NYTimes reporter Charles Duhigg takes readers today to Wisconsin, a beautiful green state renowned for its cheese and other dairy products. It is an inspired choice to rub our faces in the dirty side of the livestock business, and one of the more potentially dangerous aspects of agriculture generally. Runoff from badly managed operations can get into water supplies, can make people sick, can lead to lawsuits that can shut down businesses whose operators have labored for decades to set up. And … can go unregulated or barely regulated for too long.

The crusading piece is part of Duhigg’s and the Times’s project  Toxic Waters. It continues to be a muscular, sprawling example of what newspapers can do to add an important new topic to the national conversation. But with this iteration I find myself scratching my head over the little things that bothered me about the last one (previous post). It is the close conjoining of specific examples of things gone awry – families or communities at hazard – with statistics that imply similar things are rife.

Examples:

• After reading of instances of disease from ag waste we read, “..An estimated 19.5 million American fall ill each year from waterborne parasites, viruses, or bacteria, including those stemming from human and animal waste, according to a study…” That’s alarming. But. Does the study estimate the percentage that’s from human and animal waste, or more important, from livestock alone?
• It describes a few wells in one town so heavily contaminated the water caused infections. One home owner had to dump bleach in his well. Some residents say they have seen cow organs dumped in the fields, presumably over the aquifers. And then a regulator says “More than 30 percent of the wells in one town alone violated basic health standards.” None of those sound good, but it is unclear how they hang together. Are 30 percent contaminated by manure? Do cow organs pose a particular health threat if dumped on a field?
• In California, we read, “up to 15 percent of wells in agricultural areas exceed a federal contaminant threshhold.” This is in a news story focussed on animal waste. But, as The Tracker understands things, the most serious ag. runoff comprises fertilizers and some pesticides from crop fields, not animal waste. So, what and how much contaminants dominate that 15 percent of wells?

To his credit Duhigg forthrightly tells readers, and more than once, that connecting such dots is challenge. He writes at one point “…it is often difficult to definitively link a specific instance of disease to one particular cause, like water pollution.” That is a vital caveat.

Such uncertainty may be inherent to the topic;, it may be impossible to overcome. And it should not deter a reporter from digging as deep as he can and telling readers what he found. The piece is a powerful alert to lawmakers and authorities to demand investigation. But it is not (and does not claim to be) the full story. Perhaps a few more explicit question marks would have been in order rather than this drumbeat of facts and observations assembled as though they, in themselves, are grounds for conviction.

Pic: It’s not as though the industry including feedlot and dairy operators, at least some of them, aren’t trying. This image is from the website of a company that tests water for farmers to help them stay within regulations.

Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Health & Medicine Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.