View From The Cab

By David Tollefson, Columnist

Brent Olson, former hog farmer from the Ortonville, area, had a column with that title in the Minnesota Farm Guide of Sept. 5, 2014. That’s soon 10 years ago.

At my farm, in those nine years, I’ve had wet years and dry years. In wet years, the rains are coming faster and harder, leading to unprecedented erosion in my hills. I am in the process of enrolling the worst hills into a 15 year CRP program.

Here is Brent’s column, and a reminder that this was written in the year 2014:

Some things are so stupid it makes my head hurt. For instance, when people say the world is running out of water.

It’s not.

There’s just as much water in the world as there’s ever been. The world is not running out of water.

Places in the world are running out of clean water, and it’s a very big deal, but it’s a different problem than if we were actually running out of water. And no matter the size of the problem, if you don’t define it correctly, you aren’t going to solve it.

So, we have plenty of water in the world, except much of it is dirty or salty, and a lot of it isn’t in the right places. That’s the real problem.

The other stupid thing that people do when faced with a big problem, other than defining it incorrectly, is look for a big solution. That works sometimes, but not as often as you think. Usually, the answer to a big problem is a lot of little solutions.

Now, where I live, in western Minnesota, our water problems center on water being in the wrong places and us sending dirty water down to New Orleans.

Actually, since we’re right on the continental divide, some of our excess water goes to New Orleans – the rest goes to Winnipeg. But the problem is that when it leaves us, it’s dirty and it’s moving too fast.

For the past couple of decades, here on the edge of the prairie we’ve had increased precipitation. It you don’t believe in climate change, you would say we’re in a wet cycle. Personally, I do believe in what the scientists call climate change and the model for our part of the world for the future reads, “Warmer, wetter, and more volatile.”

That means in the years and decades to come is more water that’s going to come faster and in bigger events. Four and five inches at a time instead of one and two. If you’re a farmer that’s a big deal; land can’t handle that much water and you end up with expensive crops drowned out. So, the thing we’ve been doing is digging deeper ditches and putting in more tiling systems, which gets that water down the road faster. The down side (and there’s almost always a down side to almost everything) is that it picks up more dirt and floods out more neighbors.

That’s another problem.

Now, where we live, surface water is good for three things: Fishing, wildlife production, and flood control. 

It is often possible to get two out of three, but what we’re seeing more and more is zero out of three. Sloughs so full to the brim that they’re not useful for waterfowl habitat or reservoirs for flood control, but not deep or clean enough for fish other than carp.

Dealing with this issue is important. Recently there were 400,000 people in Ohio who couldn’t drink their tap water because of algae blooms on Lake Erie, caused by fertilizer runoff and other pollutants, and I could give dozens of other examples. But what’s the solution?

Well, the solution isn’t hard to see, but just like lasting peace in the Middle East, it would require warring parties to deal with each other honestly and fairly. The government, farmers, and environmentalists – and there’s some overlap among those groups – would need to take an honest look at the costs and benefits. 

Folks in Ohio shouldn’t have to buy bottled water because we want to boost corn yields to the max and farmers shouldn’t shoulder all the costs of proper water management just because Americans like to have the cheapest food in the world and don’t care how they get it. A properly managed wetland turns dirty water into clean water at a stunning rate, and does lots of other good, but they’re a pain to farm around.

We’re not running out of water. That doesn’t mean we’re not doing dumb stuff, all of us.

But we should stop.

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In my neighborhood south of Starbuck, Clear Springs Cattle Company (the Wulf family) are experimenting with aspects of conserving water and nutrients for the future. They operate quite a few acres of rocky, variable land including pasture, hay land and crop land.

I was at a seminar in early February at the Wulf ranch, where members of the Wulf family; a cattle rancher from central South Dakota and a husband-wife team from the Redwood Falls, Minn., area all gave detailed presentations with visuals, of wide-row 44 inch corn to facilitate cover crops to grow between those wide rows, no-till planting of corn and soybeans, pasturing beef cattle whenever there is green or harvestable forage or remnants of cornstalks (if snow is not too deep).

For those who like to drive the countryside when things begin to get green until snow flies in the late fall, take 258th Street off of highway 29, 6 miles south of Starbuck, or off of the state park road (Co. 41, becomes gravel 295th avenue) and you can see what the field crops look like.  When the snow melts, you will see green cover crops (rye or winter wheat, with radishes or turnips) along that gravel township road.

As a neighbor of theirs, fascinating to watch through the growing season!

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Please contact David Tollefson with thoughts or comments on this or future columns at: adtollef@hcinet.net