By Winona LaDuke
“One thing I’ve learned the hard way is not to collect rain from the roof into my rain barrels. It turns pink, likely from fungicides. I won’t fish anymore in our local lake, which is half a mile from the nearest field, because of pesticide drift, or in the two rivers or creeks nearby – one where children swim – that run through the village. I can no longer pick sage in the prairie for ceremonial purposes. Instead, I have to go deep into the last remaining wild places where RDO doesn’t spray. I can hear them spraying from helicopters as early as 6:30 a.m,” said Evelyn Bellanger (Anishinaabe) from Pine Point village.
The village of Pine Point is surrounded by industrial agriculture, dominated by RD Offutt Farms. On May 3 2024, RDO Offutt filed a lawsuit in federal court to stop the White Earth Band of Anishinaabe from regulating ground water permits on the reservation. Maintaining that “RD Offutt Farms’ groundwater withdrawals have not had, and will not have, a direct effect on the political security, economic security, or health and welfare of the White Earth Band,”
Offutt seeks a dismissal in federal court of the tribe’s ability to protect its groundwater. On the company’s website they write, “As a family-owned and operated farm, RDO has grown crops alongside the White Earth Nation for more than 40 years and we consider the tribe to be an important neighbor”. Well maybe.
The village has around 400 residents, where many related families are Wolf Clan, Sturgeon Clan and some Bear Clan villagers. The clans moved to the village as their lands were taken by the logging companies and Pine Point as a village is the source of many of the most well-known Anishinaabe in academia, and Native organizations, in the twin cities and beyond.
Today after a consistent pattern of economic discrimination, land alienation and an opioid epidemic, Pine Point is a bit of a poster child for Native poverty and bad public policies. The housing project, built during the War on Poverty, is looking pretty rough with some broken windows and burned buildings, and the health is not good in the village either. This community, and the White Earth tribe which represents them, wants a chance at some clean water and a little less airborne spraying over the village by big AG business.
For the past thirty years, RDO Offutt has been steadily increasing its operations on the White Earth reservation, until the southeastern village of Pine Point, has been almost surrounded with the corporation and corporate agriculture.
In 1997, RDO was producing potatoes on 55,000 acres of land. Today RDO grows on 190,000 acres spread over Minnesota and several other states, including North and South Dakota, Missouri, Texas and Wisconsin. It is tied for second place as the largest farm in the U.S., according to The Land Report’s 2021 ranking. And is the largest independent potato grower in the world, and a major McDonald’s french fry supplier .
Fertilizer, pesticides, and high-tech irrigation equipment used on the sandy soil produced yields at twice the region’s average. In 2019, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency conducted a study of the Straight River, that river comes out of the Pine Point landscape. The Straight River sits above the Pineland Sands aquifer and flows into the Upper Mississippi River Basin. “Some of the common row crops grown in the fields surrounding the Straight River require heavy inputs of nitrogen fertilizer, particularly potatoes and corn,” the authors wrote. They found that nitrate fertilizer contamination was 100 times higher than areas not impacted by industrial potato farming.
In May 2023, the White Earth Nation passed an ordinance requiring farmers with irrigation wells within the reservation boundary or in a five-mile buffer surrounding it to apply to the White Earth Division of Natural Resources for a permit.
Probably forty percent of the land to the east of the village is under Offutt contract or direct ownership, and each spring, a huge influx of heavy equipment, followed by planes and helicopters which spray the fields drown the prairie and drift into the houses of the Pine Point residents. Those are toxins. It looks like a war zone. Equipment the size of a house careens down country roads, large insect looking tractors crawl out into fields, and the air smells like chemicals. It’s not a normal spring of rebirth and joy, it becomes a silent spring as life get poisoned by the chemicals. What affects our relatives impacts us, that’s the teaching of the web of life.
The White Earth Anishinaabe once were a healthy people. There was no cancer in the Anishinaabe at the turn of the century. That is not the case now.
A Minnesota Department of Health report found “Over a 15 year period, the total number of new cancers diagnosed in Anishinaabe men living in the White Earth region was 60% higher than expected compared to white, non-Hispanic men in Minnesota”. The big ones: oral cavity and pharynx, stomach, colorectal cancer (CRC) liver and intrahepatic bile duct (IBD), lung / bronchus, kidney and renal pelvis.
Native women fared somewhat better: new cancer diagnoses were thirty percent higher than that of non-Hispanic white women. Liver and bile duct cancers showed the highest rates, and in both cases of men and women, the death rates were higher than that of the white non-Hispanic population. We bury more people than are born in our village of Pine Point. It’s becoming true almost across the reservation.
What causes those cancers? A lot of things, but having high levels of nitrates in drinking water doesn’t help. A 2020 Wisconsin study on nitrates in drinking water found that there were significant impacts in terms of colorectal ovarian, thyroid and kidney cancers from increased nitrate exposures. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10661-020-08652-0). That’s becoming a lot of Minnesota – 70% of the nitrates in groundwater are from agriculture and the exposure is growing.
How Offutt and their associates apply the chemicals seems crazy as hell. Stop over beside an Offutt field, and there will be some guys with a bunch of chemicals, and a plane, or a helicopter and then they will be mixing it all up. Like a big soup. I have no idea what those chemicals put on together do to a shallow aquifer like on the Ponsford and Shell Prairie, but it’s not going to be good. There’s the Round Up appetizer, then there’s the nitrate fertilizers. All that is topped off by chlorothalonil and mancozeb (used on 79 and 56 percent of planted acres, respectively) and metribuzin (68 percent of planted acres).
Internal Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ (MN DNR) emails released in 2020 show the agency is aware of state data showing the Pineland Sands region “as a whole had higher rates of pesticide poisoning emergency department visits compared to the state over a ten-year period (2005-2014),” and that “some cancer rates in the Central Sands counties were significantly different than the state.” That’s why the tribe is concerned, as are many Minnesotans.
The fact is that the Anishinaabe have nowhere to go if our water is poisoned, this is the last of our lands, our reservation. The problem, however, is not unique to the village. This past November, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) directed three Minnesota state agencies – the MPCA, MDA and DNR – to address the “imminent and substantial endangerment to the health” of thousands of southeast Minnesota residents exposed to high levels of nitrate contamination in their drinking water.
Then there’s the groundwater sucking problem. Offutt takes water from rivers, fish and people. In 2021, during the deep drought, Offutt kept the pumps running, violating water withdrawal permits. Together, Offutt and others pumped 22 billion gallons of water – about 2.5 billion more than was used by the entire city of Minneapolis’ water treatment plant, which serves about 500,000 people.”
“…The average R.D. Offutt permit violation allowed 43 million gallons in 2021. Those that went over, but still pumped less than 50 million gallons, wouldn’t have to pay any more than the $140 minimum…”
That’s pretty cheap groundwater. In a written statement, Warren Warmbold, vice president of R.D. Offutt Farms, said, “The story of 2021 was either going to be about water overages or food shortages.” Along with other farmers, he said, “we had to make difficult decisions around water use in order to save our crops and keep the food supply secure and affordable.” Offutt’s contribution to the food supply is largely MacDonalds fries.
“Think of our water supply as a giant milkshake glass and each well is a straw in the glass,” explains author Robert Glennon. “What most states permit is a limitless number of straws in the glass.”
It’s a David and Goliath story for sure. The big potato guys – Offutt are asking a federal judge to rule that the White Earth Nation does not have the authority to require farmers to get tribal water permits. That’s the same water that the people of Pine Point drink. There is no other water.
It’s spring in the north country, we will see how it goes between big agriculture and the tribe trying to protect its groundwater. Someone’s got to pay for those cheap french fries at MacDonalds.
