Reading Time: 7 minutes

On an idyllic evening at the Trempealeau Hotel, the Mississippi River is as much a draw as the musical act that graces its outdoor stage.

If concert-goers gathered on the hotel lawn are lucky — and they often are — they’ll get to see a sorbet sky before the sun tucks behind the bluffs and a train thundering through with a horn-blast hello. The hotel has watched over the river since 1888.

Amy Werner and Jörg Droll, who have owned the hotel since 2012, have seen a surge of interest in their part of the river since the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in outdoor recreation opportunities. The village of Trempealeau, Wisconsin, with a population of about 1,900, has leaned into the phenomenon.

Just as the river’s path has changed over time, so have communities along it changed and adapted.

The Mississippi has been a vital resource for Indigenous people, a source of employment for fishermen, trappers, boat captains and builders of the locks and dams, and more recently, the main attraction on the beloved Great River Road, a 3,000-mile drive from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico that draws millions of Americans every year.

Along this segment of the Mississippi, river communities are exploring different ways to bring people in, now that the days of commercial fishing, trapping and similar river industries have, for the most part, faded. Many are courting tourists, from those driving the length of the River Road to those simply day-tripping from the Twin Cities. Some are emphasizing the ease and nostalgia of small-town life.

They’re all doing so in the face of the headwinds hitting rural areas across the country — declining tax bases, workforce challenges and aging populations. That means it’s essential not just to attract visitors for a moment, but to get those who live there to stay — something that requires serious introspection and vision for the future.

Still, one thing hasn’t changed. The river is the centerpiece. It’s the reason these communities are here, even as they redefine what life on the river means. They’re counting on others to see that too.

“Without the river, the hotel could not exist,” Droll said. “(It’s) part of daily life for us. Every waking minute.”

Tourism drives success in Mississippi River towns

About halfway between Trempealeau and the Twin Cities is Stockholm, a Wisconsin village of less than 100 people that explodes with visitors on summer Saturdays.

The draw is Stockholm Pie, a charming bakery that started as a weekend gig and has now been named America’s best pie shop, twice. The shop’s head baker begins the day between 1 and 3 a.m., preparing up to 70 pies daily in addition to dozens of other sweet treats baked fresh. Owner Alan Nugent’s slice of choice is the sour cream raisin.

Stockholm “has always been the spot,” said Nugent, who first opened an art gallery in the village in 2004 and has since given over his career to pie. He believes its proximity to the Twin Cities is critical — 80% of customers who come through the shop’s door are from there.

More than a decade ago, Nugent decided it was time to share the wealth and formed the West Coast of Wisconsin, a marketing association for the five communities that sit on Lake Pepin — Bay City, Stockholm, Maiden Rock, Pepin and Nelson.

The goal, loosely based on what communities have done in Door County, the popular Midwest vacation destination on Lake Michigan, is for each village to have its own personality and to support the others at the same time. The association has invested significant energy into making the area a destination, Nugent said.

It’s paying off. The area has become a wedding hot spot that can pull hundreds of people on a single weekend. To serve that need, high-end properties have been converted into luxury vacation rentals, Nugent said.

Being a tourist town comes with its own challenges. So many homes have been turned into rentals, it’s hard for a person to actually move to the area, he said. But the change is inevitable.

“The world has changed dramatically,” Nugent said. “Tourism supports a lot of jobs and brings a whole lot of tax revenue.”

According to Travel Wisconsin’s latest economic impact report, seven of eight counties bordering the river saw an increase in direct visitor spending from 2024 to 2025.

In Cassville, less than an hour upriver from Wisconsin’s border with Illinois, tourism director Tracy Fishnick said the village is focusing on visitors “to help keep our community alive.”

Fishnick said village residents know they need tourists, and the river brings them in. Two summers ago, unexpected flooding brought that to a screeching halt — even the iconic Cassville ferry had to pause, and Fishnick said businesses felt it.

The village is also pitching visitors on becoming permanent residents. It received a grant this spring from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation to offer financial incentives for the next two years for out-of-state residents to move to the Cassville area.

“So many people think of small towns and they’re just like, ‘Oh, they don’t have much’ … once you come and spend a weekend or a day here, you grab some food, it’s cheaper,” she said. “You’re going to have a bartender or a waiter that will sit and get to know you.”

Fishnick said public spaces on the riverfront are part of the village’s appeal, in contrast to communities where that area is largely private property.

“We get so many people to just come walk, and sit there and watch the barges,” she said.

Communities lean into nostalgia, grapple with difficult history

In Fountain City, about an hour downriver from Stockholm, what’s old is new again.

Mike Adank moved back to his hometown from New York last fall to take over the Corner Store, an ice cream and soda pop shop with long-standing roots in the community. He whips up sweet concoctions using the building’s 1960s-era soda fountain, which he had painstakingly refurbished.

The shop is full of nostalgic nods: a candy table near the cash register, old newspaper clippings on the walls, Beach Boys over the speakers. Older people are eager to reminisce, Adank said, and young people are glad to have a place besides school to hang out.

“We’ve got all these really cool stories and buildings and history. That was important to me when I came back,” Adank said. “My parents were like, ‘What are you going to call it?’ I was like, ‘It’s the Corner Store.’ That’s what it always was to me, and that’s what it has to be.”

The community has welcomed his venture, he said, signaling another old habit that’s come around: shopping local.

In the 1980s, he recalled, Fountain City lost businesses like a grocer and hardware store as people began to make the 15-minute drive to Winona, Minnesota, for small conveniences.

Now, residents recognize the city flatlines if people don’t invest, Adank said. It’s given them – him included – new momentum to try.

History isn’t always sweet, though. Across the river, that’s something Nicky Buck knows well.

Buck, an enrolled member of the Prairie Island Indian Community, was born and raised on Prairie Island near what is now Red Wing, Minnesota, where her Bdewakantunwan Band of Eastern Dakota ancestors lived long before white settlers arrived. Other tribal nations once came to the Mississippi River valley for its lush abundance of plant medicines, Buck said.

For a long time, the relationship between the tribe and the city of Red Wing was strained due to intolerance of Indigenous people, she said. Her uncle, Art Owen, and his father, Amos, led early efforts to change that, which the community continues today. 

In 2022, the two governments signed a memorandum of understanding to share information and give tribal members a seat at the table. That year, Buck and others began the Honoring Dakota Project, which seeks to bridge cultures and create a unified world rooted in Dakota lifeways. A mural unveiled in 2023 depicts Chief Red Wing and the sacred nearby bluff site He Mni Can.

The Honoring Dakota Project has helped facilitate viewings of the tribe’s bison herd, an Indigenous art market and, in 2024, an inaugural wacipi, or powwow. It has also played a role in critical safety upgrades, like the construction of an overpass that opened in 2025 providing a safe way on and off Prairie Island over one of the state’s most dangerous rail intersections.

The work has been healing for Buck’s community.

“We’re making sure there is a place for the next seven generations,” she said, referencing an Indigenous principle about making decisions today that will benefit multiple generations to come.

The river makes everything work

The Mississippi River itself is always changing — in some ways, not for the better. Buck worries about high levels of PFAS, pesticides and plastics that could rob her community of their lifeways. Others are concerned that backwaters are disappearing as sediment fills in from upstream.

Still, the river remains a powerful reason for these communities’ existence.

A little over an hour down the road from Fountain City, Mark Clements and his son Conner run Clements Fishing Barge in Genoa.The river has been integral to the family business for 90 years.

Clements’ grandfather fashioned an early version of their raft using leftover construction materials from the creation of the nearby lock and dam in 1936. The aim of the business hasn’t changed — providing an affordable way for people without their own boats to fish the river.

It’s a fishing destination, Clements said, which is good for Genoa, which reaps the benefits of people spending money to stay. On a nice spring weekend, as many as 100 people might be out on the barge. Helping kids connect to the river through fishing is their priority, he said — so much so that he’s never increased the cost for a child to fish for the day.

Fishing outfits like Clements’ are a clear connection between the river’s past and present, one appreciated by longtime “river rats” like Max Bachhuber. Bachhuber ran the Great Alma Fishing Float in Alma, just north of Fountain City, from 1963 through much of the 1980s.

When businesses would close for the day, Bachhuber recalled, people would spill out onto the river to fish for their dinner. Now, it’s mostly for sport, he said, and the population of Alma is largely retirees. But he loves it despite its changes.

“My favorite thing is to be able to look out and see (the Mississippi River) every day,” Bachhuber said. “If you go away, you’re going to come back. You’re going to miss it.”

Whether river communities are shrinking or expanding, have momentum or are struggling to find a vision, are leaning on their history or learning to reconcile it, Bachhuber’s take is one shared by many: Life on the river is unlike anywhere else.

At the Trempealeau Hotel, Werner and Droll feel that singularity when they serve up river catfish at their restaurant, when they watch a sunset, or when a band plays to a sold-out crowd under a full moon.

Through the challenges that may come, they’ll always have this place.

“It’s just pure pleasure,” Werner said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

The Mississippi River built these towns. Now tourism is helping sustain them. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The temperatures in Christina Joann Rainey’s home reached 82 degrees recently.  The single mother from rural Carroll County in West Tennessee has paid to repair the 16-year-old home air conditioning system in the house she inherited from her grandparents multiple times, but it’s now beyond saving. She can’t afford the estimated $7,500 price tag to replace it.

As the National Weather Service warned of extreme and major heat risk in Tennessee this month, Rainey began calling any agencies and organizations she could think of to seek help. But she said she struggled to find programs available in her area that she is eligible for, other than loan opportunities that she believes will be too financially burdensome in the long run.

Rainey and her 15-year-old daughter sought relief by sitting in the car or traveling to a nearby Dollar General to get lemonade and temporarily cool off. But Rainey said she worries about being away from home for too long because of her Australian shepherd and 13-year-old cat. Rainey has been trying to keep them cool with cooling pads.

“I’m scared that if I leave, they could have heat stroke,” she said.

As high temperatures and humidity spiked “feels like” temperatures to more than 110 degrees in some areas of Tennessee, the National Weather Service urged people to stay indoors, hydrate and use air conditioning as “fans may not be adequate.”

But for an estimated 49,722 Tennessee households, air conditioning is not an option. Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau in May estimated that about 2% of state households have no access to any kind of air conditioning. 

In other parts of the Mississippi River basin, the share is still higher. In Arkansas, almost 3% of homes lack AC. In Minnesota and Ohio, the estimate approaches 4%. And in Wisconsin, over 7% of households do not have air conditioning. 

A day after suffering through those extreme temperatures, a local air conditioning technician loaned Rainey a window unit, providing some relief. 

“I’m so thankful for that, because he didn’t have to do that, and that was free of charge,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.”

Resources and support programs vary at local level

Lack of air conditioning is a growing concern for health officials across the Mississippi River basin.

In the Milwaukee area, where about one in 10 homes lack air conditioning, heat indexes soared over 100 degrees during a recent hot spell. Health officials say many homes without AC are in places that have been identified as most vulnerable to hazards like heat, due to compounding factors such as poverty, lack of transportation and poor housing quality.

“Lack of air conditioning is not an isolated issue — it overlaps with so many other issues. Heat is a multiplier of existing vulnerabilities,” said Dr. Ben Weston, Milwaukee County’s chief health policy adviser. “That’s the reason why individuals living in these communities feel heat so much differently.”

Christopher Uejio, a professor at Florida State University who did his own estimate last year of residential air conditioning in the U.S., said the census estimates may overestimate air conditioning prevalence in rural areas and underestimate it in cities, based on the data that was used. Still, he said, it’s important to have this kind of data available.

“When I lived in Wisconsin, we had one to two extreme heat events per summer. You could just open the windows, put up a box fan, and you’d be fine,” Uejio said. “As these heat events get longer and more protracted, more expensive adaptations have to be considered.”

Resources available to people without access to air conditioning vary at the local level.  As temperatures hovered in the 90s in Tennessee in early July, an online tracker published by the Tennessee Emergency Management Authority showed nine cooling centers open across the state.

Programs providing free fans, air conditioning window units or other weatherization assistance also vary. A summer cooling program in Nashville provides free fans or air conditioning units to eligible older county residents, families with children under age 6, and disabled residents with medical conditions affected by extreme heat from May 1 through Aug. 31. 

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Home Uplift program helps eligible households make their homes more energy efficient by sealing gaps, insulating ductwork and replacing aging air conditioners. Participants in the program must meet income qualifications, live in a single-family home that meets certain requirements and be a customer of a local power company that participates in the program. 

When Rainey checked her eligibility for the Home Uplift program, she received a message that TVA is not accepting applications in her area.

A spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Health recommended reaching out to county governments and local emergency management agencies for resources.

A deeper look at the U.S. Census Bureau’s experimental data

The U.S. Census Bureau released its experimental Local Air Conditioning Estimates dataset in response to requests for more detailed information on air conditioning access as an indicator of heat vulnerability, according to the bureau’s website.

The dataset includes information from American Housing Surveys from 2019 through 2023, along with data from the American Community Survey from the same period.

Air conditioning access is not directly measured in the American Community Survey. While the American Housing Survey does ask if a home has an air conditioning unit, this survey wasn’t designed to be used at a granular geographical level. The U.S. Census Bureau used a machine learning model and the American Housing Survey data to “determine if a household in the ACS potentially lacks an air conditioning unit,” according to the bureau’s methodology. 

The margin of error for Tennessee’s estimated 49,772 households without air conditioning is plus or minus 3,972 households.

This data may also fail to capture the circumstances of people like Rainey, who may have had working air conditioning at the time that data was collected, but no longer do. It also does not consider other factors that might limit access to air conditioning, like the cost burden of operating window air conditioning units.

Rainey said her mother is in a similar situation — her home air conditioning is no longer in working order and uses window units sparingly because of the electricity cost.

“Before it got this hot, she was trying to avoid (using) it because it gets so bad on electricity … but I think this last week or so, she’s had to use it because she didn’t have a choice. She was using fans and doing everything she could,” Rainey said.

Madeline Heim of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Census model estimates more than 800,000 Mississippi River basin households lack air conditioning is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Silos — tower-like structures on farms that hold fermented feed for livestock — have dotted the Midwestern landscape for 150 years. But they’re threatened by development and old age. One “silo hunter” in northern Illinois has been tracking down silos her grandfather built before they disappear.

Marianne May drove around the backroads of McHenry County on a recent afternoon, scanning for those tall, round structures with a shallow point at the top that’s characteristic of her grandfather’s silos. Some of them have a little diamond shape on the very top — his signature.

She’s a self-proclaimed silo hunter, and she comes back to her hometown throughout the year to find ever more silos that her grandfather, Frank May, built on some of the oldest farms in the Midwest.

“I grew up in Richmond, and I always knew where a lot of my grandpa’s silos were,” she said. “I just sort of had them in my head. I never really thought that I would do anything about it. They just were always there, part of the landscape.”

Silos probably fade into the background for most people who live in the Corn Belt. Though they often serve as landmarks, people’s connection to them has tended to be utilitarian. Occasionally, silos have been saved by being converted into housing or public space, but many others have been destroyed.

But their legacy is rooted in Illinois. Historians believe the first one in the Midwest was built in Spring Grove, a village in McHenry County. Bill Kemp, historian with the McLean County Museum of History, said silos transformed agriculture in the Midwest. 

“Silos and all of these magnificent, very utilitarian buildings,” Kemp said, “really speak to this rich, dynamic, very diverse agriculture that was practiced up until World War II — or the decade after World War II — when industrialization and commercialization and singular, two-crop farming came into play.”

Farmers used to have to rely on dried hay to feed their animals over the winter, but it was bulky and it didn’t last long. But silos are airtight containers that farmers could pack tightly with corn, allow it to ferment and then store it for years. They used to be made of wood, but when people like Frank May started using concrete in the early 1900s, farmers could grow their livestock herds even larger.

Kemp said initially, farmers were skeptical of this new invention.

“Once you would have a farmer in a particular township or in a rural neighborhood construct a silo and find how useful it was,” he said, “that would be quickly adapted by his or her neighbors.”

It’s an essential structure.

“We tend to forget about the built environment of the Corn Belt,” he said. “And all these wonderful stories — the buildings and the structures in the countryside that people drive past all the time but never really think about — what do they say about the past?”

Marianne May said silo hunting can be a thankless task. She’s been doing this for six years and has identified almost 200 of her grandfather’s silos. She said there may be at least that many more.

“Almost every place I go, there’s something,” she said. “There’s some connection, whether it’s somebody in my family or extended family, or maybe they worked with Frank. There’s something fun to be discovered.”

So much of the work is investigation and guesswork. But she can speculate what it was like for her grandparents to grow up as neighbors, just like she wonders why the silos are clustered in groups, or why he used one shape over another.

She found a silo at Frank May’s childhood home, as well as a matching silo at the farmhouse across the street. That’s where Marianne’s grandmother grew up.

“I think it’s important that these silos are identified,” she said. “The locations where they are and where they were, because each time I come home, there are some gone that get pushed over for development or just fall over.”

It’s a reminder that May’s project is never-ending and that it’s a gift to learn more about the family history of the area’s farming community — and the mark farming made on the Midwestern landscape.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Silos are disappearing from the landscape. One woman wants to hunt them down before they do. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

All of Greg Thoren’s cows are technically identified by the number on their ear tag. But when he drives around his pastures checking in on his animals, they go by another name: Sweetie. 

“Hey, sweetie,” he reassured one cow — her ear labeled 604. “Hi, honey. You’re okay.”

In the spring, one of Thoren’s daily tasks is tooling around looking for calves that were born overnight. This cow had a newborn.

“You’re okay. You had that baby this morning.”  

He stepped out of the truck, caught hold of the calf and in a few moments had looked it over, tagged its ear and popped back into the truck. He made a couple of notes in a battered pocket notebook and continued on through the fields. 

Thoren comes out to greet his cows most days, bringing a pile of hay in the bed of his old pickup truck as a snack. If he stops for long enough, the herd descends on his truck, eating straight from the bed. 

He’s a regenerative farmer, which means that as much as he cares for his animals, he cares about his soil more. He used to work the land as intensely as any other conventional farmer, but he quit “cold turkey” years ago. 

Now, he’s cover-cropping, rotational-grazing, no-tilling and trying out any other conservation method he wants to experiment with. And it’s showing interesting results: He’s saving a lot of money, his cows are healthier, and his profits are growing. Plus, researchers have shown that these and similar conservation methods reduce soil erosion and water pollution and help to store more carbon in the soil compared to conventional methods. 

He also shares what he’s learned with a group called the Jo Daviess County Soil and Water Health Coalition. The work they do is at the heart of the “farmer-led movement,” a grassroots initiative to put farmers at the center of agricultural innovation, rather than top-down academics or government officials. The movement is well underway in northwest Illinois, and similar examples can be found throughout the U.S. and across the globe. 

The coalition believes that one of the most effective ways to make farms more resilient — and more profitable — is to invite people into farmer-led conversations about soil health and water quality. Many farmers in the coalition are trying their own conservation methods and sharing the outcomes at field days and regular meetups.

This shared knowledge is meant to create a community of farmers who are shifting their mindset. They show up to learn from one another and experiment with conservation themselves. The coalition estimates their outreach, education and events have reached hundreds of people.

‘Figuring out practices that will work’

Corn Belt farmers are in the midst of multiple crises. Conventional farming practices are contributing to pollution, erosion and financial misfortune. Farm debt and bankruptcies are rising, and so are prices for inputs like fertilizer, pesticides and fuel. Meanwhile, the prices farmers get for crops like corn, soybeans and wheat are on a downturn. The Midwest lost more than 30,000 farms between 2017 and 2024.

The farmer-led movement offers an answer to these crises.

“Change is what needs to happen,” said Beth Baranski, the organizing secretary for the Jo Daviess County Soil and Water Health Coalition. “The farmer-led movement allows people to share the risk and minimize the risk. … The key is the farmers on their farms, in their fields, figuring out the practices that will work for them to achieve these goals.” 

Many farmers in the movement are still using conventional practices. It’s not necessarily the goal of the coalition to convince everyone to take on 100% regenerative practices. The group recognizes every farmer comes to it from a different place and has different priorities for their land and operations. Even if they wanted to try regenerative farming practices, razor-thin margins make it financially risky to make the switch. 

Instead, the goal is for farmers to show their neighbors what’s possible and learn from each other. 

And while there are plenty of government programs and grants and incentives that could help in theory, Baranski said many farmers are skeptical about how well they actually work. She said that, generally, they’re more likely to trust another farmer. 

“Somebody coming from the corporate world or from an institution … and saying, ‘This is what you need to do,’ is not as effective as a neighboring farmer who has tried one practice and found it beneficial,” she said. 

‘Farmers tend to push it’

The coalition offers connection and tested solutions to some of agriculture’s biggest problems. But it’s a slow-growing movement, and much of the industry is set up to work in opposition to the coalition’s goals, said Jonathan Coppess, an associate professor of agricultural policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

“When things are tight and margins are tough, what we’ve seen historically is farmers tend to push it, right? You push the land, you try to put more land in production,” he said.

Coppess said policy coming from the government should support innovation like regenerative agriculture so farmers don’t have to choose between protecting soil and water and making a profit. But he said policies act like a barrier instead.

“If you’re running tight — or even sometimes negative — margins on a crop, you’re going to try to get more of that crop so you can have a little bit more room to market it. And you’re going to try to do everything you can to put bushels in the bin.” 

He said that pressure makes it that much harder for farmers to move away from conventional practices and try conservation. 

“In theory, farmers could just decide to put less nitrogen on (their fields),” he said. “The risk of doing that is pretty significant. And so our policies may be making it worse … but we’re also not addressing those issues. And so to me, it’s almost like paradoxes within paradoxes wrapped in ironies.” 

He said conservation-minded farmers can be put at a competitive disadvantage to other farmers and across the supply chain.

“Farmers doing conservation practices are some of our most innovative,” he said. “They’re thinking well ahead. … Maybe it takes three or four or five years for this practice to really begin to pay off, and that’s a really critical but difficult investment.”

The farmer-led movement does have some federal backing. The coalition got seed money from an organization called the Fishers & Farmers Partnership, which uses Congress-appropriated money to support similar projects in the Midwest. They also support projects that actually install conservation practices. So far, they’ve funded 70 projects, and with matching funds from other sources to support these projects, they’ve generated more than $9 million for initiatives that put farmers at the center of the conversation. 

Amy Smith is one of the directors of the partnership. She said it is important to fund work that starts with the farmer. 

“We’re focusing on the farmer because we’re focusing on people,” she said. “We are sitting with that farmer at the table, and we’re pulling in other people that they can connect with, and then they’re doing the same on the back end. They’re connecting with neighbors; they’re connecting with local county members.”

The partnership has awarded grants for more than 15 years, and so far, they’ve helped to enhance 113 habitats and conserve almost 40,000 acres of land. Since 2021, their work has engaged more than 175,000 people in outreach or education events like the ones Jo Daviess County Soil and Water Health Coalition hosts. 

“Creating this mind shift in one farmer can lead to the mind shift of 20,” Smith said. “And that’s where we see watershed-scale change, landscape-scale change.”

Inviting people in 

As Thoren turned his truck onto the dirt road toward home, he said even though farming this way isn’t exactly easy, but when it’s stripped down to the basics, it’s pretty simple. 

“You’ve got to think about the farm. It’s not about the people. It’s about the farm. It’s about the land. It’s about the soil. That’s why I tell these young people, ‘Come in with me.’ I said, ‘It’s not about me. It’s not about you. It’s about the soil.’” 

That kind of understanding doesn’t come easy under the current industry that incentivizes conventional farming, he said. But when farmers’ minds start to shift, so can the whole system. 

“It just all comes together,” Thoren said. “It’s not the system. It’s the mindset of the person to get the system activated, but you got to have the mindset of the person first. That’s my true belief.”

He’s hosting a field day later this summer, and other farmers connected to the group are hosting their own field days, as well. It’s a testament to the success of the coalition; they get to be in a supporting role to farmers who are leading the way forward.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouriin partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

How one program is working to bring Corn Belt farmers together for conservation agriculture is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Mississippi River conservation groups are among a broad coalition urging the federal government to take action against nitrate contamination in drinking water, which they say has reached “crisis levels” and is a public health emergency.

Nitrate, which forms when nitrogen-rich sources combine with oxygen, has long been found in the country’s surface waters and groundwater, where it can end up in people’s drinking water. Consuming water with elevated levels of nitrate is linked to birth defects, thyroid problems and some cancers.

Agricultural fertilizer and manure are the most common sources of nitrogen to groundwater, with septic systems and lawn fertilizers also contributing. An April analysis from the Environmental Working Group found that about 18% of the U.S. population from 2021 to 2023 used drinking water from community systems with 3 milligrams per liter (mg/L) or more of nitrate, the threshold at which the Environmental Protection Agency says indicates contamination.

Advocates say nitrate contamination has struggled to capture public attention but is costly and hazardous to those it affects. 

A May 5 letter to the Department of Health and Human Services and the EPA was signed by 80-plus groups, about a third of which are located in or focused on the Mississippi River basin. It calls on the agencies to “immediately identify and eliminate sources of nitrate pollution in drinking water and provide funds to communities to reduce nitrate to safe levels.”

The letter cites a recent report from the Iowa Environmental Council and the Harkin Institute at Drake University in Des Moines that found high nitrate levels in drinking water, as well as the presence of pesticides and forever chemicals, are linked to rising cancer rates in Iowa. Intensive farming across the state, including corn, soy and hogs, is the dominant source of nitrate pollution, the report notes.

“We understand these are long-term problems,” said Tyler Lobdell, senior attorney at Food & Water Watch, which spearheaded the letter. “The longer we wait to address root causes, the more difficult, and more expensive (it is), and the more harm is caused in the long run.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on the letter. A spokesperson for the EPA said it is beginning the next round of review of national drinking water regulations, last published in 2024.

Too much nitrogen taints drinking water, hurts river ecosystem

Nitrate contamination is a widespread problem across the country, especially in the Corn Belt, but actions to address it have been slow-going.

Groups in multiple states, including Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa, have previously petitioned the EPA to take emergency action on nitrate problems in specific regions. Lobdell said the agency has either ignored or given an insufficient response to those petitions, dating back several years and multiple presidential administrations.

Under former President Joe Biden, the EPA restarted an assessment — which had been suspended during the first Trump administration — of the impacts of nitrate on human health. Environmental advocates had hoped that it could lead to an adjustment of the national standard for nitrate in drinking water, which currently sits at 10 mg/L, because some research shows impacts to human health below that level. Little progress has been made on the assessment.

Beyond human health impacts, too much nitrogen in surface water can drive excessive algae growth, causing harm to fish and other aquatic life. It’s one culprit, in addition to phosphorus, in the creation of the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone,” an area of low oxygen that spans thousands of square miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Kelly McGinnis, executive director of the environmental advocacy organization One Mississippi, a signatory on the letter, said that humans aren’t separate from the environment and that addressing nitrate contamination would have positive impacts on both.

She said she hopes the letter catches the attention of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pledged to “Make America Healthy Again” and has shown interest in reducing toxins in people’s diets.

“We felt the urgency right now to take advantage of the new research (from Iowa) to say, ‘Hey, this is something you guys need to be addressing,'” McGinnis said.

The spokesperson for the EPA said the agency is “committed to Making America Healthy Again by taking real, tangible steps to evaluate risks of nitrates in drinking water while following the law and gold standard science.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouriin partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Mississippi River groups tell feds to act on nitrate contamination is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.