IF CLAY BOLT WENT LOOKING for a rusty patched bumblebee, he would head to a city. The wildlife photographer said his best bet would be Minneapolis or Madison, Wisconsin, in a botanical garden or even someone’s backyard — as long as it was far away from crop fields and neonicotinoid pesticides. 

“It’s kind of ironic. Cities have become a refuge for some of these most endangered pollinators,” said Bolt, manager of pollinator conservation for the World Wildlife Fund. “Thousands of acres of monocultural row crops leave little to no room for most pollinators.”

The rusty patched bumblebee has seen populations plummet with the rise of industrial agriculture and was given Endangered Species Act protections in 2017. The species, once broadly distributed throughout the eastern United States, is now largely found in small populations in parts of the Midwest. 

Today, the bumblebee is among more than 200 endangered species whose existence is threatened by the nation’s most widely used insecticides (one classification of pesticides), according to a recent analysis by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The endangered species range from Attwater’s greater prairie chicken to the Alabama cave shrimp, from the American burying beetle to the slackwater darter. And the star cactus and four-petal pawpaw are among the 160-plus at-risk plants.

The three neonicotinoids — thiamethoxam, clothianidin and imidacloprid — are applied as seed coatings on some 150 million acres of crops each year, including corn, soybeans and other major crops. Neonicotinoids are a group of neurotoxic insecticides similar to nicotine and used widely on farms and in urban landscapes. They are absorbed by plants and can be present in pollen and nectar, and have been blamed for killing bees or changing their behaviors.

Pesticide manufacturers say that studies support the safe use of these chemicals, which in addition to seed coatings,  are also sprayed on more than 4 million acres of crops across the United States, including cotton, soybeans, grains, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. But conservation groups said that the EPA’s analysis has “gaping holes” and downplays the harm to endangered species.

“These are likely the most ecologically destructive pesticides we’ve seen since DDT,” said Dan Raichel, acting director of the Pollinator Initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group that works to “safeguard the earth – its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends.” 

The chemicals “jeopardize the continued existence of” more than 1 in 10 endangered fish, insects, crustaceans, plants, and birds across the United States, according to the analysis by the environmental fate and effects division in the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs.

In 1972, the EPA banned DDT, an ecologically destructive insecticide that had gained widespread attention because of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” which chronicled DDT’s role in harming the environment and driving species like the bald eagle toward extinction.   

The EPA — which originally approved the three neonicotinoids in 1991, 1999 and 2003 — has been forced by a 2017 court settlement to assess the impact of the chemicals on endangered species. 

The EPA has released the analysis with the hope of soon putting into place mitigations of the harm being caused, said Jan Matuszko, director of the environmental fates and effects division in the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, in an interview with Investigate Midwest. An EPA spokeswoman said the EPA is planning to announce a proposed interim decision to re-register the neonicotinoids in September. 

However, experts claim the way the agency analyzed the neonicotinoids’ predominant use — as seed coatings on crop seeds before they are planted — underestimates the amount the pesticides move off where it is applied and into species’ habitat.

HERE ARE EXAMPLES OF THE SPECIES AT RISK BECAUSE OF NEONICS

Use of neonicotinoids skyrocketed in the late 2000s and has continued to rise, despite concerns about effects on pollinators and human health. In 2018, the European Union banned neonicotinoids because of concerns about harm to pollinators. On June 9, the New York state legislature passed a first-in-the-nation bill that would ban neonic-treated corn, soybean and wheat seeds; the bill is awaiting the governor’s signature. 

In addition to environmental harm, scientists have expressed concerns about neonicotinoids’ effects on human health. In 2020, NRDC filed a petition asking the EPA to ban use of the chemicals on food because of risks to human health, including neurotoxicity and neurodevelopmental issues for children. 

A 2022 study from researchers at 16 institutions across the United States found the chemicals in the urine of 95% of pregnant women in California, Georgia, Illinois, New Hampshire, and New York. A 2023 study by the U.S. Geological Survey found neonics in more than half of wells in eastern Iowa, as well as in the urine of 100% of farmers it tested.

“It’s way worse than what we’re able to pay attention to,” Bolt said.

The chemicals are manufactured by some of the largest agribusiness companies in the world. German chemical company BASF is the lead registrant on clothianidin; German multinational corporation Bayer is the lead registrant on imidacloprid; and Swiss company Syngenta, owned by ChemChina, is the lead registrant on thiamethoxam. 

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“It’s way worse than what we’re able to pay attention to.”

— Clay Bolt, manager of pollinator conservation for the World Wildlife Fund

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Bayer spokeswoman Susan Luke said Bayer is committed to working with the EPA to “help ensure any new measures proposed by EPA are fully informed and based on sound science.”

“Bayer remains committed to the safe use of imidacloprid under label instructions; safe use that, along with other neonicotinoids, has been reconfirmed by regulators after diligent review worldwide,” Luke said in an emailed statement to Investigate Midwest. 

Syngenta spokeswoman Kathy Eichlin said in an emailed statement that more than 1,600 studies have been conducted that support the safe use of thiamethoxam. 

“Without neonics, growers would be forced to rely on a few older classes of chemistry that are less effective at targeting pests and require more frequent applications,” Eichlin said.

BASF spokesman Chip Shilling said in an emailed statement that clothianidin presents “minimal risk to humans and the environment including pollinators.” He said these products “undergo many years of extensive and stringent testing to ensure that there are minimal adverse effects to the environment, including threatened and endangered species, when used according to label directions.”

“We will continue to engage in extensive training and other stewardship activities to ensure that clothianidin seed treatment products are handled and applied safely,” Shilling said. 

EPA and the Endangered Species Act

“THIS IS, AS FAR as we know, unprecedented. I’ve never seen a determination that was this large in scope,” NRDC’s Raichel said of the EPA’s analysis, adding, “EPA violated the Endangered Species Act when it approved these pesticides.” 

Though the EPA was founded at the height of the environmental movement ignited by “Silent Spring,” the EPA has never assessed the impact of pesticides, which includes herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and rodenticides, on endangered species since the Endangered Species Act was signed into law by former President Richard Nixon in 1973.

However, the EPA has consistently lost Endangered Species Act lawsuits for decades. In April 2022, the Biden administration pledged to take action and released an Endangered Species Work Plan for pesticides.

Under the Endangered Species Act, the federal government cannot take any action that will “jeopardize the continued existence” of a protected species. In other words, the federal government cannot drive a species toward extinction.

If the government’s action is found to do so, it is called a “jeopardy” finding — which is rare. A 2015 review of seven years of consultations found only two jeopardy calls of more than 88,000 actions taken by the federal government during that time period. Jake Li, a co-author of that review prior to joining the EPA, is now deputy assistant administrator for pesticide programs at the EPA, overseeing the pesticide office.

Any federal agency that believes an action may harm an endangered species must consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or National Marine Fisheries Service (depending on the species at risk) to see if that harm rises to the level of jeopardy — which means the species is less likely to survive because of the action.

In the case of these three neonicotinoids, the EPA released a biological evaluation in 2022 finding that these specific insecticides are likely to adversely affect — or harm — between 1,225 to 1,445 listed species, depending on the active ingredient. This is between two-thirds and three-fourths of all protected species in the U.S.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or National Marine Fisheries Service are then supposed to weigh whether that harm would rise to the level of extinction. In this instance, however, the EPA did its own analysis because the two agencies are backlogged in their analyses on pesticides, Matuszko said.

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“This is, as far as we know, unprecedented. I’ve never seen a determination that was this large in scope. EPA violated the Endangered Species Act when it approved these pesticides.” 

— Dan Raichel, manager of pollinator conservation for the World Wildlife FundDan Raichel

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“It’s going to be awhile before (the services’ analyses) comes out,” Matuszko said. “The reason we’re doing this is to get mitigations in place for listed species much earlier. We want to be able to protect those species before we go through the entire consultation process.”

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — which oversees implementation of the ESA for terrestrial species and freshwater species — declined to answer questions, instead referring questions to the EPA.

Genevieve O’Sullivan, a spokeswoman for CropLife America, said the trade organization that represents pesticide manufacturers appreciates EPA’s work on the analysis to get mitigations in place for protected species.

“The new report provides better data for industry and growers to work with the relevant federal agencies as they determine additional mitigations for the continued responsible use of pesticides,” O’Sullivan said in an emailed statement.  

EPA analysis: Largest use of neonics doesn’t impact endangered species

THE EPA’S ANALYSIS, THOUGH, found that the largest use of neonicotinoid insecticides — as seed coatings – will not cause species to go extinct. Researchers who study the environmental impacts of neonicotinoids say the EPA’s analysis downplays the risks.

Justin Housenger, a branch chief in the environmental fates and effects division of the EPA’s  Office of Pesticide Programs, said in an interview that in the EPA’s analysis, they found seed treatments to be safer than other uses of the chemicals because seed treatments have “no offsite transport,” meaning they don’t run off into water or drift into the air.

However, it is “widely accepted” by researchers that seed treatments do move off of where they are applied, said Christian Krupke, a professor of entomology at Purdue University, who has published extensively about the environmental impacts of neonicotinoid seed treatments. 

Research by Krupke and others shows that treated seeds lose up to 95% of the pesticide to the environment. This happens through seed abrasion and drift during the planting process or loss to soil or waterways through erosion. Birds can also eat treated seeds that are not properly buried. 

“There is no doubt that there are important non-target effects (of seed treatments),” Krupke said. 

Housenger said because the seeds are precision planted in fields, they likely don’t move off of where they are planted. He also said that the EPA’s analysis recognized “dust off” of pesticides during planting could happen, but doesn’t “quantitatively assess it further.” 

Housenger added that seeds are physically too big for many endangered birds to eat. Further, the EPA’s analysis found that unless a species’ habitat was the treated agricultural field and its diet was primarily seeds, it would not face a jeopardy call, Housenger said.

“Unlike with foliar and soil applications, there’s no offsite transport,” Housenger said. “When you stack all these lines of evidence together, that’s why you’ve got this relatively low number, even though seed treatment considerations and uses were considered.”

The EPA’s assessment disregards well-established research in the field, said Maggie Douglas, assistant professor of environmental science at Dickinson College.

“I don’t know where that disconnect is coming from, but it does seem to exist,” Douglas said. “At this point, there’s quite a lot of evidence that this (movement) is happening. Seed treatments are not just staying in the field.”

In recent years, the U.S. Geological Survey has found neonics in rivers across the United States, tributaries to the Great Lakes, and well water and groundwater in Iowa.

“Treated seeds are no question in my mind why we’re finding this,” said Dana Kolpin, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, who has been an author on many of those studies.

A 2021 study by Kolpin and others found that clothianidin was in 68% of groundwater in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota. Clothianidin is used heavily as seed treatments in corn, but rarely used otherwise in those states.

That these chemicals are used on half of all cultivated cropland shows how widespread the pollution could be, said Bill Freese, science director at the nonprofit Center for Food Safety. 

“It’s a huge issue. We’re talking the biggest crops in America,” Freese said. “Yet EPA is convinced these seed treatments don’t jeopardize species. I think that’s the most glaring evidence of how bad their assessments are.”

Lack of knowledge about neonic usage

NO ONE KNOWS THE EXACT acreage planted with neonicotinoid treated seeds, but it is by far the largest-scale use of the chemicals, said Douglas, who has published extensively on tracking how, where and to what extent neonics are used.

As of 2012, about 150 million acres of crops were planted with neonicotinoid-treated seeds each year; the coatings are applied to the seed prior to planting. Neonicotinoids are considered systemic, which means that plants absorb the chemicals and spread them through their circulatory system. This makes flowers, leaves, nectar, and pollen harmful to both pests and non-target insects.

The neonicotinoids can often be taken up by non-target plants, including wildflowers and other native plants on the edges of fields. A paper by Krupke found that more than 42% of the land in Indiana is exposed to neonic pesticides during corn planting, impacting the habitat of more than 94% of the bees in the state.

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“This is an avoidable problem. In most cases, it’s not helping crops, yields or farmers.”

— Christian Krupke, professor of entomology at Purdue University

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The U.S. Geological Survey, which tracks overall pesticide use by purchasing data from a third-party contractor that gathers the information via farmer surveys, stopped tracking seed treatments in 2015 because the data was too complex and full of uncertainties, according to the USGS website. Many farmers also do not know which seed coatings they are planting, making accurate information difficult to get, Douglas said. 

After the USGS stopped tracking seed treatments, recorded use of the chemicals — through applications by growers, such as spraying — fell significantly. Imidacloprid usage immediately dropped in half, while thiamethoxam use has dropped about seven-fold, and clothianidin usage has dropped more than 35-fold, USGS data shows.

Housenger said the EPA also does not know exactly how many acres currently are treated with neonic-coated seeds. An EPA spokeswoman, though, said the agency estimates that between 70% and 80% of all corn, soybean and cotton acres are planted with neonicotinoid-treated seeds. In 2023, that would range from 135.3 million to 154.64 million acres. This does not include treated seeds of other crops, including fruits and vegetables.

Coated seeds unregulated

THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT is the sole way to mitigate environmental harm from treated seeds, because of a loophole in how these seeds are regulated. 

The EPA regulates all pesticides through the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA. Using that standard, the EPA must weigh whether a pesticide causes “unreasonable adverse effects on the environment.” But unlike the Endangered Species Act, the EPA has the discretion under FIFRA to make a determination of whether environmental harms outweigh the benefits caused by the use of pesticides.

Seed coatings, however, aren’t regulated by FIFRA. 

The EPA exempts seed coatings because of a loophole called the treated article exemption. Originally designed so the EPA didn’t have to evaluate the safety of lumber treated with chemicals for preservation, the EPA has since expanded that definition.

On May 31, the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit that promotes environmentally safe and healthy food systems, filed a lawsuit against the EPA arguing that the agency cannot exempt coated seeds under FIFRA because they, unlike other “treated articles,” have widespread devastating impacts that EPA does not properly assess. 

RELATED STORY: Bees, plants among the more than 200 species in jeopardy, due to neonicotinoid use

Krupke said there is little research that supports the effectiveness of seed coating to protect corn and soybeans under typical field growing conditions. A 2014 analysis by the EPA found that soybean neonicotinoid coatings “provide negligible overall benefits to soybean production in most situations.”

“We don’t need to be using nearly as much of these as we’re using,” Krupke said. “This is an avoidable problem. In most cases, it’s not helping crops, yields or farmers.”

The post Three widely used pesticides driving hundreds of endangered species toward extinction, according to EPA appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

This is the fifth and story in a series, “The Price of Plenty.”

As a young boy in the late 1950s, Frank Glenn knew the soft, freshly-tilled brown dirt lining his family’s fields signaled the start of another planting season.

“Back when we were young buckaroos, we would plow and disc and get a crop of weeds to come up [and then] knock them down,” Glenn said.

Frank and his younger brother John would hop on the tractor and start pulling their blue plow through the fields in February and March. Then they would go back with a tiller and turn over the topsoil before planting corn, soybeans, wheat and oats.

Today, the Glenns are still running their family farm in Columbia, growing corn, soybeans and hay. But about 25 years ago they transitioned to a majority no-till operation, no longer digging up the first few inches of soil before planting. Their fields are now filled with big clumps of dirt and old roots from previous harvests.

No-till farming helps decrease erosion and runoff. It’s one of several regenerative farming methods that help farmers’ fertilizer stay in fields and not run off into nearby waterways.

Rob Myers, director of the University of Missouri Center for Regenerative Agriculture, said less than half of Missouri farmers are using a regenerative method such as cover crops, no-till or integrating crops and livestock. Cost is one of the factors holding farmers back, Myers said.

Farmers use fertilizer to build their soil’s fertility and help increase crop yields. But less than half of the nitrogen fertilizer applied is taken up by the crops. These excess nutrients wash into the Gulf of Mexico, creating a dead zone where fish and shrimp cannot live. But nutrient pollution is not just an environmental problem – it’s a business one.

Farmers are responsible for the cost of implementing alternative practices, and they bear the risk if it doesn’t work. Bruce Shryock, a corn, soybean and wheat farmer in Auxvasse, said farmers are stuck between science and the economy.

“If you spend more and then don’t make any more, then you’re in trouble,” Shryock said.

Farmer finances on the line

A report from the University of Missouri found that net farm income in the state is projected to decrease by 14% this year, while the U.S. Department of Agriculture anticipates national farm income to fall by a fifth. Meanwhile, farmers’ input costs have increased 55% since 2020.

Fertilizer accounts for about a third of these annual costs, and it now costs farmers nearly 73% more than it did in 2020. But farmers continue to buy it because it offers a good return on investment, said Ray Massey, a professor in MU’s College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources.

“The economics said that you can make more money if you have higher yields,” Massey said.

Farmers also must factor in other input costs like seed, pesticide, equipment and fuel. Crop revenue has increased but the prices for inputs have continued to rise, so their margins have stayed about the same, Frank Glenn said.

 “It seems like they (the ag industry) don’t want farmers to make any money,” he said.

Some farmers coped with the price increases by cutting back on the amount of fertilizer they apply. Glenn said he and his brother went from applying 180 pounds an acre to 120 pounds last year. He said they were lucky crop prices were high or they might have not been able to survive the fertilizer price hike.

“Jesus, it makes you wanna puke,” his brother John Glenn said. “It’s so expensive.”

Promoting intentional fertilizer use

Because fertilizer is expensive, farmers want to get the most bang for their buck, said Andrea Rice, director of research, education, and outreach at the Missouri Fertilizer Control Board.

The agency enforces Missouri fertilizer laws, conducts nutrient research and helps farms implement alternative farming methods.

Rice said high costs and current profit margins discourage farmers from applying more than the recommended amount, noting that farmers lose money if the fertilizer washes off their fields.

Heavy rain or snow melt washes fertilizer into waterways, polluting water and creating toxic algae blooms in lakes and rivers. Ultimately, some of this pollution travels downstream to the Gulf of Mexico and creates a hypoxic area called the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River where water oxygen levels plummet. Any wildlife in these areas must move or suffocate.

“The Gulf hypoxia situation – that’s not something that any farmer would want to cause,” Rice said. But she said the problem did not appear overnight and is going to take time to solve.

Farmers have several ways of measuring how much fertilizer they need to apply to their fields. This includes soil testing and looking at past harvests to compare their yield to the amount of fertilizer they applied.

The Glenns use a satellite to create a grid of their fields and take samples from each block on the grid. They can see how their soil structure varies and pinpoint the exact nutrients each block needs.

Miscalculations such as applying too much fertilizer, applying it on frozen ground or overwatering fields will increase the runoff potential.

Sarah Carden, a senior policy advocate at Farm Action, an advocacy group opposing corporate influence in agriculture, said the industry is set up to support conventional farming, which disincentivizes alternative practices.

It’s easier for conventional farmers to qualify for crop insurance, Carden said, but it gets harder when a farmer wants to decrease the amount of fertilizer they use.

“It becomes a lot riskier for a farmer to participate in alternative forms of production,” Carden said.

Making change happen

One method farmers can adopt to minimize the harmful effects of fertilizer is to plant cover crops, which help decrease erosion, hold moisture in the ground and reduce weeds.

Integrating cover crops was a learning experience for Shryock, the farmer from Auxvasse. In his first year planting cover crops, a wet spring spurred his rye to grow to about 8 feet tall. Getting that tall rye out of the field was a challenge, as it wrapped around his planter shaft and damaged the bearings on his equipment.

“I cussed it that first year,” he said.

Shryock has since learned to kill rye when it’s about 2 feet tall. He saw the benefits of cover crops after that first year as it helped his soil and decreased runoff.

Shryock also no-tills in addition to cover crops. These practices take more time, he said, but they’ve been worth it. He cut back on the amount of fuel he uses, but he still has to buy seed and pesticide and must spend time planting the cover crop. Shryock thinks more people would plant them if there was an incentive to help cover their costs.

Rice said education can help increase the adoption of cover crops, though some farmers are used to doing things the way they and their families always have.

She first advises new clients to do soil sampling. Then, she discusses the type of fertilizer they are using, the amount, application times and if they are using cover crops.

“If we take those things and we do a little bit at a time and we keep encouraging and keep educating over time, there will be a big impact,” Rice said.

The MU Center for Regenerative Agriculture has recently been awarded two grants: $25 million to offer financial incentives for farmers to implement regenerative practices and $10 million to research how to improve varieties of cover crops.

The grant will pay farmers to adopt grid sampling, cover crops and livestock grazing systems to decrease nitrogen runoff. It also will fund programs to help farmers learn about these methods and their benefits.

“It takes time to keep making changes and improvements in agriculture,” Myers said. “But I think we’re headed in the right direction with these practices.”

This story is part of The Price of Plenty, a special project investigating fertilizer from the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications and the University of Missouri School of Journalism, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative and distributed by the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk.

The post Facing high fertilizer costs, farmers still struggle to use less appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

After months of planning, the cities founded the Selkirk Pend Oreille Transit (SPOT) system, bringing the first fare-free bus to the area. Anyone 13 and up can ride alone with routes that span the entire county. Many riders are teens and tourists who rely on SPOT buses to get up to the ski resort as […]

The post Rural Idaho County Thrives with Free Bus Service appeared first on Barn Raiser.

U.S. Department of Labor data show that the majority of agricultural laborers whose legal rights have been violated are farmworkers in the U.S. on H-2A visas.

These workers make up about 11% of the overall agricultural workforce, according to the Woodrow Wilson Center, but an Investigate Midwest analysis found that they were owed 62% of the industry’s back wages in 2022. This represents a dramatic increase over the past 15 years. In 2008, by comparison, H-2A workers were owed 30% of the industry’s back wages.

Employers who are found to have violated labor laws may be subject to civil monetary penalties — punitive fines that are paid to the government rather than to the affected employees. Not all cases that find illegal wage withholding result in such fines, and employers may instead be ordered to pay workers withheld wages without additional penalties.

Farmers do not always directly employ H-2A laborers and may instead work with farm labor contractors, who recruit workers for placement on individual farms. Farm labor contractors have been fined the most money for H-2A labor violations from 2008 to the present.

The H-2A visa program, established in 1986, provides a legal pathway for migrant workers to perform seasonal work on American farms. The number of H-2A visa certifications has increased rapidly in recent years, more than tripling since 2008.

The Department of Labor lists agriculture as a “low wage, high violation” industry. In 2022, the average rate of hourly pay advertised in H-2A job postings was roughly $14 and workweeks averaged 43 hours. Agricultural employees, regardless of citizenship status, are ineligible for overtime pay due to an exemption in the Fair Labor Standards Act.

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Seth Petersen was at his grandmother’s funeral, and his phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

Three hours away in the village of Luck, Wisconsin, where he served as director of public works, there was an emergency. Petersen was getting calls repeatedly, asking for his expertise.

Petersen and two other employees were responsible for drinking water, wastewater, street maintenance, park and cemetery maintenance and picking up stray dogs, he said. The job never stopped.

“Seth, what the (expletive) are you doing?” his brother-in-law said to him as he came back to the family gathering from another call. “Why are you living like this?”

Petersen left that job at the end of last year. Now, he helps train water operators in small communities for the Wisconsin Rural Water Association.

Luck is not an outlier. In small and rural communities across the U.S., water system operators are stretched thin, covering around-the-clock responsibilities to keep water running safely and reliably despite aging and underfunded infrastructure.

The consequences of a water system falling behind have received the national spotlight, infamously in Flint, Michigan, and most recently in Jackson, Mississippi, where majority-Black communities bore the brunt of mismanagement and aging infrastructure.

Thousands of under-resourced systems risk a similar fate, and small water systems — defined by the EPA as serving fewer than 10,000 people, and making up more than 90% of the nation’s community water systems — are in a particularly precarious position.

Their staffing is often sparse and underpaid. Infrastructure, in many places, is crumbling and underfunded, and though there is a fresh infusion of federal money on the table, it’s a challenge to access.

The American Rescue Plan Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other programs represent a historic investment in the country’s water infrastructure, totaling billions of dollars.

But the total available funding, even after it’s all been doled out, still won’t be enough. One report from 2020 estimated that the U.S. would need to invest nearly $3.3 trillion in water and wastewater infrastructure projects between 2019 and 2039 to keep systems updated.

Many communities will also face increases in their water bills to keep up with infrastructure and staffing needs. Yet raising the price of water may prove unworkable in rural and historically-underinvested communities like Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, some of the most impoverished in the country.

No one in the U.S. should have to worry about having safe drinking water, said Chris Groh, executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Water Association.

“But a town doesn’t take care of itself.”

Small community water systems falling behind

Over the last two decades, water systems in the ten states bordering the Mississippi River violated U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations for drinking water more than 438,000 times.

That figure includes thousands of instances of heightened levels of harmful chemicals in water each year. Nitrates, trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids, which have all been linked to various cancers and other health hazards, were top contaminants in the EPA’s violation data in 2022.

Nitrates are an indicator of agricultural runoff, common in rural areas. And trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids appear as byproducts of the water treatment process, when chlorine reacts with organic contents.

Addressing these issues can require expensive treatment technology. But in the last two decades, small and large utilities alike have reined in the number of violations.

However, an Ag and Water Desk analysis of EPA Safe Drinking Water Act violation data nationwide found small water systems have been slower to reduce their violations than larger systems. And these violations only represented those reported; there could be many more incidences of unreported issues.

In the ten states along the Mississippi River, both small and large water systems saw increases in violations newly reported during 2022. For small water systems, that increase was more significant.

That disparity is, at least in part, an indicator of the disadvantages facing small and rural water systems, according to Jennifer Sloan Ziegler, a Mississippi-based engineer serving as vice president of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Environmental and Water Resources Institute.

And recent injections of federal infrastructure funding won’t be enough, she said. They’re not sustained funding, she added, and “the sad thing about it is: It still doesn’t catch us up.”

‘I don’t have a day off’

The working conditions that drove Petersen to leave his position in Luck are a trend reflected in small communities across the country.

“I don’t have a day off,” said Nathan Taylor, lead operator of a small water plant in Wax, Kentucky. The days he’s not on-duty, his phone is constantly ringing as issues come up at the plant, he said.

Ziegler pointed out a water operator she knows nearby in the Mississippi Delta, whose responsibilities span four different water districts — “a huge, huge area,” she said.

Water system operators serve as a first line of defense for a community’s public health, and must have working knowledge of chemistry for licensing tests.

Yet operator pay in many small communities is about neck-and-neck with wages at the local McDonald’s. Other trades, like construction, often pay far more.

“You can go swing a hammer for 25 bucks an hour,” said Petersen, in Wisconsin, “...and you can ice fish all winter.”

A workforce survey last year in Kentucky found water utilities in the state pay as low as $10 per hour for an entry level position, with an average closer to $18. But 72% of managers reported losing staff to better pay in another job opportunity or other, often larger utilities.

The water workforce nationally is also aging overwhelmingly. Seventeen million workers are expected to leave the industry in the next decade, Ziegler said, and bringing young people into the profession has proven challenging.

“We’re losing people,” she said, and “we’re not getting them back.”

Federal money on the table, if you can get it

Widespread water workforce shortages make accessing infrastructure funding an even bigger task for small water systems’ overworked staff, despite desperate needs.

And the application process for federal funds often looks very similar in a village of 1,000 or a city of half a million, according to Ziegler.

“It is extremely extensive,” she said. “Not just the application, but the amount of background documentation that you have to provide them. It takes… I would say, months, to get it together.”

Smaller systems are at an inherent disadvantage. Larger utilities, with more ratepayers and bigger budgets, often have experts on staff to go after competitive funding pots.

“Their applications are shiny,” Petersen said. “And they’re written by someone with a Master’s degree.”

During his tenure as director of public works, Petersen worked through the application process to access federal infrastructure funding for Luck’s streets. Even with help from a consultant and phone calls with the state, he described it as overwhelming.

“You don’t even know where to begin,” he said. “Things are this far behind.”

Luck didn’t get that money. And in cash-strapped communities, paying large sums for the help of consultants in applying for funding that isn’t guaranteed is a big gamble.

“Let's just be honest. If they can't afford to upgrade and maintain and operate their systems with the money they have,” Ziegler said, “do you think they have money left over to hire somebody, to pay somebody to put together this application…? They don't.”

Poorer communities facing higher water bills

Without sustained infrastructure funding, communities in turn face a rising water rate. In many rural areas, it’s a bill they can’t afford.

In Martin County, Kentucky, where communities are built along snaking creeks and between the rolling mountains of Appalachia, residents still don’t trust the tap.

Decades of water district mismanagement, including chronic reports of discolored water and burdensome service shutoffs, eventually culminated in a state takeover. In 2020, authorities shifted control to Alliance Water Resources, a private firm, hoping to get the county’s water provisions on the right track.

At the peak of the crisis, the system’s aging water lines were leaking up to 90% of the water they were carrying, according to the estimates of Craig Miller, who now oversees the county’s water operations as division manager for the firm. For Martin County, that meant tens of millions of gallons of water going to waste every month.

In the years since the change in management, Martin County’s water system has made progress. In a recent stakeholder workgroup meeting, Miller reported improvements in water loss, as well as new hires and licensing for staff.

“There’s a good story here,” Miller said in the meeting. “But it is not over.”

Improvements came with a 24% rate increase, effective last year, piling onto already steep prices. More than a fifth of Martin County lives below the poverty line, according to recent census data.

“That's a huge burden on our poorest people,” said Nina McCoy, an advocate with Martin County Concerned Citizens, in the workgroup meeting. She pointed out that local water rates are far higher than in wealthier Louisville, where median income is 50% higher than that of Martin County.

The region’s mountainous terrain piles onto water infrastructure challenges, said Lindell Ormsbee, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Kentucky who’s paid close attention to the state’s water system struggles. And as in many rural areas, there are miles of water lines for relatively few homes, compared to cities like Louisville.

In Eastern Kentucky, many counties have historically relied on taxing the coal industry to fund water and other infrastructure needs. As the coal industry has declined, that funding has dried up, Ormsbee said, turning the burden over to ratepayers.

Even if systems are able to access one-time federal infrastructure funding, once it’s spent, they’ll return back to current levels of funding. In small communities, Ziegler said, that just won’t be enough.

“They're serving less affluent areas. They're serving older populations on fixed incomes,” Ziegler said, citing high rates of poverty in the rural and disadvantaged communities of her state of Mississippi. “Their customers cannot afford to pay more.”

Connor Giffin is an environmental reporter for the Louisville Courier Journal and a corps member with Report for America. Kae Petrin contributed data reporting.

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.

The post With billions on the table for water infrastructure, small communities risk being left out to dry appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

This is the second story in series, “The Price of Plenty.”

ST. JAMES PARISH, La. — From the crest of Louisiana’s Sunshine Bridge, the expanse of modern industry is laid out along the banks of the Mississippi River.

Leviathan petrochemical plants loom over fields of sugarcane and livestock. Bright yellow hills of sulfur are visible in the distance. It’s difficult to tell where the fumes stop and the clouds begin.

For generations, exposure to chemical pollutants has been a fact of life for residents in Louisiana’s industrial corridor.

The 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is home to about 150 chemical production sites. Elevated cancer rates have been documented among residents living in the corridor, earning it the nickname “Cancer Alley.”

One short section of the river is home to three massive fertilizer plants run by industry giants. The Mosaic Co.’s Uncle Sam and Faustina plants sit on opposite banks in St. James Parish. Just upriver is CF Industries’ Donaldsonville Complex, the largest nitrogen fertilizer plant in North America.

Health and safety concerns around these plants are a microcosm of the larger environmental justice movement that is gaining steam nationwide. Residents near the plants live with the risk of industrial accidents and the burden of increased air pollution.

“There are just as many (people living) on the fencelines of fertilizer facilities as there are on the fence lines of the other industrial facilities on Cancer Alley,” said Wilma Subra, a longtime environmental scientist and an expert on life in the industrial corridor.

‘This huge immediate concern’

In this part of the country, if you mention the fertilizer industry, people inevitably bring up a notorious incident involving Mosaic’s Uncle Sam phosphogypsum stack.

In late 2018 and early 2019, a sugar cane farmer harvesting a field noticed a strange bulge in the land adjacent to the Uncle Sam Phosphogypsum Stack 4. The 300-acre, 200-foot-tall  mountain of gypsum waste contains acidic and radioactive materials.

The farmer reported the bulge to Mosaic, which informed environmental authorities, who eventually determined that the pile was slouching. Residents were alarmed, fearing that the pond could burst, spilling sulfuric acid into the watershed.

“There was this huge immediate concern, because you have a massive amount of liquid toxic waste close to communities, close to the Mississippi River, which is where a lot of places get their drinking water, including New Orleans downstream,” said Kimberly Terrell, director of community engagement and a staff scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic.

Gail LeBoeuf, a St. James Parish resident and co-founder of Inclusive Louisiana, a nonprofit that aims to protect residents from industrial pollution, said she believes the issues with the stack were only reported when it couldn’t be kept secret anymore.

Mosaic eventually removed some water from the stack and used a dam and berm to slow down the slope’s movement, company spokesperson Jackie Barron said in an email. Mosaic also injected liquid into underground wells, according to a news report from The Advocate.

Barron said Mosaic leaders updated the community regularly via meetings with parish officials and ads in the local newspapers. The stack is still monitored and hasn’t produced any off-site impacts, she said.

Barbara Washington, a St. James Parish resident who lives about three miles west of the Uncle Sam plant, said she’s received no information on the site cleanup over the past few years. She sees it as a typical situation for residents concerned about local polluters.

“The process of getting something done is really slow,” Washington said. “They just slap industry on the hand…They keep on polluting, and we keep on dying.”

‘I think I’m far away enough’

Just 11 miles away, across the Sunshine Bridge, sits CF Industries’ 1,400-acre Donaldsonville complex. The plant sports a large waste-burning flare that persists day and night, and abuts patches of farmland, a veterinary clinic and quiet neighborhoods on two sides.

It doesn’t bother some neighbors, like Renee Steib, who has lived next to the plant for about a decade. The view from her front steps, about 600 yards from the plant’s fenceline, includes a field and fuming towers. Her father and uncle worked at CF for years, and Steib works at Bayer’s chemical plant in nearby St. Charles Parish. She said she moved to the neighborhood because she likes how quiet it is, and she doesn’t look out her front door much anyway.

In fact, the only time she has been bothered by CF was last winter. It was a December morning, and she got a call from a friend asking to see if she was all right. An ammonia leak had forced the evacuation of a nearby school and a number of road closures.

Although CF Industries told the media that people neighboring the plant had been informed, Steib said she was not notified. But otherwise, she said, she doesn’t have a problem with the company – despite deadly accidents linked to CF fertilizer manufacturing.

In 2013, a blast at the Donaldsonville plant killed one man. That same year in West, Texas, CF supplied the West Fertilizer Company with ammonium nitrate that caused an explosion that killed at least 15 people and injured hundreds.

Steib said she wasn’t worried about such accidents at the plant impacting her. “I think I’m far away enough,” she said.

And aside from the fact that her allergies get a little worse when the CF-owned sugar cane field in her back yard is burned, she doesn’t have any health concerns.

“Come on, we’ve lived in Louisiana our whole lives. It’s nothing new to us. You smell it, then you just keep going,” she said.

CF did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

‘Something had to be wrong’

Regardless of residents’ perceived risks, EPA data show that each fertilizer facility emits chemicals that can harm human health and the environment.

The three complexes ranked in the top third of more than 15,000 facilities in the U.S. for potential health risks from on-site air emissions, according to EPA data. According to EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, in 2021 the facilities collectively emitted and discharged millions of pounds of ammonia and nitrate compounds, as well as lesser amounts of methanol, lead compounds, formaldehyde and sulfuric acid.

Ammonia can hurt the lungs and irritate the throat and eyes, and contributes to the formation of particulate matter that can penetrate deep in the lungs and cause deadly lung ailments. Formaldehyde exposure is linked to rare cancers, rashes and breathing difficulties.

People living around the plants have a higher cancer risk than at least 80% of Americans and are at a higher risk of respiratory illness than at least 95% of Americans, according to the EPA.

But communities don’t always get the health information they need, Terrell said. Misinformation and economic interests complicate the picture, and battles over new facilities can garner more attention.

Washington said she knows a number of people in the area who suffered from emphysema, headaches, coughs, cancer and early death. Her sister who lived nearby died at 57 from lung cancer. She attributed these health issues to the chemical production sites in the area. 

Another co-founder of Inclusive Louisiana, Myrtle Felton, joined the fight against industry after five family members died over the course of three months in 2014.

“I knew something had to be wrong for people just to start dying like that all of a sudden,” Felton said.

It’s difficult to directly trace negative health outcomes to pollution from one specific plant. However, a correlation can be drawn between cancer rates and collective emissions from local plants, according to a 2022 study from the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic.

Felton said plans for new developments are often in the works well before nearby communities are informed of new construction. And, Washington said, groups actively working to stop new companies from coming in don’t always have time to worry about combating existing plants.

What activists want now is accountability for industry and regulators – and action to prevent current and future pollution.

LeBoeuf credits modern technology and science, media coverage and today’s youth for getting the word out about exposure to pollutants. “We are not sleeping anymore,” she said.

This story is part of The Price of Plenty, a special project investigating fertilizer from the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications and the University of Missouri School of Journalism, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiativeand distributed by the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk.

The post Fertilizer plants add to toxic loads in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

The Mississippi River flowed lazily under the Centennial Bridge, which connects Illinois and Iowa in the Quad Cities. Cars cruised past on a Saturday afternoon in early May, waving and occasionally honking at a long line of environmentalists who say the river is alive.

Glenda Guster was among the roughly 80 people to join the Great Plains Action Society’s Walk for River Rights — the centerpiece of a three-day summit earlier this month for Black and Indigenous organizers from across the Mississippi River basin, who, among other things, want to grant the river legal standing.

Like many making the march across the river, Guster, who held a sign saying “water is life” over her head, said the river needs more protection.

“The river has rights, just like human rights,” said Guster. “Nature has rights and it’s up to us to preserve these rights.”

According to Sikowis Nobis, the founder of the indigenous rights organization, the goal of the summit was to build a riverwide coalition to rethink the legal framework they believe imperils life on and in the Mississippi River. The way she sees it, the existing legal system cannot confront the types of environmental disasters that are increasingly imminent – but “Rights of Nature” might.

The idea is that natural entities like rivers, trees and wildlife have the same rights as humans and thus have legal standing in a court of law. Natural entities, the legal principle holds, constitute living beings with legally enforceable rights to exist that transcend the category of property.

“The Earth is really suffering, and rights of nature would basically give personhood to the river,” Nobis said. “It would allow us to have more power to keep it safe.”

The legal movement to grant natural entities like forests and rivers the same legal rights as humans has won meaningful success abroad, and has in recent years picked up steam in the United States. Largely Indigenous-led campaigns to recognize the legal rights of natural entities like wild rice in Minnesota, salmon in Washington, and the Klamath River in northern California are setting the stage for a nascent movement for the Mississippi River.

The implications of rights of nature as a legal instrument are far reaching. Companies could be taken to court for damaging ecosystems, and construction projects with the potential to cause environmental damage could be stopped.

That’s exactly what happened in Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania. Thomas Linzey is a senior attorney at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and drafted the document to grant the small borough rights.

“It may be a radical concept, or it was 20 years ago, but we’re rapidly coming to a place where without this kind of new system of environmental law, we’re all kind of done, we’re kind of cooked,” said Linzey.

Ultimately, locals were able to stop sewage sludge from being dumped in Tamaqua using the new ordinance.

Linzey said that before the rights of nature movement made its way into the mainstream, it was born from the cosmologies of indigenous people that recognized the natural world as made up of living beings – not just resources or commodities.

In 2008, Linzey consulted the Ecuadorian government while it drafted its new constitution, the first in the world to ratify the Rights of Nature. In 2021, an Ecuadorian municipality appealed to the constitutional protections to overturn mining permits that they said violated the rights of nature of the endangered Los Cedros rainforest.

“The work has spread to other countries, and in the U.S. to about over three dozen municipalities at this point,” said Linzey.

Ecuador remains the only country in the world to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. A similar proposal was considered in Chile last year, and the island nation of Aruba is currently reviewing its own amendment addressing the inherent rights of nature. Court decisions in countries like Bangladesh, Colombia and Uganda have successfully held up the rights of nature. Local laws and treaty agreements recognizing the rights of nature are emerging across the globe, particularly in the U.S.

Lance Foster, a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and a speaker at the Mississippi River Summit, said that a couple years ago, the success of rights of nature in South America got his and other tribes thinking, why not us?

“And we wondered why haven’t the big rivers, like the Missouri River, and the Mississippi River, gotten those rights?” said Foster.

He said his tribe and others have created an inter-tribal resolution for the rights of the Missouri River. They hope to use it to fight industrial scale agriculture and deep mining operations.

“If the Mississippi had those rights recognized… it would be able to have standing in court for an advocate on its behalf to help clean it up,” said Foster.

Two years ago in Minnesota, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe brought a suit against the Enbridge corporation’s Line 3 on behalf of wild rice, called Manoomin. And last month, the city of Seattle settled a case with the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe over the claim that salmon had the right to spawn, among other rights.

Because the Mississippi and Missouri rivers flow through so many states and tribal lands, experts said it would be prohibitively complicated to secure legal standing for them in the courts.

But Foster said if corporations get legal rights in the U.S., why shouldn’t rivers? Afterall, they were here far before humans.

States like Idaho, Florida and Ohio have moved to preemptively ban the possibility that nature or ecosystems can have legal standing. Even so, Foster said the rights of nature isn’t as unthinkable as it once was. After all, children, women, Black and indigenous people were denied rights once too – what’s stopping the river.

“It gives us a chance,” said Foster. “Now, will we take that chance as a society? I’m dubious most days, but we have to keep trying, we have to keep going to the bitter end.”

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 the Society of Environmental Journalists, funded by the Walton Family Foundation. 

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Midwest is known for its rows and rows of corn and soybeans that uniformly cover the landscape.

But in central Missouri, farmer Linus Rothermich disrupts the usual corn and soybean rotation with Japanese millet. He has been growing it since 1993.

“Golly, I have to think how far back that is,” he said. “I was a young man and I was looking for alternative crops to grow to make more money. We just weren’t making a lot of money in agriculture then.”

Compared to his corn and soybean crops, he spends a lot less on Japanese millet. Because its growing season is shorter, it fits perfectly into the rotation of the crops he already grows. It’s working so well for him that he wants to keep the grain to himself.

“I have recommended it to other farmers, as long as it’s not my Japanese millet,” he joked, pointing out prices likely would drop if a lot of other farmers start growing it.

But these humble grains soon may garner more attention after the United Nations declared 2023 the International Year of Millets. It’s part of an effort to encourage more awareness and a bigger market for millets, which the UN points out are extremely sustainable, weather resilient, nutritious and could help diversify the global food system.

However, the grains have not gotten nearly the same level of policy and research attention compared to corn and soybeans in the United States, or even compared to other crops in the global market.

“Millets had gotten sort of marginalized in its place, and therefore, it didn’t get the same investment and research attention that maize, wheat and rice have received over the last decades,” said Makiko Taguchi, an agricultural officer at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, “so in that sense we consider millets as one of the sort of neglected crops.”

She said that millets have an opportunity to assist with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and that hopefully will bring these climate-friendly grains more attention — similar to the success of the UN’s International Year of Quinoa in 2013.

A climate-friendly crop

There are several different kinds of millets. In addition to Rothermich’s Japanese millet, there is pearl millet, foxtail millet, proso millet and more. Sorghum can also be considered a millet.

Millets tend to need less fertilizer and are more resistant to insects and diseases (although sometimes birds like to eat them). Farmers can also use most of the same equipment for millets as they do for corn and soybeans. And while, so far, millets don’t produce the same yields as those commodity crops, Rothermich says it’s worth it.

“It’s not as high-yielding, but it also has lower inputs on it,” he said.

Perhaps more important today in parts of the Midwest and Great Plains, many types of millets are known to be incredibly drought resistant.

Matt Little, a farmer just outside of Arnett, Oklahoma, started growing proso millet last year. He expected the crop to burn up alongside his wheat crop during the extreme heat and the drought, but he managed to harvest and sell the crop.

“I’m really impressed with it. I’ve never seen a crop that stood the heat and stood the drought and still made me money,” he said.

Millets are also getting attention at the University of Missouri’s Center for Regenerative Agriculture, which is providing information to farmers on the grains.

The center’s director, Rob Myers, said that millets are versatile. Proso and pearl millet would do well in drier states like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Japanese millet survives hot humid conditions and is often used for planting in creek bottoms to support wildlife.

“We see millets being used in some of those areas because of concerns about the supply of irrigation water,” he said.

Other millets would be better in places that are prone to flooding like the Missouri and Mississippi River bottoms. That includes the Japanese millet Rothermich grows in Missouri.

The market for millets is not a large one in the United States, except for its use as songbird seed. However, millets could be used for livestock feed, cover crops and even biofuels. Myers said that they could even become a more popular food option as people look for gluten-free alternatives.

“I expect the market opportunities to continue to expand, but it’ll be incremental,” said Myers.

Research and policy investment

Because the market is not as large, millets are not as well-known as other crops in the United States.

Ram Perumal, the head of Kansas State University’s millet breeding program, said millets don’t get the same level of federal protection as corn and soybeans.

“Those are all cash crops: They have insurance; the prices; the market is there; commodity grant support is there,” he said.

While there is insurance available for proso millet, it is only available in certain parts of the country. Perumal said that lack of support and protection also makes it harder to get research grants. He’s hoping the UN Year of Millets will help highlight the importance of millet science.

More research is needed to really advance millets, said Myers of the University of Missouri.

“If you spend an extra $1 million on corn research, you don’t necessarily advance the state of corn science very much,” he said, “but if you spent a million dollars on millet research, you might suddenly create a whole lot of new information that we didn’t have before.”

For example, millet yields would be easier to improve than getting corn to take up less water, according to James Schnable, a professor at the University of Nebraska. He and his father, Patrick Schnable, a professor at Iowa State University, co-founded the start-up, Dryland Genetics. A lack of funding for research is partly why they started a company to research and breed proso millet.

“(Proso millet) is in this weird hole in the federal funding schemes, which is part of why we ended up using private money to start Dryland Genetics. Because it’s a grain, it doesn’t qualify for a lot of the specialty crop grants,” said James Schnable.

In Ames, Iowa, farmer Jeff Taylor said he started growing proso millet about six years ago, with the help of Dryland Genetics. He thinks more farmers would try new crops if federal programs would shoulder some of the risk.

“It would be wonderful if crops like proso millet were researched more and there were some incentives for farmers to consider planting alternative crops outside of just corn and soybeans,” he said.

This story was produced by Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest, and the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report For America.

The post Millets — ancient drought-resistant grains — could help the Midwest survive climate change appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

Four days after HyLife Foods filed its bankruptcy paperwork, workers anxiously awaited answers from management about its plans for the pork processing plant.

The employees gathered in the plant’s cafeteria before their shifts on May 1 to listen to an executive read a list of what appeared to be frequently asked questions and corresponding answers about the company’s financial situation. 

HyLife announced in early April that if it can’t sell the plant, it anticipated laying off the 1,007-person workforce by June 2. An end date has not been set, the company told Investigate Midwest on May 10.

About half of the plant’s workers are employed through a temporary visa program, and if the plant closes, they will have few options outside of immediate return to their home countries.

Many want to continue living and working in the U.S. in order to support families in their home countries, where wages are much lower.

If the company is successful in selling the plant, the buyer could choose to retain the current workforce, the executive explained during the staff meeting, according to four HyLife employees who were in attendance that day. 

Around 500 HyLife workers are employed through the H-2B visa program, which allows companies to hire foreign workers on a temporary basis when there aren’t enough Americans to fill the company’s needs, according to U.S. Department of Labor data.

H-2B visas are valid for one year at a time but can be renewed annually for up to three years. The employees interviewed by Investigate Midwest all said HyLife promised to employ them for three years.

The employees requested anonymity for fear of retaliation by HyLife and to protect their future job prospects.

HyLife currently employs more H-2B workers than any other meatpacking plant in the country — twice as many as the next-biggest H-2B employer in the industry, according to the DOL data.

If the plant closes, the visas will be immediately terminated and HyLife will have 10 days to return the hundreds of H-2B workers to their home countries.

“We acknowledge this is a challenging situation for our employees and the Windom community,” HyLife CEO Grant Lazaruk said in a statement provided to Investigate Midwest. “In an effort to be transparent, we have shared numerous updates with our team on the plant sale process. Our goal remains to find a buyer so that operations may continue under new ownership.”

H-2B visas cannot be transferred to another employer. Few options exist that would allow the workers to stay in the U.S. legally, and each of the potential legal paths come with strict eligibility requirements and some downsides. 

Employees told Investigate Midwest they’re worried about what will happen if the plant closes. In addition to supporting themselves in Minnesota, many send money home to their families. 

“Many of us are paying off cars, or we signed leases” in the U.S., an employee said in Spanish. “We don’t know what will happen with the company. We can’t call the bank and say, ‘Wait for me because the company is out of money.’”

One employee said he came to the U.S. to support his daughter through university. Another said he started working at HyLife in order to purchase a house for his family back home. 

HyLife, based in Manitoba, Canada, is Canada’s largest pork producer, according to the company’s website. Charoen Pokphand Group, a Thai holding company, has held a majority stake in HyLife since 2019. 

HyLife purchased a majority interest in the Prime Pork plant in Windom in May 2020. The company also owns a pork plant in Guanajuato, Mexico, where many H-2B workers were employed before moving to the Windom plant.

Fewer than 5,000 people live in Windom, located in the southwest corner of Minnesota.

When the executive finished reading the prepared statements — including an announcement of reduced hours — to the group of employees in the cafeteria, he left, the four attendees said. Some workers protested, saying they still had unanswered questions, workers told Investigate Midwest. Most stayed in the cafeteria instead of leaving to prepare for their shifts.

The executive returned to the cafeteria. One employee started recording, sensing the rising tensions in the room, he said.

The executive told employees to get to work immediately or be fired. If the H2-B workers didn’t go to their shifts, he said, they would be sent home.

In a video clip reviewed by Investigate Midwest, the executive’s interpreter repeated his words in Spanish. 

“…they’re going to fire you,” the interpreter said. “Those with H-2B, what does that mean? Return to Mexico.”

The crowd grew noisy in response. Some workers shouted and some whistled. Others quickly headed for the door.

“That’s a threat,” multiple women said in Spanish in the background of the video.

The employee who recorded the video requested that it not be published because it could identify him and put his job at risk. Investigate Midwest provided HyLife a detailed description of the events of the May 1 meeting based on the video and interviews with four employees who were in attendance. 

In statements provided to Investigate Midwest, HyLife did not answer questions about the May 1 meeting.

“As you can appreciate, having full context matters, and it is difficult to comment on a video Investigate Midwest refuses to share,” the company said in a May 10 statement.

The four attendees said they left the meeting with unanswered questions. 

“People were a little angry because they aren’t sticking to the hours they promised us,” one employee told Investigate Midwest in Spanish. “And to talk to the people like that…it was like we were animals or something. It’s like they were making a threat against us.”

Few options for those wanting to remain in U.S.

In a church basement in downtown Mankato on May 7, HyLife workers with H-2B visas gathered to learn about the immigration options available to them. 

Organizers had estimated around 100 people would attend. By the end of the meeting, more than 250 sat in folding chairs, leaned against the walls or watched through open doorways. Several tended to infants during the three-hour gathering.

HyLife employees organized the meeting with support from Unidos MN, a nonprofit organization advocating for social and economic equity for Latinx families in Minnesota.

Over Zoom, an immigration lawyer answered questions and outlined the paths available to the employees, if they wanted to continue living and working in the U.S. in the event that the plant closes.

“You could feel the tension, you could feel the desperation,” said Rayito Hernandez, lead organizer of Unidos MN, who participated in the meeting. “They were like, ‘We want an answer.’”

Some workers also addressed Minnesota State Rep. Luke Frederick, a member of the state’s Democratic party, and whose district includes the city of Mankato, where many workers live.

Frederick told Investigate Midwest that some of the current state legislature’s initiatives, such as issuing driver’s licenses regardless of an individual’s immigration status and expanding paid family leave, benefit H-2B workers in Minnesota. 

But the core issue is one of federal immigration law.

“What can we do at the state?” Frederick said. “That’s the question I’ve been asking.”

HyLife said it is following Labor Department and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service frameworks.

“If the plant closes before our H-2B work authorization ends, we are prepared to help (H-2B workers) identify possible employment options,” the company said in a statement provided to Investigate Midwest. “If opportunities are unavailable, HyLife will provide transportation for a safe return home.”

If the plant closes but the employees want to continue working in the U.S. on an H-2B visa, they may need to return to their home country and reapply for the program, according to federal immigration law.

There is a possibility for workers to obtain another H-2B job in the U.S. without returning to their home countries, said attorney Erin Schutte Wadzinski, co-owner of Kivu Immigration Law Firm in Worthington, Minnesota, which hosted a separate legal clinic for HyLife workers on April 29. The prospective employer would need to already have a Temporary Employment Certification from the Department of Homeland Security, have open H-2B positions and submit the new employee’s H-2B paperwork before the existing visa expires. 

“There is no obvious pathway that is available for everyone,” Schutte Wadzinski said. “Some individuals might be eligible for family petitions. Other individuals are genuinely fearful of returning to their home country and wish to seek asylum in the United States.”

Being granted asylum would permit an individual to live and work in the U.S. In order to qualify for asylum, the person must prove that they are subject to persecution in their home country due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a specific social group. 

During the asylum application process, and after asylum is granted, petitioners can’t visit their home countries. (H-2B visas allow the workers to travel internationally. Hourly HyLife employees employed for less than five years receive 15 vacation and personal days, according to a 2022 copy of the plant’s employee handbook.)

Family visas require sponsorship by an immediate relative, like a parent, spouse or adult child who is a citizen of the U.S.

There are other visas available — for victims of human trafficking or crimes that take place in the U.S. Applicants have to weigh the pros against the cost, processing times and international travel restrictions of each option.

Nonresidents who can prove they were victims of or witnesses to violations of labor rights can also request deferred action from the DHS. Deferred action allows non-resident immigrants to temporarily live and work in the U.S. without fear of deportation.

Tensions rise as potential plant closure looms

On April 10, in compliance with federal regulations, HyLife Foods sent a letter to the state government informing officials — and its employees — that the company would have to lay off its workforce if the company didn’t find a buyer. 

Two and a half weeks later, the company filed for bankruptcy.

“On April 27, 2023, Windom entered Chapter 11, a formal court-supervised process, for our production plant in Minnesota,” HyLife president and CEO Lazaruk said in an April 27 statement provided to Investigate Midwest. “This helps us to move forward with our restructuring plan while we pursue a potential sale, so that the plant can continue under new ownership.”

The executive reiterated that the company was still seeking a buyer at the May 1 employee meeting, four workers told Investigate Midwest.

“We are still actively seeking a buyer,” HyLife said in a statement provided to Investigate Midwest on May 10. “An end date for Windom has not been set. We continue communicating with our team and will give additional updates as more details become available.”

As of May 12, the company had not announced a sale.

HyLife said it has reduced the scheduled work hours for employees by 25%, the maximum allowable under H-2B visa regulations, because the plant is processing fewer hogs.

“We understand this personally impacts our employees and have shared additional Minnesota Unemployment Insurance resources to help support individuals exploring top-up options,” the company said in its statement.

Many non-H-2B employees have already left for other jobs, employees said, leaving the rest of the workforce short-staffed. Work has become more difficult in recent weeks due to the departures, they said.

One employee said he’d had to move to different positions in the plant multiple times recently, including working in the slaughter area for the first time, where the smell of the pig blood and excrement makes him nauseous, he said.

Conflicts are increasing among coworkers and between workers and their supervisors, the employee said.

“There’s a lot of pressure,” he said in Spanish.

Because their visas aren’t transferable to other workplaces, and they don’t have jobs lined up in their home countries, three employees who spoke to Investigate Midwest said they plan to work at HyLife until their visas expire.

“Life must go on,” one employee said. “Until the last day of the plant, we will still be here and we will still continue to work.”

The post In bankruptcy’s wake, a Minnesota meatpacking plant’s visa workers face an uncertain future appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

More than 90% of Americans access drinking water through public water systems, which are regulated at the state and local level, according to the government-standardized data portal USA FACTS.

During 2021, there were 153,501 total water quality violations across all U.S. states and territories. Of the total violations, more than 63% were found because of issues with monitoring and reporting by regulatory agencies. 

The high proportion of monitoring, reporting and public notification violations raises questions about how well tens of thousands of public water supply systems test for and report potential health violations to EPA and the public, according to a USA FACTS report released in November 2022.

While the total number of violations in 2021 is lower than the 10-year average, the frequency of drinking water violations does not appear to be decreasing over time, according to the report.

In states such as Iowa and other big agricultural states — with extensive crop production and livestock farming, which involves the use of fertilizer, pesticides and manure — runoff from these activities contributes to water pollution. 

These pollutants, particularly nitrates and phosphates, can enter water bodies, causing problems such as harmful algal blooms, oxygen depletion and degradation of aquatic ecosystems.

The post Most water quality violations are from monitoring and reporting issues appeared first on Investigate Midwest.