Could mining Wisconsin sand lead to butter and cranberry shortages?

By Joel Greeno,   Op Ed for OtherWords.org, November 14, 2012

My family has raised dairy cows on our farm in Monroe County near Kendall, Wisconsin, for almost 150 years. We’ve weathered the Great Depression, low milk prices, droughts, floods, and snowstorms. Despite difficulties, the dairy and related industries generate $26.5 billion in revenue, 174,000 jobs, and fresh, healthy milk, cheese and butter for the state each year.

Other local families have harvested cranberries for generations. Wild cranberries are native to central Wisconsin’s marshlands, and cranberries have become the state’s largest fruit crop. They contribute $350 million and 7,200 jobs to our state’s economy, while comprising almost 60 percent of the nation’s total harvest.

My farm is just a few miles from the town of Warrens, the center of Wisconsin’s cranberry country and home of the world’s largest cranberry festival, with more than 140,000 visitors this year. Thanksgiving wouldn’t be the same here or anywhere else if our cranberry crop vanished.

Mining Wisconsin’s high-quality sand is another industry that’s been established for some time. However, the recent spike nationwide in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas and oil has boosted demand for the sand the process requires. If all 86 planned facilities for the state are built and mined, they would account for about 2,800 jobs. Those jobs would be helpful but hardly remarkable or sustainable. The sand will eventually be depleted. Then what?

Mining companies are offering farmers in Monroe and neighboring counties millions of dollars for their land, and a number of them have sold. I can’t really blame them — that’s more money than most dreamed of making over a lifetime. But the consequences are horrific.

Extracting sand on a wide scale would convert thousands of acres of our countryside into open pit mines. Each oil or gas fracking well can use as much as 3 million pounds of sand — 1,500 tons — before it’s tapped out. And there are thousands of these wells nationwide.

In addition to the loss of productive farmland, fracking uses huge amounts of water. Cranberry bogs are meticulously designed to take advantage of the water stored in the marshes, which is necessary for harvesting, and growers generally set aside seven acres of land for every acre planted to store this water. Marshes surrounded by sand pits will eventually lose water as it seeps into the pits, leaving berry growers high and dry.

Sand mining also poses a serious risk of groundwater contamination, further threatening the lives and livelihoods within rural communities. In addition, heavy truck traffic leads to congestion, overburdens the roads and amplifies road noise, damaging the overall quality of rural life.

Once farms are destroyed, it’s pretty hard to rebuild them, just as it’s hard to bring farmers back to the land once they leave. Farmers in this region shouldn’t have to choose between diametrically opposed options — continue farming at a loss by incurring more and more debt or selling their farms to be converted into sand pits to relieve debt.

Many of these farmers wouldn’t consider selling their land if they saw a real future in farming, and the future depends on a fair price for their products, whether it’s cranberries, turkeys, or milk. The people who provide our food and beverages for every meal deserve a living wage. The small number of short-term mining jobs that large-scale sand mining might create just doesn’t justify destroying our food supply, farmers’ livelihoods, and rural communities.

Extracting sand, oil, gas, or any other finite resource means that eventually the mined land will be worth nothing. The mining companies will move on, taking the jobs and leaving behind scarred landscapes and empty houses.

On the other hand, if farmers receive a fair price from the buyers of their product, especially renewable, sustainable ones such as cranberries, butter or milk, everyone wins — local businesses thrive, schools and other infrastructure are supported, and future generations of farmers have real opportunities.

If farmers get paid fairly, they’ll keep producing good products. Everyone will be able to enjoy a good meal. And farmland and rural communities won’t be turned into sand pits. We would all be grateful for that.

Joel Greeno is a dairy farmer in Kendall, Wisconsin, president of the American Raw Milk Producers Association, and at-large board representative for the National Family Farm Coalition. See this web site:  NFFC.net

The rush to drill for unconventional gas, enabled by a process popularly known as “fracking,” or hydraulic fracturing, has brought with it much collateral damage. Close observers know about contaminated water, earthquakes, and climate change impacts of the shale gas boom, but few look at the entire life cycle of fracking from cradle to grave.

Until recently, one of the most underlooked facets of the industry was the “cradle” portion of the shale gas lifecycle: frac sand mining in the hills of northwestern Wisconsin and bordering eastern Minnesota, areas now serving as the epicenter of the frac sand mining world.

The silence on the issue ended after several good investigative stories were produced by outlets in the past year or so, such as Wisconsin Watch, PR Watch, The Wisconsin State Journal, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Orion, EcoWatch, and most recently, Tom Dispatch. These various articles, all well worth reading, explain the land grab currently unfolding in the Midwest and the ecological damage that has accompanied it. 

To put it bluntly, there could be no shale gas extraction without the sand. As Tom Dispatch‘s Ellen Cantarow recently explained,

That sand, which props open fractures in the shale, has to come from somewhere. Without it, the fracking industry would grind to a halt. So big multinational corporations are descending on this bucolic region to cart off its prehistoric sand, which will later be forcefully injected into the earth elsewhere across the country to produce more natural gas. Geology that has taken millions of years to form is now being transformed into part of a system, a machine, helping to drive global climate change.

Frac sand, which consists of fine-grained sillica, can cause the respiratory illness, silicosis. Washing the frac sand in preparation for the fracking process is also a water intensive process, particularly threatening in the age of increasing water scarcity in the United States and around the world.

“The state’s water supplies are also threatened as sand mining destroys sandstone formations which serve as giant filters for local aquifers.” Sara Jerving of PR Watch wrote. “The mining process can use thousands of gallons of water which can also deplete aquifers.”

The “frac sand rush” has been an uphill battle for small towns and municipalities that are trying to fight, or at the very least, attempt to negotiate with large corporations, with compartively little governmental oversight to deal with corporate behemoths such as EOG Resources, mirroring in many important ways the shale gas rush.

Cities and concerned citizens have done their best to keep up with the boom, but have no precedent to look for, no previous legislation to protect themselves, their infrastructure (see: roads and heavy trucks rolling through), their groundwater and their air.

Enter “Sand Land”

To further introduce the world to the impacts of frac sand mining, DeSmogBlog presents “Sand Land,” a short video report filmed and produced by Milwaukee, WI by photo-journalist and film-maker, Spencer Chumbley of 414 Wire, co-reported on with DeSmogBlog Research Fellow, Steve Horn. The film serves as a short audio-visual primer on the issue.

We encourage you to watch and share it with friends, colleagues, and family.