美国国家公共电台 NPR Farmers Fight Environmental Regulations

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

In the fight over how we treat our environment, farms can be a battleground. NPR's Dan Charles reports here on how regulations meant to protect land and water are being challenged by farmers.

DAN CHARLES, BYLINE 1: Environmentalist Craig Cox says streams and rivers across much of the country are suffering from the side effects of growing food.

CRAIG COX: The leading problems are fertilizer and manure 2 runoff from farm operations.

CHARLES: Cox is a vice 3 president of the Environmental Working Group. He says nitrate-filled runoff from farms is making drinking water less safe. Phosphorous runoff is feeding toxic 4 algae 5 blooms.

COX: They're interfering 6 with people's vacations, taking your kids to the beach and the beach is closed. There's stories about people getting sick.

CHARLES: This is preventable, Cox says. Farmers can grow extra vegetation to capture nitrates before that pollution runs into streams. They can plant wide grassy 7 filter strips along stream banks. Some farmers do this, many do not. And there's no law forcing them to. The Clean Water Act, which has cleaned up pollution from factories over the past 40 years, specifically exempts 8 what it calls normal farming operations like plowing 9 or maintaining drainage ditches.

And farmers have fought any hint of stricter regulation, for instance, the Clean Water Rule released by the Obama administration. It lays out which streams or wetlands are actually waters of the U.S., and thus covered by the Clean Water Act. Don Parrish from the American Farm Bureau Federation 10 says that rule expands the law's reach too much.

DON PARRISH: All of a sudden, farmers go from farming fields and land that they have always farmed to now farming in waters of the U.S.

CHARLES: Last week, President Trump 11 talked about damage to farmers as he ordered a formal review of the Clean Water Rule.

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It's a horrible, horrible rule. Has sort of a nice name, but everything else is bad.

CHARLES: In Iowa, meanwhile, the water utility for the city of Des Moines may not survive because it picked a fight with the state's farmers. The utility sued several agricultural counties a couple of years ago, demanding that they reduce nitrate levels in a river that supplies Des Moines with drinking water. Here's Bill Stowe, CEO of the Des Moines Water Works.

BILL STOWE: We're trying to regulate what comes out of the underground drainage systems beneath farm fields.

CHARLES: But a member of the Iowa legislature has introduced a bill that would abolish the Des Moines Water Works and perhaps its lawsuit 12. The bill would replace the waterworks with a regional water authority. The lawmaker who sponsored the bill, who's a farmer, denies that he's trying to get rid of the Water Works because of that lawsuit. He says he's heard many concerns about the utilities management. But Bill Stowe's not buying it.

STOWE: This is clearly aimed at chilling our litigation and sending a message to others that no one dares to speak against industrial agriculture in this state.

CHARLES: The bill could pass the legislature this spring. Many farm groups say farmers want to reduce pollution in nearby streams. But cooperative, voluntary programs work better than regulation. Craig Cox, though, from the Environmental Working Group, says it's time to lay out a list of things that farmers are required to do. He'd start with those grassy buffer 13 strips along streams.

COX: We could and should argue about that list if that's the right list. But the point is there needs to be a list.

CHARLES: The state of Minnesota's taking the lead on this. Starting this fall, that state's farmers will have to maintain a strip of grass 50 feet wide on average along many streams, or they'll have to pay a fine. Dan Charles, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF TUATARA'S, "THE SPIDER PIMP")