by Dan DeGroot, former Lower Yakima Valley-area dairy farmer and former chair of the Lower Yakima Valley Groundwater Advisory Committee’s Residential, Commercial, Industrial, Municipal (RCIM) Work Group.
The conversation about nitrates in Washington’s aquifers has been derailed by politics and prejudice. For more than a decade, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has leaned heavily on activists hostile to animal agriculture, while ignoring inconvenient realities about the true sources of nitrates in groundwater. The result is not only unfair one-sided treatment of family dairies, but also a failure to meaningfully address the problem.
The dairy community has never denied that farms can contribute nitrates to groundwater. But the data makes one thing abundantly clear: focusing on dairies alone is a distortion and will never fix the issue. A comprehensive strategy is needed, one that looks honestly at all sources of nitrates, even those that may be politically unpopular.
Before 2007, the EPA itself recognized on-site septic systems (OSS) as the leading contributor of nitrates in U.S. aquifers. Then, without a clear scientific rationale, that focus shifted. Suddenly, animal agriculture was cast as the prime suspect. What changed? It wasn’t the science—it was the politics. The EPA began listening to anti-farm voices hostile to animal agriculture rather than to evidence, and dairies became the convenient target. The agency determined it was easier to demonize dairies than to take on the politically unpopular reality of failing septic systems.
But the numbers tell a different story. In 2014, the Lower Yakima Valley Groundwater Management Area (GWMA) contained roughly 6,500 septic systems. Each system discharged a daily average of about 200 gallons of water directly into the ground, adding up to 1.3 million gallons every single day. These were older systems that did nothing to reduce nitrates before the water was released to leach toward the aquifer. That translates to more than half a billion gallons of septic water per year.
Since then, the number of septic systems has only increased, yet counties have shown little appetite for requiring homeowners to upgrade to modern nitrate-reducing systems. Why? Because it’s politically inconvenient to demand that thousands of households spend money on expensive upgrades.
Meanwhile, dairies have done the opposite. They have invested heavily in upgrading lagoons, manure management, and nutrient application systems. Their contributions to groundwater nitrates have decreased, not increased. Yet they remain the scapegoat. Because farms are an easy political target, they are painted as the culprits while septic system pollution grows unchecked.
This is not just bad policy. It’s willful negligence and it’s time for honesty. We cannot solve nitrate contamination by chasing political targets. We must look squarely at the contributors, whether or not they have powerful defenders. Pointing fingers at dairies while ignoring septic systems will never stop nitrate levels from rising.
Environmental policy must be guided by science, not by prejudice. To restore fairness, and more importantly, to restore clean water, we must hold all sources accountable. Until septic systems are addressed with the same scrutiny forced on farmers, the nitrate crisis will only worsen. The EPA’s selective blame is not just bad policy—it’s convenient politics and a betrayal of the communities it claims to protect.