Webinar notes impacts of nitrates in drinking water

Conservation Nebraska, through help from Nebraska Water Center research and extension specialist Crystal Powers, hosted a series of helpful webinars beginning in February to explore water quality topics in Nebraska. 
The first webinar was focused on what might be the hottest topic of them all -- nitrates in drinking water.
“This is part of a really large effort to think about how we re-engage nitrate in our drinking water across the state,” Powers began. “We started in 2020, pre-pandemic, so it’s been a little bit slow going, but we’ve had several collaborative meetings through various formats throughout the pandemic.”
A number of organizations across many facets have gathered together to figure out how to “solve this problem” and work together.
After a brief audience poll, Powers found that a majority of those participating in the day’s webinar voted that they were concerned about Nebraska’s water. 
“Not surprisingly, those of us on the call are concerned about water and care about our water and are doing things ourselves or maybe want our state to do a little bit more,” she said. “(Water) is one of the resources that we are very fortunate to have in the state. We’ve got abundant groundwater supplies. In some places, it’s decreasing, but overall we have quite a lot of high-quality groundwater.”
It’s available for human and non-human use across Nebraska, she added, which as a state is a top contender for having the largest number of river miles across the whole country.
“This is definitely something that I think we can all be a little proud of,” she said. “We just need to think about how we’re going to manage it in the future.”

Challenges
“Water is really a connecting point for most of the aspects of what goes on in our life, whether we think about it or not,” Powers continued. “So we can talk about water from a quality of life standpoint, whether that’s recreating out on the water or the water that we all drink. It’s helping us grow the food that we grow here in Nebraska. It connects to the vitality of our rural communities, whether that’s because they’re an agricultural base or the water that they themselves drink, and then it connects into what’s the legacy in those rural areas. How are we going to pass on these farms and this water to the next generation?”
All that being said, she noted, nitrates are “one of the largest” and most commonly found agrichemicals in water. 
“And where it comes from is fertilizer, mostly commercial fertilizers, inorganic sources that are put onto our crop fields,” she said. “And the challenge with that is that leads to a whole host of health impacts.”
According to research posted by Powers, a “definitive link” between Blue Baby Syndrome (methemoglobinemia) and nitrates in drinking water was found in the 1940s.
“(This) is when an infant drinks water that’s high in nitrates, that’s usually from making formula that’s mixed with this water,” she explained. “Infants don’t have the enzymes to break it down and therefore it binds to the hemoglobin in the baby’s body and doesn’t allow oxygen to get to their system.”
Ten parts per million is what the EPA’s “safe drinking water threshold” is based on, Powers noted.
“Ten is based on this Blue Baby Syndrome data from almost 100 years ago,” she said. “But more recent research is finding there are significant links to several types of cancer, particularly pediatric cancer and colorectal cancer as well as several negative birth outcomes, whether those are birth defects or early term pregnancies, as well as thyroid disease.”
A recent study that looked at elevated nitrate levels in drinking water across the U.S. reported that the occurrence can have somewhere from $250 million to over a billion and a half dollars in health impacts every year. 
“So it’s nothing that we want to sneeze at, as some people think,” Powers said. “The other main impact that we’re dealing with is economic vitality. So we talked about the health cost, (and) now I’m looking more at some of the other costs that are associated with that.”
Many of the Nebraska water supplies don’t meet the threshold, she added. 
“Currently, there’s 99 public water supplies -- so that’s referring to anything from small villages to larger towns -- that have nitrates above five parts per million,” Powers said. “And with that trending upward, once it crosses that 10 threshold that I mentioned before, they have to invest in water filtration. So this becomes an economic challenge, because that’s a multi-million dollar investment.”
This doesn’t include private wells, which are rarely regulated. 
“We don’t know who’s drinking what type of water, (but) based on the maps of where groundwater nitrate is high it’s likely there’s probably thousands of private drinking wells that need filtration,” she voiced. “Some people have filters, some don’t. We just really don’t know. But that’s a cost to those private well owners as well.”
Finally, not coming as a surprise, Powers noted that this is a problem at the farm level. 
“Any farmer who uses fertilizer doesn’t want it to go into the groundwater,” she said. “It needs to go into his crop. Therefore, you know, kind of framing it for them as lost revenue is also really critical.”
The overall financial burden of filtration systems is a burden to rural vitality, she added. 
“And the last impact I’ll just briefly touch on is in our surface water,” Powers reported. “Mostly I’ve been talking about what happens in our groundwater, but as we know, first off, they’re interconnected. And secondly, some of these fertilizers run off into our surface waterways.”
After the last Water Quality Report for the state, reportedly 83 percent of the lakes in Nebraska are impaired due to excess fertilizer, nitrogen and phosphorus. These can lead to potentially deadly algae blooms. 

Personal impact 
After a brief survey, it was found that only one of the webinar’s guests was a private well owner. Others on the call got their water from city utilities, or public water supplies. 
Out of the data collected by the Nebraska Water Center, concerning wells that have been tested across the state for nitrate levels, Powers found that hundreds are “above background levels,” or what would be expected to naturally find in the groundwater.
“Across almost the entire state we’re impacted at some level,” she said. “And the question becomes, how much?”
Another look at the data shows testing by decade, some of which has been being done since the 1950s. 
“Basically the point being is the areas with nitrate levels above safe drinking water threshold, which are the red dots, continue to grow,” Powers said referring to her graphic. “We’ve done a few things that have slowed it in a few areas, but we are still trending upwards across most of the states. And you’ll see these (dots) pretty much mimic where we grow corn, because that’s the most nitrogen intensive crop in the area.”
Testing done at the Water Sciences Lab to show whether the nitrates are coming from an organic source, like manure, versus commercial nitrogen.
“The vast majority is coming from commercial nitrogen,” she said.
And in Nebraska, the problem is even worse in areas that have a shallow depth to groundwater, she concluded, such as the Platte River valley. 
Powers continued to poll webinar attendees and discuss a multitude of topics related to nitrates and drinking water. To watch the full webinar, please visit Conservation Nebraska’s Youtube channel.