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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fateful Harvest | 1/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fateful_Harvest | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:39:18.176447+00:00 | kb-cron |
Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret is a nonfiction book written by Duff Wilson, who was a reporter for the Seattle Times. The book began as a series of newspaper reports, which made the issue a "national focus". Fateful Harvest focuses on Quincy, Washington. It was awarded Book of the Year from the press group Investigative Reports and Editors. It details Wilson's investigation into the recycling of fly ash, tire ash, flue dust, tailings, phosphoric acid from car factories, baghouse dust from recycling plants, zinc skimmings from galvanizing industries, and assorted other industrial byproducts with heavy metals and other chemicals into plant fertilizer based on the agronomic benefits of their alkalinity (sold as lime) or their micronutrients—zinc and manganese. It was reasoned that plants growing in alkaline soils do not uptake the metals as easily. The problem was brought to Wilson's attention in 1996 by Patty Martin, the mayor of Quincy, Washington, and Wilson and a small group of farmers conducted the investigation. The issue of heavy metals in fertilizer is sometimes mistakenly confused with biosolids, though there may be some crossover.
== Synopsis ==
=== Cenex and the rinsate pond === Farmer Dennis DeYoung, who lived outside of Quincy, bought fertilizer in 1985 from Land O'Lakes, and subsequently experienced one-tenth of the usual yield. DeYoung kept his bills and noted that he paid prices varying from 2.5 to 9 cents a pound for nitrogen fertilizer; in 1985, the average price for nitrogen fertilizer was 11 cents. In 1986, Washington began to pass stricter laws against dumping toxic waste. Cenex, the local agricultural company, dumped its excess chemicals into a concrete rinsate pond rather than on vacant land, and it filled quickly. Len Smith, who worked there for a summer dumping cans into the pool, recounted seeing its levels drop mysteriously overnight. By 1990, Cenex wanted to get rid of the rinsate pond, so it developed spreading technology that allowed it to use its chemicals on farms. Given the choice between spending $170,000 to put it in the Arlington, Oregon, hazardous waste facility, or "selling" the mixture as fertilizer, the company's managers chose the latter. Company officials later claimed under oath that state officials (whose names remain unknown) had told them to dump the waste as fertilizer. The company avoided testing the pond for anything but fertilizers and pesticides. Cenex paid DeYoung to apply the "fertilizer" to his land then attempted to dilute it with massive amounts of water. The spreader, Dane Lindemeir, remembers objecting to the spreading of what he was told was a mix of fertilizer, atrazine, and trifluralin, because it did not look healthy, and it did not make sense to apply both atrazine, which kills beans, and trifluralin, which kills corn. Later that year, Cenex salesman Nerpel, a friend of DeYoung, told DeYoung that he should check the fertilizer. The corn hardly grew, and what was grown was sold as animal feed. DeYoung, worried about the liability of the toxic waste, tried to get Cenex to take over the land, which they reluctantly agreed to do. Cenex planted Sudan grass, which soaks up heavy metals, but the "extremely rank stand" of Sudan grass only covered 22 percent of the land. Although Cenex promised it would not sell the grass, its Quincy manager John Williams sold it to a neighbor for her horses, several of which died. Meanwhile, DeYoung hired lawyers, but did not make much headway against Cenex, which had the state government on its side. Another farmer, Tom Witte, purchased from Cenex and discovered his fields had substantially less yield, his cows developed cancer, and his field man was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. In 1991 Witte filed for bankruptcy. The conflict drew the attention of several community members, led by Patty Martin. When Martin called the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), she was confused with Senator Patty Murray and the EPA visited the city for a thorough investigation. It found that the rinsate pond used to dump excess fertilizer and pesticides had beryllium levels of 1.39 ppm, cadmium at 25.2 ppm, and chromium at 360 ppm, as well as a variety of other metals and materials, all of which exceeded toxicity threshold levels. Titanium levels "hundreds of times higher than the highest level of titanium found in uncontaminated soil" were also found in several fertilizer tanks used by affected farmers. The farmers had their fertilizers and crops tested independently, which were found to contain lead and arsenic. Martin and other farmers' families had their children's hair tested, and found high levels of aforementioned metals. The homeopathist testing them claimed the families had the highest levels he had seen. Most of the affected farmers went bankrupt and lost in court; one lost because a memo to the regional manager claiming Cenex could save $170,000 in hazardous waste costs by selling the waste as fertilizer was discovered too late to use as evidence. In 1995, Cenex received a $10,000 fine for using a pesticide for an unapproved purpose, which had a maximum penalty of $200,000.