Dionne Searcey drove across Minnesota and Mira Rojanasakul analyzed decades of water data to report this article. Photographs by David Guttenfelder.
Sept. 3, 2023 The New York Times
THE DROUGHT THAT GRIPPED MINNESOTA in the summer of 2021 was one of the worst on record. Day after day a blazing sun shriveled leaves, dried up waterfalls and turned ponds to puddles.
In a state known for its 10,000 lakes, many people could do little except hope for rain.
But big farmers had another option. They cranked up their powerful irrigation wells, drenching their fields with so much water that they collectively pumped at least 6.1 billion gallons more groundwater than allowed under state permits. Nearly a third of the overuse happened on land affiliated with one company, R.D. Offutt Farms.
The water helped R.D. Offutt to achieve its objective of creating long, smooth potatoes that effortlessly sail through the slicers at frozen food processors so Americans could have one of their favorite foods: McDonald’s French fries.
It takes a lot of water to make a perfect fry.
By turning on the taps in the depths of drought, R.D. Offutt and other farmers in the state — where thousands of wells irrigate potatoes and other water-intensive crops like corn, soybeans and sugar beets — blew through limits designed to protect aquifers that supply drinking water to millions of people.
For some Minnesotans, it significantly worsened the drought’s effects. And it exposed how dependent much of the state has become on aquifers that are fragile and often poorly understood.
The increasing overuse of groundwater is a nationwide problem, a New York Times data investigation found, with big cities and industrial farms alike draining aquifers at alarming rates. The practice threatens not only drinking water supplies for millions of Americans but also the nation’s status as a leading exporter of food.
In Minnesota, watersheds started to dry as the heavy irrigation in 2021 lowered aquifer levels. Trout streams warmed when huge wells siphoned away the cooler underground water that normally fed the streams, scientists said, threatening fish populations. And in parts of Minnesota, people reported backyard wells drying up, sometimes leaving kitchen faucets to cough and sputter as though they were gasping.
Officials in Warren, Minn., partly surrounded by sugar beet fields, had to physically lower the pump at the town’s well by 63 feet in order to keep providing drinking water to more than 1,500 residents, including those in a hospital and nursing home. One older woman outside Warren said the only way she could get water after her own well went dry was to drive her riding mower to a neighbor’s house to fill water bottles. State officials wound up suspending four irrigation permits in the area.
In Backus, Minn., Mike Tauber, whose forested land abuts potato fields affiliated with R.D. Offutt, was shocked to find dried-up, exposed banks along a pond so big he had nicknamed it “Super Pond.” And in the northwestern part of the state, members of the White Earth Nation worried that farmers’ irrigation wells were draining culturally significant bodies of water.
Коментарі