Cattle drink water provided by the Kingbrook Rural Water System in South Dakota. South Dakota Association of Rural Water Systems
Mikkel Pates - Reporter - Agweek
In recent decades, rural residents in the Dakotas and Minnesota have largely replaced wells with rural water systems as sources of drinking water for themselves and their animals.
This is so even when there is an abundance of groundwater and few incidents of pesticide and fertilizer contamination.
Today, 33 systems supply an estimated 25 percent of North Dakota’s population, including some 200 small towns. South Dakota has 26 systems in operation and another coming on line in July, supplying together some two-thirds of the state’s residents.
“We’ve found we’re literally plumbing the state with regional water systems,” said Dennis N. Davis, executive director of the Madison-based South Dakota Association of Rural Water Districts.
Minnesota has six rural water systems, all on the state’s western border.
For some rural residents, water from the ground tastes bad and their animals don’t like it either. For others, there isn’t much water and it tastes bad, too.
Good water rare
“In North Dakota, our groundwater sources are abundant, but we do have high iron and manganese in the water,” said Eric Volk, executive director of the North Dakota Rural Water Systems Association in Bismarck. “There is a band from the northwest to the southeast that is high in arsenic. And in the southwest it’s pretty ‘salty’ – plenty of it, but the cattle won’t drink it. You can’t cook with it.”
In Minnesota, most rural residents continue to use well water for drinking purposes, except along the western border.
There residents have similar problems as rural North Dakotans with iron, manganese or sulfate in the water, which aren’t a health threat but are “pretty unpleasant” and harsh on bathtubs and other household appliance, said Ruth Ann Hubbard, executive director of the Elbow Lake-based Rural Water Association.
She said livestock, especially young animals, are heavily dependent on rural water.
In the state’s northwest, along the Red River, heavy clay soils don’t yield sufficient water, and the deeper soils have the old sea-bed water that is salty. In the southwest, the issue whether there’s water available at all, or sometimes nitrate problems related to “land use issues.”
In South Dakota, the majority of the state’s dairy cows, beef cattle and other livestock are now watered through rural water.
“We have more livestock drinking rural water than people,” Dennis said.
“If we’d have had this discussion 15 years ago, I’d have said this isn’t going to pay out for the cow-calf guy,” he said. “But we have droughts. Dams dry up. The quality of water that runs into stock dams can be pretty atrocious, and guys can have vet bills they couldn’t stand if the cattle aren’t doing well.
The additional weight gain of the calf more than compensates.”
Late start
Rural water systems in the northern Red River Valley were among the region’s first.
First in North Dakota was the Grand Forks-Traill system, based in Clifford, in 1969. First in Minnesota was the Kittson-Marshall system, based in Donaldson, that went on-line in 1975.
The first systems in South Dakota were the Butte-Meade system, based in Newell, and the Rapid Valley system, based in Rapid City, in the state’s western side, both of which began in 1972.
Many systems rely on groundwater, but some pull water from rivers or dams, such as the Langdon, N.D., system that uses water from the Mount Carmel Dam on the Pembina River. Some serve not just residents of remote rural areas but those living near urban areas, removing nuisance minerals and bacteria.
Rural water systems would have happened earlier than 1969, Volk said, but several technologies made it possible – the development of large plows that could place pipe in the ground miles at a time, instead of backhoe trenches, and new inventions with PVC pipe, as well as engineering techniques to move pipe.
Rural water systems continue to advance today. In South Dakota, the Lewis & Clark system is near completion in rural areas near Sioux Falls, the state’s biggest city. In North Dakota, the state’s growing northwest is also in need of rural water.
“With the oil activity in the western half of the state, some of our systems have been approached to serve ‘man camps,’” Volk said. “And around Minot, with the flooding, people are having to build homes on the outskirts of town and need a source for water.”
Fertilizer, manure
Groundwater contamination in the region is not unusual, according to several state regulators, but contamination levels are often very low.
Trace amounts of nitrates, found in fertilizer and animal manure, is common.
In North Dakota, they are the most common, according to Norene Bartelson, an environmental scientist with the state Health Department.
“We find that in many wells, but generally in low levels,” she said. “That may not be due to field application of fertilizers. More often it’s associated with a livestock feedlot.”
The Health Department monitors shallow aquifers that are sensitive to contamination, primarily in the eastern and central parts of the state.
In 2011, a typical year, seven of 111 wells sampled had nitrate levels exceeding 10 parts per million, the federal standard for municipal drinking water. The levels were, for the most part, high enough to harm infants but not adults.
Nitrate levels also exceed federal standards in some vulnerable Minnesota aquifers, according to Dan Stoddard, assistant director of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s Pesticide and Fertilizer Monitoring Division, which monitors wells and surface water.
One department report indicated that 10 to 13 percent of wells in vulnerable aquifer areas are above the 10 ppm standard.
“I wouldn’t pin it on livestock,” Stoddard said, noting that it could involve other practices.
South Dakota ground water can have similar problems.
Davis, the rural water association head, said farmers generally apply no more fertilizer and pesticides than they need, but sometimes runoff can create problems for groundwater. “I don’t know that we notice huge areas of farming practices that are causing us consistent water problems.”
Pesticide
Pesticide contamination is also present, but not at harmful levels.
Bartelson said the most common pesticide contaminant is “picloram,” an active ingredient in the herbicide Tordon used primarily on leafy spurge. The chemical is very mobile in the soil, and stays a long time but is not very toxic to humans.
North Dakota’s major river systems are tested by the state Department of Agriculture for more than 180 pesticide compounds, but none have shown up in significant amounts.
“Most of what we find is very low parts per billion compared to its toxicity,” said Jessica Johnson, an environmental scientist who works with the program.
Stoddard said it “isn’t really surprising” to find pesticide in water, but considering the number of pesticides the agency is looking for and how sensitive tests can be, it is “impressive and surprising” how few are found.
Pesticide contamination, in particular, is dropping though at different rates in the state, he said. “The most vulnerable areas are the central sand plains, and in southeast Minnesota in the shallow bedrock.” The northwest part of the state has less shallow groundwater and is less vulnerable.
Stoddard isn’t willing to say why pesticide levels have been declining but said the promotion of best management practices for pesticides as well as label changes have had some impact.
Rural residents are working to reduce contamination.
The Wellhead Program, part of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, helps states educate the public, including farmers who may be farming close to outlying wellheads used for public supplies.
In some cases a local rural water system will purchase some property around the wellhead and lease it back to farmers with stipulations on the types of crops, amounts of chemicals or number of animals on the land, to avoid contamination.
In other cases, farmers work together.
“They may work with an adjacent landowner to see if they might put something into Conservation Reserve Program or limit the amount of fertilizer near the wellhead,” Volk said.
Mikkel Pates reports for Agweek.
