We're drinking fertilizer

Not that long ago, a retired fisherman in Alberton, PEI, pointed to the island's famed potato fields from his boat and told me that agricultural chemicals were leaching into on-shore waters and killing fish.

Last summer, six farmers were ordered to make changes to their fields after thousands of dead fish washed up near two of the island's most pristine rivers.

The CBC reported last year that the high nitrate levels in PEI's drinking water will get worse if farming practices don't change. Researcher Martine Savard said the study showed the nitrates are coming from chemical fertilizers spread on fields.

Twenty federal and provincial researchers were involved in the study, taking water samples from wells around the island over several years. It indicated that if farmers along a watershed stopped using fertilizers today, it could take 20 years for nitrates to come down to a normal level.

This past January, the PEI government showed it was starting to take the problem seriously. It set up a series of seven, free drinking water testing clinics to look at nitrate content. The Commission on Nitrates in Groundwater will report to the premier by June.

It's a good 20 years since this newspaper first ran stories about high nitrate content in drinking water in the Annapolis Valley.

Not much better

Nobody blinked then, and the problem isn't appreciably better today. However, water testing is no longer free. Nitrates cannot be tested in this region, anyway. The service will probably cost $150, according to the government website.

Three years ago, the Geological Survey of Canada looked at 966 wells in the Annapolis Valley. It determined that 56.8 per cent of the sampled wells exceeded the threshold level for human impacts -- one out of 10 contained nitrate traces above acceptable levels prescribed in municipal drinking water standards.

Stephen Hawbolt of the Clean Annapolis Valley Project says the highest concentrations are around Kentville -- Billtown, Port Williams, Canard, Canning and Berwick. Elevated counts were detected in wells from Lawrencetown to Wolfville.

The hotspots are mostly, as Environment Minister Mark Parent told me, in his riding, where farming predominates. The Nova Scotia survey authors also blamed agriculture as the most prominent source. Parent’s department has been monitoring groundwater in the region since 2002. Water in 22 per cent of the wells tested last year exceeded the federal guideline for nitrate levels.

The levels have not significantly changed since monitoring began and won’t for years, according to Parent, but he says he is cheered that they have stabilized.

Affects health

Nitrates are known to interfere with the body's ability to absorb iron, and are particularly a problem for infants, who can develop blue baby syndrome, where the blood's ability to carry oxygen is reduced. Anemia is another flag.

Dr. John Rolf, who is a Canada Research Chair on Environment and Conservation at Acadia University, says the wider health implications of excess nitrates are not put together at all.

There is a myth that Parent himself voices that filtration systems, like Brita, can easily take nitrates out of household water supplies, but science has yet to prove that point.

Rolf says he would like to do a small study on whether activated charcoal filters can remove nitrates because one hasn’t been done. “I could do it in about three days. It would not be expensive,” he says. According to Rolf, the only municipal system that can filter out nitrates is in Guelph, Ontario.

Twenty years ago I stopped thinking that Kings County well water was better than chlorinated town water. I worry about the implications of moms in Billtown, Port Williams, Canard, Canning and Berwick mixing formula with groundwater. There is no much that is not known about nitrates contaminates and why is nobody even talking about it?