Transcripts

MARY LOZIER: Ron D. Offut, its corporate office building in Fargo, North Dakota, looks as though it belongs to a big insurance company. It has gleaming plate glass windows, deep carpets, and leather furniture. It's the headquarters for a potato empire. Offut farms, more than 100,000 acres in 11 states, he also owns the biggest chain of John Deere farm equipment dealerships in the nation. His success began more than 30 years ago. That was when he realized the future of potato growing could be expressed in two words-- French fry. Did you see that the frozen French fries were going to be huge?

RONALD OFFUTT: Yes, yes, yes, we knew that. We knew that.

MARY LOZIER: And how?

RONALD OFFUTT: Just the convenience factor and everything you read in that time frame and saw driving through the country was more. McDonald's stores going up. Burger King was coming into the picture.

MARY LOZIER: So Offut began buying land where he could grow potatoes for the French fry market. He targeted the so-called sand lands of Western Minnesota.

RONALD OFFUTT: What the sand land of Minnesota allowed us to do was to produce the kind of potatoes that make the best French fries.

MARY LOZIER: At the time most people thought the dry, sandy land off it was buying wasn't worth much. It needed irrigation to produce a good crop. A lot of it was idled under government soil conservation programs. Offut plowed it up and irrigated it. Soon, he was producing the exact kind of potatoes the French fry processors wanted. He expanded his operations dramatically.

RONALD OFFUTT: It went out that late that winter of '74 and almost tripled our operation.

MARY LOZIER: Offut soon got so big. He bought his own French fry processing plant in Atlanta. A few years later, he built a bigger one in Minnesota, Lamb Weston RDO frozen. The initials RDO stand for Ron D. Offutt. He owns half the plant. It uses 1 billion of potatoes a year. Offut grows almost all of them.

In the lakes cafe in Perham, Minnesota, everybody has heard of Ron D. Offutt. His potato warehouse is sit on the railroad tracks on the edge of town. His giant storage tanks for nitrogen fertilizer tower over the scene. His irrigation rigs stretch like telephone wires over the dry, Sandy fields all around. Joe Holzer is a retired factory worker. He lives a little way outside of town and has come in to chat with friends over coffee. He says since the irrigating began, he's noticed a change in his well.

JOE HOLZER: 15 years ago when I built my home there, you could sink a sand point down.

MARY LOZIER: A sand point well?

JOE HOLZER: Mh-hmm, and drink the water. Today, you couldn't drink it. The nitrates are so high. And that's all happened since they started irrigating. That's my biggest concern.

MARY LOZIER: Potatoes for the French fry market require big doses of nitrogen, so they can grow supersized, the way French-fry processors like them. The problem is that nitrates from the nitrogen can wash right through sandy soil and into the groundwater. Perham has four city wells. The one near the elementary school is now tainted with nitrates. The nitrates are above the safe-drinking-water standard. The city is drilling a new well to replace it. Private wells are also contaminated. John Altstadt is head of a committee set up by the mayor to protect the city's water. The committee has been testing wells around the area. He drives through a small subdivision on the edge of town. He points out houses where the wells are reading above the safe-drinking-water standard of 10 parts per million.

JOHN ALTSTADT: That brown one is over 10. This one over here is the one that had 79 parts per million, and they put in a new well, and now that one is reading 49 parts per million.

MARY LOZIER: And the drinking standard is 10?

JOHN ALTSTADT: 10, mm-hmm.

MARY LOZIER: Christy Staber, her husband, and their 16-month-old son Harley moved into the subdivision this summer. Farewell is the one reading 49 parts per million, nearly five times the safe-drinking-water standard. When they bought the house, they didn't know there was anything wrong. By the time they found out their drinking water was unsafe, their infant son had been drinking it for nearly a month. Water contaminated with nitrates is dangerous for infants, pregnant women, and old people. Babies under six months who drink it can get blue baby syndrome. It inhibits the baby's ability to use oxygen. It can cause lasting damage. In some cases, it's fatal. Staber son was 10 months too old to get blue baby syndrome. He did not seem to suffer any lasting effects. But his mother says she still worries.

CHRISTY STABER: It makes me sick. I think about it all the time. It bothers me at night. It bothers me all the time. I don't know what we're going to do about it.

MARY LOZIER: R.D. Offutt in other smaller potato farmers applied well over 100,000 pounds of nitrogen last year to the land that overlies Perham's wells-- 60% of all the fertilizer used on that land. But there is no way of proving a connection between irrigated potato growing and Perham's well problems. You can't trace nitrates to a specific source, the way you can trace an industrial chemical back to a smokestack or a discharge pipe. Bridgit Pankonin and her husband and five children live across the street from Christy Staber. Their well is testing three times the safe-drinking-water limit. She says she's angry. But she doesn't know who to be angry with.

CHRISTY STABER: There's just a lot of speculation about why the wells are contaminated. So I can't say this company or this farmer or whatever did this and that. But it's like keep testing, but what's the answer? I don't know what the answer is.

MARY LOZIER: Ron Offutt concedes there are environmental risks to growing irrigated potatoes for the French fry market. He says his company is doing all it can to reduce the risks.

RONALD OFFUTT: I think any time that you've got agricultural production, and it's not unique to potatoes, you have some environmental issues. I think they are minimized today. At least, we minimize them today by using best practice methods and by only putting on enough fertilizer and pesticides to handle the crop, and we monitor it very closely.

MARY LOZIER: Regulators in Minnesota have started to take a harder look at the practice of growing irrigated potatoes on sandy soil over shallow aquifers. But studies to determine whether the practice is contaminating groundwater are expensive and time consuming. In the meantime, the R.D. Offutt company continues to grow. Its growth now is outside Minnesota. The company is focusing its expansion on arid western states. There is plenty of dry land there to irrigate. I'm Mary Lozier, Minnesota Public Radio.