MINNEAPOLIS _ Someday soon, water management as currently practiced in this state will be considered primitive. That such a realization isn't already commonly held except among a small subset of hydrologists and a few other water techies isn't surprising, given the vast amount of the wet stuff Minnesota is privileged to possess _ for the time being.
Subsurface tiling has been around a long time, with early iterations made of concrete and clay. The difference today is the relative speed and ease with which plastic tiling can be positioned underneath a farm field, and the speed also with which it can rush water from a field's surface to the nearest stream, ditch or lake.
When this happens, unless the water is held back by technologies that to date have gained too little traction among farmers, levels of the receiving waterway can rise significantly, sometimes by 5 feet or more. In many cases, these water-level jumps wipe out aquatic vegetation that fish and some wildlife species, among them ducks, need to survive.
This rush of water also carries with it various farmland chemicals that in many cases end up in the Gulf of Mexico, where they contribute to the huge "dead zone" at the mouth of the Mississippi.
If you think a practice like pattern tiling is regulated in Minnesota, given its impact on public waterways and other resources, you'd be wrong.
In fact, except for a single soil and water conservation district in western Minnesota, the amount of tile laid in the state isn't even documented, and probably never will be, given the power that farmers and farm groups wield at the Capitol in St. Paul.
Yet farmers can be forgiven if they want sheet water, snowmelt and the detritus of the state's increasing number of downpour "events" off their land as quickly as possible.
Dry fields not only make farmland easier to access, in many cases they boost corn and soybean yields. If, downstream, clean water and fish and wildlife habitat are lost in the process, well, that's an expense logged in the public's ledger, not the farmer's.
The speed and breadth with which pattern tiling installation has been undertaken across much of farmland Minnesota is no secret to the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and to the state Board of Water and Soil Resources (BWSR). It's no secret as well that, while the state on one hand is making sincere and in many cases effective attempts to clean up waterways and to slow down rain and other runoff, pattern tiling nonetheless continues unabated, and unrestricted.
Ditto for that matter the increasingly dire outcomes of water mismanagement in and around the Twin Cities, where storm-water retention ponds in many cases have replaced the shallow lakes and wetlands that once distilled rain water as it seeped into to the metro's increasingly stressed aquifers.
All of which would seem to have political, if not regulatory, consequences, given that the actions of a minority of citizens (farmers/developers) so adversely affect resources belonging to a majority of Minnesotans.
Not so.
The reason is at least threefold:
_ Most Minnesotans, like most people, zone out problems that are too complicated to understand easily, and/or don't affect their lives in the immediate term.
_ The farm lobby is powerful in this state, as are construction/development lobbies.
_ State environment and conservation agencies and their leaders too often are unwilling and/or incapable of calling out these practices for the soul-sucking drags on land, water and wildlife that they are.
