings, Mother Nature thrives. And so, there’s some humility to that.”

In accordance with their bimaadiziwin, or traditional lifeway, Ojibwe people harvest from nature — things like wild rice, deer, maple sap and fish — as an act of stewardship. If they do not, the Creator will cease to provide those beings.

When the land and water are contaminated, future generations lose knowledge and stories centered on fishing and other harvesting. Family, kinship, oral history, ceremony, community cohesion, food security and self-determination suffer.

“Everything that makes us Native,” said Patty Loew, director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University and a Bad River citizen.

“If the health of the fish or the wild rice is compromised,” she said, “then treaty rights are meaningless.”

Great Lakes cleanups see mixed outcomes  

U.S. and Canadian governments have achieved some successes in improving the health of the Great Lakes and its fish since 1972. That’s when the countries signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which aims to coordinate Canadian and U.S. lake restoration efforts. Yet, neither country is required to abide by the agreement, which is periodically updated, and the International Joint Commission, formed by the binational Boundary Waters Treaty in 1909, issues recommendations to both parties but lacks authority to compel action.

The non-regulatory Great Lakes Restoration Initiative supports the agreement through funding and goal-setting. Key aims include restoring some of the most polluted “areas of concern” along the lakes.

In a 2022 progress report, the EPA and its Canadian counterpart praised “unprecedented progress” toward that goal. The countries have so far delisted nine of 43 sites.

However, both countries have failed to meet a 1990 International Joint Commission challenge to eliminate the release of nine toxic pollutants into the Lake Superior Basin. 

The lack of a final deadline or requirement that the countries launch new initiatives stymied the effort, scholars say.

In 1999, the program selected 2020 as the year to achieve “virtual elimination” of the pollutants. Neither country has banned toxic discharges, enabling them to continue.

In their 2022 assessment, the countries rated the status of toxic chemicals in Lake Superior’s fish as “fair and unchanging” — not yet safe to consume without restrictions.

EPA proposal: regulations must consider treaty rights 

The 20th-century court rulings in Wisconsin that affirmed treaty rights addressed whether, where and how Ojibwe tribes could exercise them and the regulations deemed necessary to ensure the “supply” of natural resources would be maintained. But courts did not consider the quality of plant and animal habitats.

“It’s a legally gray area, how far the tribes can dictate what a state or the federal government might have to do or not do in order to preserve the treaty rights,” said Ann McCammon Soltis, director of the division of intergovernmental affairs at the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.

But GLIFWC’s member tribes believe states should preserve the integrity of natural resources, she said. 

A recent EPA proposal could address some of those concerns.

The draft rule would require states to account for treaty rights, such as fishing and wild rice gathering, when adopting water quality standards under the Clean Water Act. That law forces states, territories and some tribal governments to improve the quality of water bodies within their borders when they cannot safely be utilized for designated purposes, such as drinking or recreation.

States would also need to preserve full use of any resources guaranteed under the treaties on and off reservations. The EPA is accepting public comment on the draft rule until March 6.

Wisconsin DNR officials said the agency already consults with affected tribes and considers their uses of a waterbody when it sets water quality standards. Tribes also may submit comments when states review their standards every three years.

But “the states haven’t really had to respond in any way” when the tribe presents a request, Soltis said. 

“This indicates that the EPA is going to be a little bit more willing to take what the tribes say seriously in that context and ensure that the state is responding.”

Red Cliff band protects sovereignty 

Absent stronger state and federal action, Ojibwe communities have forged strategies to protect water, fisheries and lifeways now and for the next seven generations.

“Our reservation is booming and our people, more and more people, are coming home,” Bainbridge said of Red Cliff. “We want to make sure that we maintain the integrity of what we’ve been allowed to harvest and what’s been provided for us.”

To that end, Red Cliff’s Treaty Natural Resources Division oversees the protection and enhancement of natural resources within the reservation boundaries and the band’s ceded territory. That includes stream and riverbank restoration, water and air quality monitoring, hazardous waste disposal and wild rice reseeding. An environmental justice specialist monitors outside projects including mines, pipelines and concentrated animal feeding operations that could affect treaty rights.

The tribe bolsters food sovereignty through its Red Cliff Fish Company, which opened in 2020, and 35-acre Mino Bimaadiziiwin Gitigaanin — Return to the Good Life Farm.

Red Cliff Tribal Fish Hatchery staff raise brook trout in hopes of restoring populations to past levels in Lake Superior. They also rear walleye in ponds to increase populations in inland lakes.

Practicing treaty rights might be viewed as a political act in a country with a long history of challenging them.

“Having to fight for access to food is kind of mind-boggling in a sense,” Phillips said. “Advocating for the right to feed your people is somehow seen as resistance or activism.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter and donate to support our fact-checked journalism.

Great Lakes pollution threatens Ojibwe treaty rights to fish  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Ojibwe tribes have fished in the Great Lakes for centuries, but throughout their histories, have faced numerous incursions and displacements — possibly including the circumstances that led to their migration to the region.

“We originated on the East Coast, near the Great Salt Water,” said Edith Leoso, retired tribal historic preservation officer with the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. “There was this spirit entity that came to us and said that there was a light-skinned race that would come from where the sun rises and that upon their coming, our way of life would be jeopardized.”

The Ojibwe, and the related Ottawa and Potawatomi peoples, also refer to themselves as Anishinaabe, which has several meanings, including ‘‘original person,” “the people” and “from whence descended man.”

One telling of the migration story begins when prophets told the Anishinaabe that a sacred shell would guide them westward from the Atlantic Coast to a place where food grows on top of the water. They would stop to rest seven times.

The final stopover occurred at what would come to be called Madeline Island, the largest of Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands. The location is considered a spiritual center for Anishinaabe nations. To the south in the Kakagon Sloughs, manoomin, or wild rice, still grows at the water’s surface.

Tribes cede territory through treaties 

By the mid-1800s, the United States sought to acquire the territory, rich with timber and minerals, through treaties with Ojibwe bands living in present-day Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. A succession of treaties, negotiated with the federal government in 1836, 1837, 1842 and 1854, established the Ceded Territory.

It is a misconception that the government granted Ojibwe tribes treaty rights. On the contrary, the Ojibwe tribes retained rights to hunt, fish and gather and granted other rights to the United States.

Henry Dodge, the first governor of the Wisconsin Territory, helped oversee the 1837 negotiations, as chronicled by historian Ronald Satz. Federal officials offered to pay tribes $800,000, distributed in annuities over 20 years. The 1842 treaty called for the disbursement of about $800,000 more, across 25 years.

Ojibwe tribes would cede more than 22,000 square miles of land within Wisconsin alone, in addition to nearly 14,000 square miles of Lake Superior’s waters.

Chiefs believed they faced coercion and deception during negotiations, historical records show. Ojibwe delegations thought they were enabling the Americans to use their lands for lumbering and copper mining, not relinquishing ownership of them nor agreeing to leave.

Forced removal and ‘Wisconsin Death March’

The tribes had been assured in 1842 they could remain in Wisconsin so long as they “lived on friendly terms with the whites,” but in February 1850, President Zachary Taylor revoked the Ojibwe bands’ treaty rights through an executive order. He ordered their removal to the unceded Minnesota Territory to open Wisconsin to white settlement.

That autumn, federal officials attempted to dull dissent from the Wisconsin Ojibwe tribes by requiring them to travel to Sandy Lake, in Minnesota, to receive their annuity. Previous payments occurred at Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin.

Federal officials did not arrive at the lake as scheduled and failed to provide promised rations. Hundreds of Ojibwe people died from exposure to cold weather, famine and infectious disease.

The incident, which one scholar has called the “Wisconsin Death March,” set into motion events leading to the Treaty of 1854, which established, at the insistence of tribal leaders, permanent reservations for four Ojibwe tribes in Wisconsin. Before that occurred, however, several Ojibwe leaders, including Chief Buffalo of the La Pointe band, traveled to Washington to petition Taylor’s successor, President Millard Fillmore, to rescind the removal order.

Treaty rights ignored, discarded

Still, Ojibwe people faced obstacles in exercising their treaty rights over the next 150 years, fueling ongoing advocacy.

While the U.S. Constitution holds that state laws are subordinate to the founding document, federal law and treaties, Wisconsin increasingly exerted control over the Ojibwe tribes, asserting they were subject to state fishing and hunting regulations.

Meanwhile, federal allotment policies — designed to encourage private land ownership and farming among tribal citizens — dramatically reduced tribal landholdings nationwide, shrinking the jurisdictions in which Indigenous nations could exercise their sovereignty. 

The Dawes Act of 1887 granted citizenship to American Indians who took allotments. Great Lakes states continued to call treaty rights moot, reasoning that Indians fell under their jurisdiction when they became citizens. In 1908, the Wisconsin Supreme Court dismissed the treaties altogether, ruling that Wisconsin’s admittance to the union had invalidated them 60 years earlier. 

By the early 20th century, historian Chantal Norrgard writes, commercial fishing had decimated several fish species on Lake Superior, prompting states and the federal government to regulate everything from fishing seasons to net sizes.

Alongside ecological concerns, efforts to preserve fisheries for tourism motivated the passage of new protections and hiring of wardens to enforce them.

Large fishing companies also exerted their influence in the passage of legislation, fearing competition from independent and tribal operators. Both industry and the state viewed treaty rights as a threat.

Tribes defeat Apostle Islands National Lakeshore relocation plan 

As government actors sought to regulate Ojibwe communities’ harvest, some federal officials sought to relocate tribes from their reservations. 

In the late-1960s, the Bad River and Red Cliff bands, two of six federally recognized Ojibwe tribes in Wisconsin, defeated plans by then-U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a former Wisconsin governor, to appropriate reservation land to create the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. 

The plan would have relocated the tribes inland, with potential termination of their hunting and fishing rights within the new park.

“The only way that the state can think of to increase access for non-Native tourists to the lands and to the resources on the lands is to restrict the access of Native people,” said Katrina Phillips, an associate professor of history at Macalester College and a Red Cliff citizen.

Court rulings affirm treaty rights

Throughout the 20th century, states punished Ojibwe people for hunting or fishing on reservations or within the Ceded Territory. They challenged their citations and arrests in court.

Landmark rulings would affirm the Ojibwe tribes’ treaty rights — the 1972 Gurnoe decision, the right to fish in Lake Superior. The 1983 Voigt decision applied to inland lakes within the Ceded Territory, along with other forms of harvest.

Still, harassment of Indigenous fishers continued during Wisconsin’s violent Walleye Wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it has persisted to a lesser extent in recent years. 

Red Cliff land repatriation 

The Red Cliff Reservation now spans more than 15,000 acres, but the tribe does not own all of those lands. 

As of 2006, the tribe only held property rights to slightly more than half. The rest was a checkerboard of public and private plots within the reservation boundaries. For example, when Congress created the national lakeshore in 1970, it designated several miles of coast — about 10% of Red Cliff Reservation lands — as the mainland portion of the park.

But in an assertion of sovereignty, Phillips wrote, Red Cliff repatriated other properties within and outside its borders. In 2012, it opened the tribally managed Frog Bay Tribal National Park, the first of its kind in the United States. The park includes an 89-acre parcel of former reservation land that was repatriated that year and a second, 86-acre parcel, acquired in 2017.

The tribe’s repatriation of formerly held reservation lands in the ensuing years, including 1,582 acres of forest owned by Bayfield County, represents a continued exercise of self-determination, Phillips said.

“That history of advocacy — it’s not something that just kind of came out of nowhere,” she said. “It’s been there for centuries.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter and donate to support our fact-checked journalism.

How Ojibwe tribes in Wisconsin resisted efforts to deny treaty rights  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Listen to reporter Bennet Goldstein discuss this story on Milwaukee’s WUWM.

Shannon and Eve Mingalone avow that their farmers market booth is “very gay.”

They hang strings of pride flags and sell rainbow stickers to help pay for gender-affirming care, like hormone replacement therapy, for Eve.

Sometimes, when parents and their teenagers pass the booth, the adults glance, then speed ahead. The kids pause for a second look. Shannon, 34, hopes it means something for them to see LGBTQ professionals out and succeeding.

People often share stories. The middle-aged woman who confided that her daughter is transgender. The teen who stood in the middle of the Mingalones’ booth and said, “This makes me feel safe.”  

“That means everything to me,” Shannon said.

Now in their second season, she and Eve, 35, grow more than 45 varieties of vegetables at their business, Ramshackle Farm, in Harvard, Illinois.

Lettuces and Asian greens emerge on stacks of hydroponic troughs and spinach in a warm hoop house. Outside, Shannon and Eve tend to arugula, broccoli, peas and radishes using intensive planting and heavy rotation techniques — never pesticides or synthetic fertilizer.

Their operation is an exception to the sprawling corn and bean fields that dominate the landscape. Shannon and Eve work to feed people, not livestock or cars.

Shannon wears her politics on her coveralls. Her favorite jean jacket includes patches that declare “End monoculture” and “Save the earth. Bankrupt a corporation.”

The Mingalones are among a multitude of LGBTQ farmers who draw connections between their identities and agriculture, including their adoption of sustainable practices. 

“We’re not just raising food,” Shannon said. “We are creating safe spaces for people.”

Like many, they used to have a specific image of a “typical farmer:” white, male, heterosexual, Christian and conservative. Excluded from that vision — or perhaps myth — is a space for them. 

So they are creating one.

The presence of LGBTQ people in agriculture challenges stereotypes of who can, or should be, interested in farming. But the community is not a monolith, interviews with 16 Midwestern LGBTQ producers indicate. Some use restorative techniques in hopes of reducing environmental destruction and social inequity. Others run conventional operations, which industry representatives and policymakers say are key to feeding the world’s growing population.

Nonetheless, as LGBTQ farmers navigate common hurdles, ranging from land inaccessibility to federal lending restrictions to social isolation, they rely on creativity and resilience to survive, much like they do in other arenas of their lives.

USDA doesn’t count LGBTQ farmers

No definitive figures measure how many LGBTQ people farm in America. The U.S. Department of Agriculture asks respondents to identify their sex in its five-year censuses, not their sexual orientation or gender identity.

But the department is considering adding those questions to the 2027 Census of Agriculture. It conducted a pilot study in late 2021 to gauge whether their inclusion would affect response rates.

Responses decreased significantly when the questions were inserted, despite the survey’s confidentiality. The study lacked possible explanations for the findings.

But when word of the survey reached U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., he accused the USDA and President Joe Biden of advancing a “woke agenda.” Hawley claimed in a tweet that a farmer sent him a copy of the document. The lawmaker questioned, facetiously, the relevance of “such important” questions to the farming profession.

The National Young Farmers Coalition likewise encountered pushback from outside of the LGBTQ community to a survey that included similar demographic questions.

But a failure to acquire demographic information about LGBTQ people prevents improvements to services, said Katie Dentzman, a rural sociology and public policy assistant professor at Iowa State University.

“If you’re completely unaware that these people are out there, then their issues are completely being ignored,” she said. “In a way, that is perpetuating violence in a system.”

Dentzman jimmied a statistical workaround using the USDA’s 2017 census, finding that 8,302 farms were overseen by men married to men and 3,550 by women married to women. That was about 1.2% of all dually run farms nationwide.

Dentzman found that many same-sex couples farmed conventionally. But same-sex married men were more likely to have organic land and grow products intended for human consumption than farms run by men married to women. Likewise, women married to women more often engaged in alternative farming practices like intensive grazing and the production of value-added products.

Might LGBTQ people’s unique vantage draw them to sustainable farming?

It’s possible, Dentzman said, but as other sociologists have proposed, the economic and social disadvantages queer people face also might funnel them into alternative agriculture. That is, they lack the expansive resources and capital necessary to farm conventionally.

Statistically, LGBTQ people experience higher rates of poverty and food insecurity compared to non-LGBTQ people. They also earn less dollar-for-dollar and disproportionately experience homelessness.

Then add the upfront costs of farming.

Land access remains a top obstacle to entering agriculture, and attempting to do so without the backing of family can be a Herculean task.

Fifty-nine percent of respondents to the 2022 National Young Farmer Survey said finding affordable farmland to purchase is very or extremely challenging, while 45% said the same of finding any farmland at all. 

Meanwhile, the cost of cropland is rising nationwide.

Corbin Scholz, 27, operates Rainbow Roots, an organic farm “rooted in queerness” on 6 acres of rented land north of Iowa City, Iowa. She does not come from a farm family and works two other jobs to support herself.

Scholz’s lease expires after the 2024 growing season and she doesn’t know whether she will be able to renew.

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to ever afford a farm,” Scholz said, “and moving everything I’ve built to another one-to-five-year lease really limits my growth opportunity.”

Family link keeps Iowan farming

No rainbow flags hang on the red barn at Hoefler Dairy.

But it’s apparent the men who live there are hitched when one casually grabs the other’s butt as he strides past him in the milking parlor.

Under the drone of equipment, Andy Ferguson walked down a row of cows to check that the milkers were running smoothly. His husband, John Hoefler, a third-generation dairy farmer, crouched to retrieve a bucket of rags. Outside, dusty brown fields — freshly combined during the autumn harvest — stretched across the gentle hills surrounding New Vienna, Iowa.

Hoefler feels fortunate to own a farm. He milks 230 cows, occasionally with help from Ferguson, who is a school administrator in nearby Dubuque.

Both 51-year-olds previously were married to women and fathered children.

Marrying, having kids, it was the normal thing to do, said Hoefler, who spent nine years with his wife.

“I thought I could just do it.”

But he couldn’t.

Hoefler’s divorce upset his father — a “good German Catholic.” That his son was gay added to his distress. He tried to take Hoefler to the hospital after the secret came out.

“Because you’re sick,” his father told Hoefler. “You’re sick.”

Hoefler feared his dad would kick him off the farm and sever ties permanently. Hoefler would miss the opportunity to purchase the family business.

His mother intervened.

“If you kick him out, I’m going too,” she told her husband and later relayed to Hoefler.

Father and son didn’t speak for three years. But they continued to milk side by side in silence.

Hoefler doubts he would be farming today had he lost his family link to the dairy.

Relationships, kinship matter

Intimate relationships and economic capital are bound together, said Isaac Leslie, an assistant professor at the University of Vermont Extension. Often, farmers turn to partners and family for on-farm labor, extra income and health insurance.

“We see that in the process of accessing each of these key resources, queer farmers face barriers that cisgender and heterosexual farmers don’t,” said Leslie, who has studied farm viability and the experiences of LGBTQ producers.

Matters of the heart are tough for LGBTQ farmers to begin with. 

Locating a partner in rural America, where an estimated 2.9 million to 3.8 million LGBTQ people live, poses a challenge when there are fewer queer people and gathering spaces. Rural areas, especially where agriculture is an economic mainstay, trend religiously and politically conservative.

Moreover, two traditional avenues to land acquisition — marriage and inheritance — can be tenuous routes for LGBTQ people. Wedding into ownership was not necessarily an option across the country until 2015 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all states must issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and recognize same-sex unions performed in other states. Inheriting a farm might be off the table for LGBTQ people whose familial relationships have frayed.

Even the American Farm Bureau Federation — the country’s most powerful agriculture lobbying group and the self-described “unified national voice of agriculture” — has documented anti-LGBTQ beliefs that stress the connections between farming and the heterosexual family.

Its 2022 resolutions state that a “family should be defined as persons who are related by blood, marriage between male and female or legal adoption.” In a section titled “family and moral responsibility,” the federation expresses opposition to “granting special privileges to those that participate in alternative lifestyles.”

“You have people who are going to say, ‘Why on earth is it important to talk about queer farmers? Sexuality does not impact how I plant my beans,’” said Michaela Hoffelmeyer, a doctoral candidate in sociology at The Pennsylvania State University. 

“I always come back to that by saying, ‘Okay, that’s true perhaps for a heterosexual person.’ Sexuality isn’t, at least from their view, impacting how they farm, but it very much is.”

Most farm loans hinge on family status

The family makeup of a farm is a crucial factor for those seeking government support.

Many USDA loans, such as those allocated for beginning farmers and ranchers, require that the applicant operate a “family farm.” That means “the majority of the business is owned by an operator and any individuals related to them by blood, marriage or adoption” — a definition that applies to about 98% of all U.S. farms.

Such restrictions can curtail the options of farmers who have faced or continue to experience biological and legal hurdles toward creating families. LGBTQ people who are unmarried or lack children might turn to non-family business partnerships for assistance. That would make them ineligible for the types of USDA loans that help the majority of farmers.

“There’s a value of the traditional family that overlooks other ways to be a community, to be in a relationship, that operates outside of blood and marriage ties,” said Michaela Hoffelmeyer. “The queer community has been doing this for a long time.”

Additionally, the USDA does not offer targeted grants to LGBTQ farmers, a department spokesperson said, and they are not considered a “historically underserved” population. That precludes their participation in loan, credit and insurance programs that are reserved for “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers,” unless they qualify under other program criteria.

The USDA is working to ascertain the needs of LGBTQ farmers, the spokesperson said. The department held the first-ever LGBTQ farmer roundtable in June to learn how producers access department programs. The USDA also plans within the next year to hold listening sessions to “better understand issues and barriers” facing LGBTQ farmers.

Sometimes in the absence of “traditional” families, LGBTQ people have constructed chosen ones that encompass a gamut of possible relationships. In farming, too, LGBTQ producers have conceived new kinds of partnerships.

“Queer people have different perspectives on life,” said Rufus Jupiter, 42, a flower farmer living in Viroqua, Wisconsin. “Just the verb ‘to queer’ is taking whatever is the status quo and seeing what different possibilities exist.”

Finding family in community

Chef Fresh Roberson grew up poor but believed they lived in a state of plenitude. The feeling stemmed from the food growing around them.

Roberson, who uses she and they pronouns interchangeably, was raised in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. It was a small Southern town, she said, where the railroad tracks separated Black from white residents. 

Roberson and their mother visited nearby sweet potato fields to gather the still-edible tuberous roots that heavy machinery failed to collect on the first pass. Roberson filled milk crates and kept them to overwinter in the bottom of closets throughout her home.

Roberson moved to Chicago in 2001 to study biomedical engineering at Northwestern University. One day, they decided to bake a pecan pie but discovered they could not afford a small bag of the shelled nuts.

Back in Rocky Mount, Roberson had been able to locate the food she needed, whether from an aunt’s pecan tree or a cousin’s grapevine.

“I don’t think I really thought about it in that perspective until something that was always abundant for me, I couldn’t afford,” Roberson said.

They later changed course. Roberson left Northwestern and went on to work on an organic, heirloom farm; attend culinary school; start a catering company; travel to California; work in the Silicon Valley kitchens of Google and Facebook; return to Chicago and manage a mobile produce market.

For Roberson, 40, gardening makes the world disappear for a moment. 

Now they run Fresher Together. The business, located in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, exists to improve community access to fresh food. It is framed by four pillars: build, grow, cook and heal. Each supports a vision of creating an equitable food system that prioritizes community sovereignty.

A team of staff, fellows and volunteers farms on 0.25 acres at an incubator on city property and oversees a nearby community hub and aggregation space, where they store, wash and pack food.

“A lot of how we are building is through this lens of choosing our family — choosing our loved ones who we are taking care of,” Roberson said.

Fresher Together partners with people and organizations with similar aims. Each week of the growing season, the team creates harvest bags filled with produce, herbs and value-added products from the urban farm and other businesses owned by people of color.

The business has grown and is relocating to a permanent home in Beaverville, Illinois, near a historically Black farming town. Roberson will continue to sustain Fresher Together using diversified funding streams.

Other LGBTQ farmers have looked to unconventional financing models to launch their operations.

Hannah Breckbill, a vegetable, pork and lamb farmer in Decorah, Iowa, said her local USDA Farm Service Agency classifies her 22-acre, organic operation as a “home garden,” which disqualifies her from utilizing some financial programs. She did not attempt to secure an FSA loan when she started farming because she lacked confidence the agency would take her efforts seriously. So, Breckbill, 35, purchased the land using donations and personal savings. 

In 2018, she organized her business as a worker-owned cooperative and created “the Commons” — a capital account that was funded by donations and constitutes 40% of the farm’s ownership. Nobody owns the Commons; it is a shared resource. When a worker buys into the farm, they pay into their own capital account. That investment is offset by the Commons, which also reduces the amount the farm must pay out when an owner retires.

Resisting stereotypes

Not all LGBTQ farmers link their identities to farming. 

Liz Graznak, an organic vegetable grower who lives outside of Columbia, Missouri, believed that she had to stay guarded when she moved to her rural community in 2008.

“I didn’t want people to know that I was a lesbian,” said Graznak, 46. Not only was that a futile effort in a small town, she said, it also mischaracterized residents’ attitudes.

It is easy to stereotype rural communities as bastions of conservatism. While polls have measured less acceptance for issues like same-sex marriage and LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections compared to urban residents, a majority of rural residents nonetheless agree with such policies. 

“In the country, at least from my experience, people are much more concerned about the kind of person that you are,” Graznak said. “Are you kind? Are you helpful? Will you stop and help somebody change their flat tire on the side of the road?”

Even when LGBTQ farmers aren’t making a conscious effort to enact change, their presence offers alternatives to family norms.

“It’s not just a heterosexual man does this, a woman does this, children do that,” said Jess Frankovich, 30. She and her wife Jessica Chamblin, 33, produce honey and raise poultry and rabbits on their 3-acre farm near Ellsworth, Wisconsin. 

Chamblin, who also teaches, says puzzled students ask her who feeds the farm’s animals, who runs the chainsaw and who constructs the vegetable beds.

“We do,” she said. “The two of us. The two women here.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter and donate to support our fact-checked journalism.

Queering the family farm: Despite obstacles, LGBTQ farmers find fertile ground in Midwest is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Nine years ago, my friends incredulously raised their eyebrows when I told them I was moving to rural Iowa. Good luck with that, several said. Have fun with all the straight farmers. We hope you survive.

From their perspective, I was embarking on a journey to a desolate wasteland, abundant with livestock, but devoid of LGBTQ people. I wasn’t sure what to expect in the countryside, having lived in cities my entire life; but I was not particularly surprised when these presuppositions were later confirmed — at least, partly. It was lonely. No gay bars. Churches and kaffeeklatsches galore. Co-workers with children my age. I could jog across town in eight minutes, from cornfield to cornfield.

I threw myself into work and submerged the gay part of my identity. I began wearing baggy corduroy pants, oversize dress shirts and leather hiking boots. I lowered the register of my speech and buzzed my hair short over the bathroom sink. Anything that might help me avoid detection.

I planned for the day I could leave and get a job in a larger city. Until my return this year to Madison, Wisconsin, fulfilled that vision, I hadn’t noticed the aspects of country living that I appreciated. Charming red brick Main Streets. Affordable housing and easy parking. And if people didn’t like you, they rarely said it to your face. Although few, I did meet other LGBTQ people, including a hodgepodge who farmed.

People often express surprise when I tell them queer people willingly work in agriculture. I believe that is a result of a longstanding archetype within the LGBTQ community — the tragic, provincial escapee. The story nearly always involves a queer person who has recently “come out.” They flee their rural hometown as soon as the chance arises, bound for the nearest urban center. They reinvent themselves. The acculturated person never looks back, only visiting for the occasional family holiday.

Within that framework, how could LGBTQ people voluntarily live in the country, and happily so? Moreover, how could they find a place for themselves in a profession whose image is so clearly defined? 

When I thought “farmer,” I unreflectively conjured a white, flannel-wearing patriarch, king of his fields. His wife keeps the books, drives the tractor when needed and raises their three kids. They are perpetually stressed, and another baby is on the way. The family attends church on Sundays, except during the planting and harvesting seasons.

Yet after nearly a decade writing about county fairs, commodity prices and hunting — and enjoying the experience — even I managed to find space for myself among Iowa’s cornfields. I came away wanting to learn about the other LGBTQ people who have done the same.

When I pitched this story to my editors, I didn’t expect to discover many queer farmers, much less a group that held such a broad array of perspectives.

“We don’t try to hide who we are,” Josie Paul, 59, told me, “but we don’t make that who we are as farmers either.” 

Paul and her wife, Samantha Gorman, 39, raise poultry, eggs, pigs and microgreens in Harvard, Illinois. They identify as transgender and moved in 2021 from Chicago to the bucolic community of about 9,500.

Sociologist Jaclyn Wypler unearthed similar sentiments when she researched the reasons LGBTQ farmers enter and exit the profession. 

“By and large, queer farmers are not surrounded by other queer farmers,” Wypler said. “So, your ‘bread and butter’ of your connection is your local community. And for a lot of the farmers, they do have deep, meaningful relationships with neighbors — but there is some precarity there.”

Rural Illinois certainly is not perfect, Paul said. She supposes there could be someone who mutters “terrible things under their breath.”

“But if they don’t come here with it — if they leave us alone — I’m okay with that,” she said.

Other farmers told me it is crucial to signal their presence as queer professionals to increase social acceptance of LGBTQ people and create welcoming spaces. Acknowledging the presence of queer farmers also is important for institutions. The U.S. Department of Agriculture told me that it’s starting to investigate the needs of LGBTQ producers to better tailor its services.

Some farmers drew links between their identities and their desire to steer agriculture toward more environmentally sustainable practices.

“A lot of traditional notions of land ownership are husband, wife and their children farm the land,” said Bailey Lutz, a 27-year-old entrepreneur in Decorah, Iowa. “And when the husband and wife die, the oldest son gets the land.”

Lutz tends a growing herd of goats and contracts with landowners to have the animals consume brush and invasive species on those properties. Lutz also sells some of their goats for meat.

Lutz said the traditional view of land ownership and inheritance reinforces the idea that land exists solely for human extraction — disregarding how other plants and animals live on the landscape.

“I very much see land as being as much in a relationship with me as I am with it, or with other people or with my goats,” they said. “Had I been much more fearful of engaging with my queerness, I wouldn’t have explored these concepts.”

Lutz, who grew up in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park, had few reservations about moving to a significantly smaller community in northeast Iowa. They miss dance venues, though, and opportunities to hold hands with a significant other in public.

Lutz and I walked past pastures, stopping to watch the herd. The goats munched on bergamot, goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace as the sun began to set. One of the kids, a bottle baby named Butternut, nibbled on my jacket. 

“It’s really hard to talk about the land as a singular entity, because it’s made of billions and billions and billions of organisms, just like our bodies are,” Lutz said. “We are billions of cells that all fulfill their own little need to create this bigger organism.”

I used to describe the pastoral ground I formerly called home as the corn metropolis of the universe. Now and again, living there felt like working an unpaid overtime shift. But I also experienced moments that broke through the stereotype of rural isolation.

A few nerve-wracking hours milking cows, anticipating the instant I would have to jump away when they relieved themselves on the platform above me. A short excursion through the downtown on a Union Pacific locomotive, horn blasting at the railroad crossings. Watching, atop a prickly hay bale, a solar eclipse darken the sky. I could revel in the rush of feeling — apart from this otherworldly place, and yet not — and notice something akin to a heartbeat.

Listening to LGBTQ farmers helped me reconsider my place in the heartland is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

If you’ve been hearing more about PFAS in Wisconsin waters, it’s because testing is increasingly detecting those harmful chemicals. As of Nov. 18, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources was monitoring PFAS contamination at 91 sites from French Island in the west to Peshtigo in the east.

What can you do if you have PFAS in your water? The answer is complicated. Here’s what to know about navigating threats from the chemicals. 

What are PFAS?

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of more than 12,000 human-made compounds. They accumulate in the environment and human bodies over time and do not easily break down, which is why some people call them “forever chemicals.” Increased testing is revealing PFAS in public drinking systems, groundwater and surface waters nationwide.

Why should I care about PFAS? 

Scientists haven’t studied most PFAS deeply, but they link two of the most widely researched, PFOA and PFOS, to a range of health problems. Those include altered hormone levels, decreased birth weight, digestive inflammation and ulcers, high cholesterol, hypertension in pregnancy, kidney and testicular cancers and reduced vaccine effectiveness in children. 

Where do PFAS come from? 

PFAS are ubiquitous in consumer and industrial products, such as fabric stain protectors, firefighting foam, food packaging, lubricants, non-stick cookware, paints and waterproof clothing. Most Americans encounter them through the foods they eat, dust, and hand-to-mouth contact with PFAS-treated products. But you probably wouldn’t know it, because the chemicals are often odorless, colorless and tasteless.

Tap water is typically the main source of exposure for people living near contaminated sites. But that doesn’t mean you have to stop showering. Little PFAS enter the body through the skin, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Bathing and washing dishes with PFAS-contaminated water is unlikely to significantly increase exposure, the agency says. 

How much PFAS is harmful?

Virtually no amount of PFAS is safe for consumption, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In June, the agency updated draft health advisories for PFOA and PFOS. It warned against consuming more than 0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) and 0.02 ppt of the two compounds, respectively. That equates to about 4 drops and 20 drops of water in 1,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

How do I know if my water is safe to drink?

The answer depends on who you ask and where you live. The EPA sets standards for public drinking water systems, which must treat water to within acceptable limits for contaminants. No national standard yet exists for PFAS, so many states have stepped in to set their own. Others have none.

Wisconsin this year established a drinking water standard of 70 ppt for PFOA and PFOS individually and combined, far above the draft EPA health advisory. Multiple Wisconsin public water systems have detected PFAS above or within the state’s standard. Utilities must publish their test results, which you can view online.

What if I have a private water well?

Neither the EPA nor the state regulates private water wells. That means the 1.7 million Wisconsinites who use them bear responsibility for testing and treating their own water for PFAS or other contaminants. The Department of Natural Resources offers general recommendations for well testing here. Many laboratories can test water for PFAS for a fee. 

How can I treat my water? 

Multiple filtration systems can remove PFAS from tap and well water. You can install them  where water enters a house or building or on a specific fixture. Treatment methods include granular activated carbon, ion exchange resins and reverse osmosis.

“We know that the lower the levels of PFOA and PFOS, the lower the risk,” EPA environmental engineer Jonathan Burkhardt said in an email. 

The EPA does not recommend that contaminated households switch to bottled water, because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not established PFAS quality standards in bottled water, nor does it require testing for PFAS, although the International Bottled Water Association says its members test for the chemicals annually.

What are my filtration options? 

Granular activated carbon systems, generally the least expensive treatment option, can remove some PFAS, including PFOA and PFOS. They work by binding PFAS to a porous carbon surface. But molecularly shorter chemicals, known as short-chain PFAS, may slip by. You can install the filter as a household unit or in sinks, faucets, refrigerators and pitchers. 

Ion exchange resins act like little magnets that capture PFAS molecules. They are generally more effective than activated carbon, especially at snatching short-chain PFAS. Both technologies often cost less than reverse osmosis systems, which can run upwards of $1,000 to $2,000.

Reverse osmosis devices force high-pressure water through a membrane with small pores to separate chemicals, including short-chain PFAS, from water. However, the technology requires a large volume of water, and it discharges PFAS-tainted backwash into sewer or septic systems — potentially reintroducing the contaminants into the environment.

“None of these techniques are perfect,” said Yanna Liang, a professor of environmental and sustainable engineering at State University of New York at Albany. “It really depends on what exact PFAS are in the water.”

If you can afford it, you can use multiple treatment systems in succession to increase effectiveness. That process is called a “treatment train.”

How well do these systems work?

Each technology can reduce many types of PFAS to non-detectable levels, exceeding 99% removal in lab and real-world settings, according to EPA reviews of scientific studies. However, not all devices are equally effective. 

Researchers at Duke University and North Carolina State University tested 76 point-of-use filters and 13 point-of-entry systems and found that reverse osmosis filters and two-stage filters that utilized a treatment train reduced PFAS by 94% or more.

On average, activated carbon removed just 73% of PFAS contamination. But the carbon filters performed inconsistently. Sometimes they removed all PFAS, while at other times they had no effect.

Properly maintaining the systems matters, too. You should replace filters or cartridges according to manufacturer instructions, because PFAS can break through a broken or saturated system. PFAS can even leach from spent carbon filters at higher concentrations than the concentration of PFAS in untreated water.

Reverse osmosis is the “gold standard” for high PFAS concentrations, but activated carbon filters work well for many who treat lower concentrations, said Riley Mulhern, an environmental engineer at RTI International.

Which filtration systems should I trust?

Wisconsin health officials recommend purchasing a device certified by the American Standards Institute and NSF, a product testing and certification organization. To comply with NSF standards, the equipment must reduce combined PFOA and PFOS to below 70 ppt.

But most NSF-tested filters can reduce PFOA and PFOS to undetectable levels, according to NSF. The organization plans to update its PFAS standards in January 2023.

Do treatment systems carry drawbacks? 

Yes. They can leave behind contaminated waste, including filters and resins. Those might go to a landfill or incinerator, where they could reintroduce PFAS into the environment. Researchers are studying methods of destroying PFAS-tainted materials — ranging from electrochemical oxidation to ball-milling — but according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office review, no methods can yet “fully destroy PFAS at full scale.”

Small water systems will face even greater filtration challenges than homeowners, said David Cwiertny, a University of Iowa engineering professor and director of the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination.

“They’ll have to figure out how to dispose of it in a way that doesn’t just put it back into the environment and have it be somebody else’s problem.”

What should I know about installing a treatment system? 

If you install a treatment system, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services recommends selecting a licensed plumber.

If my private well is contaminated, should I just dig a new one? 

The Department of Natural Resources can help well owners determine whether that’s a good idea, or if treatment is better, said Kyle Burton, the agency’s drinking and groundwater field operations director. It depends on several factors, including local geology.

New wells aren’t guaranteed to deliver PFAS-free water, he said, and some risk tapping into aquifers where other contaminants are present. Another risk of digging through certain terrain: the possibility of cross-contaminating aquifers with PFAS.

Digging a well also is pricey, but state aid might be available to pay for it.

The department recently announced a $10 million grant program — using federal pandemic relief — for those seeking to replace, reconstruct, treat or abandon private wells that are contaminated with arsenic, bacteria, nitrate or PFAS. Learn more here. 

​​The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

What should I do about PFAS in my water? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

This fall, the towns and rural farmsteads along the Mississippi River received alarming news about their drinking water. Chemicals from a large 3M factory north of Cordova, Illinois found a way into the river and their wells.

The facility employs about 500 people and makes the adhesives used in Post-It notes, Scotch tape and other popular products. It also produces a family of chemicals called PFAS, otherwise known as “forever chemicals,” whose threat to human health has prompted increasing concern among federal and state environmental agencies.

Water and wastewater sampling by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2019 detected the chemicals. Now the agency says the drinking water of nearly 300,000 people, including the Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa, will need additional testing to ensure it is safe.

Earlier this month, the EPA announced that PFAS contamination from the 3M factory has created “an imminent and substantial endangerment” of public and private drinking water supplies. In a Nov. 2 EPA order, Minnesota-based 3M agreed to investigate PFAS contamination in private wells and public water systems up to 10 miles away from the plant.

The situation has left local officials in a dilemma: they want to reassure people about their drinking water, even as they face unanswered questions about health risks and who will pay to clean up the contamination. 

City officials in Camanche, Iowa, announced in September that the municipal water, which serves almost 4,600 people, tested positive for two of the chemicals above EPA limits. 

The city advised residents to contact their health care providers or consider installing home filters. Now, officials are informing water customers that the city is seeking “expert guidance” from state and federal authorities and will provide more information when it becomes available.

“As of right now, we are in a ‘test and wait’ phase on PFAS issues,” Camanche Public Works Director Gaylon Pewe wrote on the city’s website. City officials did not respond to a request for an interview.

Their announcements have not eased the fears of several Camanche residents, who on social media reacted to the city’s latest press release with dismay. Is the water safe to drink, several asked.

“If it’s that serious, you know, do some surveys and find out what’s going on,” Camanche resident Gary Hopkins, 78, said in an interview. “Then get it to the doctors and the scientists and figure out what they can do to stop it.”

The 3M plant has been a fixture in Cordova since the facility opened in 1970. The EPA permits the company to discharge its wastewater into the Mississippi River, but 3M must monitor it for PFAS.

In 2019, 3M informed the agency it was releasing more of the chemicals from the factory than previously reported. Testing has revealed the presence of at least 60 PFAS analytes within the vicinity.

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of human-made compounds that do not break down easily in the environment and bioaccumulate in organisms. Some are linked to a range of health problems like altered hormone levels, decreased birth weight, digestive inflammation and ulcers, high cholesterol, hypertension in pregnancy, kidney and testicular cancers and reduced vaccine effectiveness in children.

They are ubiquitous in consumer and industrial products, but for people living near contaminated sites, drinking water is typically the main source of exposure of the odorless and tasteless chemicals.

In June, the EPA updated draft health advisories for PFOA and PFOS to levels so low as to suggest that no amount of PFAS is safe for consumption — a lifetime limit of 0.004 parts per trillion and 0.02 ppt of the two compounds, respectively — equivalent to just a few drops in the combined volume of water in thousands of swimming pools.

This summer, 3M began testing some of the drinking water near Cordova for PFAS and offered to sample about 190 private wells within a 3-mile radius of the plant. The company later started to contact private well owners with an offer to install in-home water treatment systems, regardless of their sampling results.

Under the EPA order, 3M now must offer well sampling to properties within a 4-mile radius of the plant that were not previously included in its outreach. Testing can begin after the agency approves a work plan the company will submit by early December.

Meanwhile, 3M is required to test area public water suppliers within 10 miles of the plant. An agency spokesperson declined to say what specific actions the EPA might take if testing reveals contamination in those facilities.

The agency also ordered 3M to develop a special work plan for the city of Camanche, located north of the Cordova plant in Iowa. The plan must include the provision of an alternative drinking water supply or water treatment.

Grant Thompson, a 3M spokesperson, directed people who are concerned about the safety of their drinking water to government websites that address “PFAS-related questions.” 

The city of Camanche has issued similar advice.

Numerous river communities downstream of the plant have detectable levels of PFAS in their water treatment systems and continue to test for the chemicals. 

Charlie Brown, utilities lab manager for the city of Moline, said PFAS removal is expensive, and there are downsides to taking action too soon.

Treatment standards are likely to change next year when the EPA announces its final recommendations for four PFAS chemicals, he said. Research on PFAS removal also is apt to provide water plant operators with additional treatment options in coming years.

Brown said Moline residents contacted him several months ago to inquire if they can drink their water.

“Of course the water is safe,” Brown said. “We wouldn’t put it out if it wasn’t, and we would let people know.”

Moline tests city water quarterly. Results from December 2021 indicated two PFAS compounds exceeded the EPA’s guidelines, but just one tested above the state of Illinois’ health advisory limit, which is less stringent.

“We’ll have to wait to see where more funding comes for the actual treatment,” Brown said. “But we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves in treatment until we know what the (final EPA PFAS) limits are going to be and, then, what the science will be for treatment.”

3M has faced several legal cases for PFAS production. Other than in Cordova, it has two major US plants that produce the chemicals: in the Twin Cities, Minnesota and in Decatur, Alabama. The state of Minnesota sued the company over mismanaged PFAS waste from its Cottage Grove plant and in 2018 settled for $850 million to treat drinking water there. 3M also settled multiple lawsuits in Alabama last year for $99 million. 

But perhaps the most significant situation centered on the company’s chemical plant near Antwerp, Belgium, where Flemish authorities briefly shut down production of the chemicals. 3M ultimately struck a $600 million remediation deal.

Beyond the factories that actually make the chemicals, 3M’s other major legal threat comes from lawsuits over the products that use PFAS, like firefighting foam. Thousands of civil cases have been consolidated in federal court in Charleston, South Carolina, and now the company is facing lawsuits from California, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

David Cwiertny, a University of Iowa engineering professor and director of the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination, said if his drinking water tested positive for PFAS, he would install a home water treatment system, such as carbon filters or reverse osmosis.

“It’s jarring to have your water supply be something that you immediately don’t trust,” he said. “And even with treatment, a lot of people won’t trust what’s coming out of their taps, and that trust is hard to regain and rebuild.”

As communities surrounding Cordova grapple with the difficult cleanup ahead, Cwiertny said, it is all but certain they will not be the last.

Linda Vaughn, a retired school bus driver, lives about four miles from the 3M plant on the Illinois side of the river. She already avoids what comes out of her well, but wonders whether she will have to do more. Vaughn drinks bottled water, while her husband drinks filtered water from their refrigerator.

“I don’t know if that covers it,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve had any problems so far. And my husband’s in his 70s. I’m in my 70s.”

Chloe Johnson of the Star Tribune contributed to this story. 

Midwest river towns seek answers after 3M factory taints water with PFAS is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.