PLEASE DON'T DRINK THE WATER

...The supreme worry is that once groundwater is contaminated, it is very difficult to decontaminate," says Dr...

...Since fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides are so common in everyday farm life, it is difficult to isolate their individual toxic effects and calibrate their cumulative impact...

...Most of the time, if the weather is reasonably cooperative, the crops develop just as the ads say they will...

...Remember that three generations of Americans were heavily into smoking before the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer became clear...

...The data showed that pregnant women whose drinking water contained five to fifteen parts per million of nitrates—well below the health-warning standard that many nations have set—ran three times the risk of bearing malformed infants...

...By summer, officials of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources had surmised that more than one quarter of the state's water wells are contaminated by nitrates or pesticides or both...

...But new studies show that such sources don't hold a candle to nitrogen fertilizers dispensed in huge areas of the Farm Belt...

...The Australian study compared birth-defect rates among expectant mothers who drank rain water, which is essentially free of nitrates, and those who drank from nitrate-contaminated wells and lakes...

...Last spring, the 319 citizens of Washta, a farm town in northwest Iowa, received the unwelcome news that their public water well contained traces of five weed-killing chemicals—Aatrex, Bladex, Sencor, Dual, and Lasso—along with a tad of the insect-slaying compound Counter...

...One of the first organizations to raise serious questions about nitrates and pesticides in groundwater was the Center for Rural Affairs, a family-farm advocacy group in the tiny town of Walthill, Nebraska...

...Such illusions are rapidly wilting...

...Blue-baby syndrome" is not the only serious problem caused by nitrates...

...The risk was four times greater when nitrate levels exceeded fifteen parts per million...

...The long-range effects of drinking chemically contaminated water have not yet been determined...

...The herbicides and insecticides were supposed to cling to the topsoil until they broke down into harmless components, and nearly all of the nitrogen fertilizer that wasn't used by the crops was supposed to vaporize into the atmosphere, posing no more of a threat to the environment than, say, a herd of flatulent dairy cows...

...Congress gave the Office of Drinking Water a mandate to strive for a "philosophical ideal" of purity, says Joseph Co-truvo, director of the criteria and standards division of the EPA's office of drinking water...

...Nevertheless, the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs continues to allow American farmers to use Lasso by the millions of pounds...

...Some studies have shown a tentative connection between nitrates and certain types of human cancers, and a research team in southern Australia has found a seemingly strong link between nitrates in the drinking water of pregnant women and nervous-system birth defects, including babies born without brains...

...Environmental Protection Agency...

...Rootworms succumb to Dyfonate's poison, and the weeds wither and die under the curse of Aatrex, Lasso, Bladex, and Sencor...

...Well, we don't know," says George Hallberg, an Iowa state geologist...

...Consider how difficult it would be to calculate the potential harm of water that has, say, a bit of Lasso, a tad of Bladex, a little Counter, maybe some Aatrex, some nitrates, and perhaps a smidgen of naturally occurring radiation from the rock formations in which your town draws its water supply...

...That level is now frequently exceeded in the Corn Belt—particularly in the wells used by farmers themselves...

...As the last snows of winter melt into the rich black soil, farmer-actors promote these chemicals in a blizzard of television commercials...

...From the potato fields of Long Island to the orchards of California, residents are discovering that the pesticides and fertilizers upon which modern farming relies are more resilient and enduring—and hazardous—than almost anyone suspected...

...The EPA has adopted a typically ineffectual approach to the problem...

...threatening humans or the environment...

...Following the farm-chemical industry's standard line, The Bottom Line averred that a part per billion is a very little bit of anything, and that were it not for newly discovered analytical technology, no one would probably even know if there were parts per billion of pesticides in the water-consumed by Farm Belt residents...

...The advertisements are a ritual of seedtime, as pervasive as the pickup trucks, driven by real farmers, that tool down the county blacktops, towing tanks of nitrogen fertilizer for another fledgling corn crop...

...You've told me that as far as you know these levels of concentrations won't have any adverse health effects...

...The tens of thousands of tons of nitrogen fertilizers produce corn plants that are a dazzling deep green, and they promise another prodigious crop in late autumn, even though the yield will be far beyond the market's capacity to absorb...

...These may not become evident until ten or twenty or thirty years after exposure—not a particularly long span of time for a baby raised on water contaminated by farm chemicals...

...The rural well water which her mother used to prepare formula contained 152 parts per million of nitrates—more than three times the amount considered safe...

...Nitrates can come from many sources, including animal manures and human sewage-disposal systems...

...It's a question of how much epidemiological evidence you need before people believe that the use of agricultural chemicals is harmful to health," Strange says...

...In late June, a two-month-old South Dakota girl, Lacy Jo Geyer, died of nitrate poisoning...

...1 take them up there to my fields to kill things, and I don't want such chemicals in my drinking water/ Most of the groundwater in Iowa, for example, had a low "background level" of nitrates until the tremendous increase in the use of nitrogen fertilizers in the 1960s and 1970s...

...The Agency's new Office of Drinking Water, making its initial stab at determining supposedly safe levels of pesticides in public water supplies, proposed a zero contamination level for the weed-killer Lasso, noting that it has "carcinogenic effects in animals" and seems "highly mobile in the environment...

...I've read your stuff and I've heard what you said," one old farmer responded to Hallberg...

...And in April 1986, the EPA informed Iowa health authorities that Aatrex—after having been on the market for twenty-seven years, earning millions of dollars for Ciba-Geigy Corporation—"may be carcinogenic...

...Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), rather belatedly, has labeled Lasso a "probable human carcinogen...

...He has the unenviable task of telling farmers they are drinking traces of the toxic chemicals they've been putting in the fields for more than twenty years...

...As public concern grows over the possibly irreversible contamination of groundwater, the makers of farm chemicals are beginning to realize they have a problem...

...Farm wells tend to be closer to the land surface and thus more quickly susceptible to nitrogen and pesticide contamination...

...In an intensively studied 103-square-mile farming area of northeast Iowa, the nitrate level in groundwater was found to have tripled, following exactly a threefold increase in the application of nitrogen fertilizers on the region's corn crop...

...Tests of drinking-water supplies in the towns and on the farms increasingly reveal traces of toxic pesticides and higher and higher concentrations of nitrates from fertilizers...

...Put that mixture in the context of routinely using the water not just for ingestion but also for showering and bathing, and put that in the context of the trace residues of many of these chemicals that appear in foodstuffs, and what does that mean...

...For this reason, nitrates in a concentration of more than forty-five parts per million are considered dangerous for infants, according to the World Health Organization and the U.S...

...In a well serving nearby Sioux Rapids, five farm chemicals were found...

...And in parts of Nebraska, nitrogen-contaminated groundwater, pulled up by irrigation pumps, provides a ready-made fertilizer...

...After several years of negotiating, the manufacturers have compromised with environmental groups on accelerated health testing of pesticides and agreed to kick in for some of the costs...

...1 know what I use these chemicals for,' says one farmer...

...You always have to weigh things...

...I take them up there to my fields to kill things, and I don't want such chemicals in my drinking water...

...We don't live in Utopia," Cotruvo says...

...If the chemicals prove to be carcinogenic," says Richard Kelley of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, "what we have done is to put an entire population at risk...

...In parts of western Iowa, nitrate contamination of groundwater has gone up ten times, reflecting a ten-fold increase in corn farmers' use of nitrogen...

...But I know what I use these chemicals for...

...Donald Morgan, a toxicologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City...

...What's worse, unlike polluted rivers, which have a certain capacity to cleanse themselves, groundwater may not move a foot in a year's time...

...Soon thereafter, the farmer hired a driller to put down a deeper well, a solution to his problem at least until the chemicals move deeper into the groundwater profile beneath his land...

...Seventeen different agricultural pesticides and herbicides have now been detected in the groundwater of twenty-three states, and the list of hazards is expanding all the time...

...Studies have linked Bladex to birth defects, after some laboratory animals exposed to the product were born without eyes...

...Physicians have known for years that high nitrate levels in water can kill infants by inducing a reaction that robs a baby's brain of oxygen...

...For years, Americans were told that the weed- and insect-killing chemicals applied by farmers would do their job without Larry Fruhling is a reporter for The Des Moines Register, which published a series of articles on this topic earlier this year...

...That may sound odd, but naturally there's an EPA bureaucrat who can explain...

...Iowa geologist George Hallberg is helping run a study of groundwater contamination in the Big Spring Basin in the northeastern corner of the state...

...Concern over groundwater has increased in the two years since the report was issued, says Marty Strange, director of the Center, but there has been little change in the practices of either farmers or chemical manufacturers...

...We seem to be moving down that street rather rapidly...

...There are no smoking guns, only dead bodies and the smell of gunpowder," the Center noted in a 1984 study...

...For those who need a body count," says George Hallberg, "here is one to check off...

...It's inevitably kind of a one-way street...

...This summer's issue of The Bottom Line, a publication of Dow Chemical Company's agricultural products group, contained an article on groundwater...

...We don't know...

...Then add nitrates to the concoction that is our groundwater...

...The longer-established Office of Pesticide Programs, Cotruvo explains, is under orders from Congress to balance a pesticide's possible hazards against its economic benefit in killing weeds and insects...

...Meanwhile, they've gone on a public-relations offensive to salvage as much business as they can for their old-line products currently under suspicion...

...The U.S...

...But you've also told me there's a lot we don't know...