Letter: We all need to know what chemicals our farms use

Posted 10/17/18

To the editor:

To the owners of some of the local top killed farm fields, thank you for identifying yourselves. But you stopped short of telling your community what chemicals you are using to …

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Letter: We all need to know what chemicals our farms use

Posted

To the editor:

To the owners of some of the local top killed farm fields, thank you for identifying yourselves. But you stopped short of telling your community what chemicals you are using to desiccate your crops. What did you use? Why not mechanical mowing? Have you tested your groundwater for these chemicals? Have you measured residues in your produce, your farm workers, or in your neighbors’ wells?

Sakonnet peninsula's only water source is ground water. Watson Reservoir belongs to Newport. Watson water is so heavily contaminated with watershed agricultural chemicals and runoff that it has to be treated through three different procedures to remove the trihalomethanes created when the raw water is chlorinated.

Sakonnet peninsula's bedrock is also nearly impervious, preventing quick spring drying of farm fields and leaving the water table very close to the surface. In addition, the glacial till soils of the region contain little humus to support bacterial growth that would decompose water soluble chemicals, sewage, and household wastes. So, think of the groundwater table in the Sakonnet region as a sewage and chemical soup only occasionally diluted with rain and melting snow.

Add to that, the bedrock of the peninsula has an arsenic layer at about 75-100 feet down, so if your well is drilled into this layer, the arsenic will be dissolved and cannot be filtered out and can only be removed by reverse osmosis or ion exchange resins. Arsenic causes kidney and bladder cancer. The farm herbicide Atrazine has also been found in a well near a corn field on West Main Road. Atrazine is a teratogen and endocrine disruptor and has been associated with sex changes in utero in amphibians and mammals. Thus, safe well water is certainly questionable here.

There are "Community Right to Know" rules. Years ago, at a church meeting a member who lived in the Fogland area and close to potato fields, asked me how she could discover what chemicals the farmer used. She had contacted several commercial labs to measure her well water. They told her that unless she knew what chemicals to test for, it would cost her thousands of dollars. I contacted authorities and was told by the DEM Division of Agriculture the "Right to Know" begins when a supplier or farmer stores more than 500 lbs of a chemical on his property. They also informed me that both suppliers and farmers in the Sakonnet region scrupulously adhere to the 500-pound limit so as to avoid monitoring, testing and "Right to Know".

In the 1980s, TemiK, AKA Aldicarb, a pesticide for nematodes, was found to contaminate groundwater on the east end of Long Island and in Rhode Island. It was so bad in Washington County RI that most of the farmers abandoned potato farming and turned to turf. It was years before many public water supply companies, relying on only groundwater, could produce potable water, and bottled water companies flourished. On Long Island, they formed Farm Bureaus and worked with state and federal officials to ban Temik and to test and monitor their groundwater until the chemical fell to safe limits. I don't believe anything of the kind happened in the east bay.

Washington County's groundwater supply has now been federally designated as a Sole Source Aquifer. I believe it is high time our Town Council worked for a similar designation. It would bring in grant money to test and monitor our groundwater and perhaps even give the town money to develop a small water system for the Commons, which is facing sewage contamination of wells and a moving underground salt plume from the old state garage salt pile.

For the most part the Sakonnet region is college educated. We can't afford the scientifically ignorant, authority averse, libertarian mentality anymore or our paradise will be poisoned forever. We should insist on what they've done on Long Island and have a Farm Bureau, where farmers work with the state extension service and openly disclose the chemicals they use, so that they can be monitored in the groundwater we all share.

Please Sakonnet, wake up to this hidden problem in your paradise. Don't let the region's beauty only be skin deep!

Mimi Karlsson, Retired EPA-AED

Little Compton and Hopkinton

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