Our water supply becoming tainted?

If you are like me, and everyone else from the midwest like I am, you most likely take water for granted. It is very easy for us to do see I believe out personal well is only like 15-20 ft deep. But if you go to an arid region like California or all the other western states (CO, WY, NV, AZ etc) water becomes quite the problem. What is worse it is becoming polluted by nitrates that nearly every farmer uses.

I used to be a farmer in my younger years. In addition to running a traditional row crop farming business, I actually got my start at farming through the swine business. Now, to successfully operate a swine farm nowadays there are several environmental dictates you must follow. Luckily for me, these regulations were not in existence when I was 'hog farming'. But every farmer, unless he is one of the new age farmers like what you will run into in CA, applies nitrate to any of his non legume crops.

What this means traditionally is that the farmer applies nitrate based on what he believes his crop will make. Like if you take for instance a corn crop, the rule of thumb is you apply 1-1.5 lbs of nitrate per bushel of your target goal. Only problem with this 'rule of thumb' farming is what if you experience a drought or some other malady? In which case most of the nitrate will not be used by said crop and will instead leach into the groundwater.

This is an excellent article on the subject groundwater contamination. What it says to sum it up succinctly is that the nitrates in our groundwater is only going to get worse if we travel down this path much farther.