<b>By ANN HINCH<br>
Assistant Editor</b> </p><p>

LANSING, Mich. — Agriculture was one of the advisory sectors that contributed to hammering out the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact (see related articles) between 2001-05, along with environmental, industry and other interests.<br>

Scott Piggott, manager of the Michigan Farm Bureau’s (MFB) agricultural ecology department, has helped work on the compact for several years and explained while it is designed to protect against diversion, it’s a double-edged sword that requires each state institute some water conservation and management practices – which some states don’t already do.<br>

“It’s not an easy thing to talk about,” he said. “How do you talk about water conservation when your farmers drain their fields and are standing in the middle of the biggest bathtub in the world?”
Indeed, according to journalist Peter Annin’s research for his book The Great Lakes Water Wars, the Great Lakes contain 18 percent of all surface freshwater in the world, more than half of that in Lake Superior alone, which is approximately a quarter-mile deep.<br>

A concern of MFB and at least some of the other 37 ag-related organizations with involvement in the compact’s creation, Piggott said, was a provision about reporting “consumptive use.” The compact would create a new special council to oversee its provisions and a permit system, paid for and staffed by experts from each of the eight states involved. Indiana’s estimated annual cost for four scientists and engineers, and supplies, is estimated at just under $250,000.<br>

The other states are Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania.<br>

Originally, Piggott said, the compact required any user drawing more than 100,000 gallons a day average over a 30-day period to report it. Because Michigan growers use a lot of water irrigating half a million acres of seed corn and fruit and vegetables, and feeding a growing livestock industry, MFB asked for 120 days – and received 90. With other changes, overall, he said the compact gives individual states more deference than he believes it originally intended.<br>

A controversy with Great Lakes water has nothing to do with outsiders trying to get it – at least not those out-of-state. Indiana, for example, isn’t very much in the Great Lakes Basin, and Dave Naftzger, executive director of the Council of the Great Lakes Governors, noted a situation in which Lowell, Ind., petitioned for water and was denied because Michigan’s governor denied the request.<br>

In Wisconsin, some towns seeking water to replace their own radium-contaminated supplies are incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses just to pursue permission.
“Anytime that you draw a line on a map, what happens at the line?” Mike Baise asked.<br>

Baise, who works on strategic issues for Indiana Farm Bureau (IFB), said in-state political boundaries are a concern for farmers whose properties may straddle the Basin border. If a farmer’s pumps are on the Basin side (where rainfall drains into the Lakes and connecting waterways) but he uses from them to irrigate crops on his non-Basin property, does that constitute a legal, reportable withdrawal?<br>

“I don’t know that they have really thought about the local impact it could have,” he said, by strict letter of the law.<br>

Also, Baise wondered what would happen in a drought. If farmers who live on or near the Basin boundary, whose crops are dying, find out that city residents in the Basin can still wash their cars, what are they to do?<br>

He said IFB brought this up with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and was assured that small movements of water near the Basin boundary wouldn’t be a problem, and that permits would only be needed for large-consuming ventures not on the boundary, such as dairies and ethanol plants.<br>

Fortunately, he said, Indiana farmers in that area don’t often have the problem of drought since they receive plenty of precipitation. “The water challenges in Indiana tend to be ‘How can we get rid of it?’” Baise said, adding that finding a way to capture excess freshwater might someday benefit those farmers. “It may become an economic asset in the future, if we had freshwater impoundment, or reservoirs.”<br>