Forever chemicals tainting food supply, destroying American farmers

Advocates like Erin Brockovich are sounding the alarm. She says when it comes to forever chemicals, “the storm is here."

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Dec 8, 2024 - 15:00

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Forever chemicals tainting food supply, destroying American farmers

(NewsNation) — It’s 4 a.m. in Maine, and just like his father and grandfather before him on this land, dairy farmer Fred Stone makes the frigid journey through the snow to milk the cows.

“It was always known as cows first, people second, and that’s the way it’s always been,” Stone told NewsNation’s Natasha Zouves. “I wish that snow wasn’t cold, and I wish rain wasn’t wet, and I wish I still didn’t love my cows. But the more people I meet, the more I love my cows.”

Stone has chosen each of their names and knows them by heart. In the warm barn, he greets Moon Beam, Blue and Storm Chaser.

“There’s no phoniness about the, you know exactly where you stand, and they’re all different,” said Stone. “Their personalities are all completely different.”

His whole life, he says his care for his cows has been rewarded with what he calls “liquid gold.” His family has owned this farm since 1914, and for more than a century, their high-quality milk and cream have gone to market.

Now, he milks them only to pour every drop down the drain.

“You either laugh or cry, and I ran out of tears a long time ago,” said Stone.

Fred Stone’s milk is contaminated, heavily tainted with PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” linked with cancer and other serious health issues.

“This has broken our hearts and crushed our spirit, and I don’t know if we’ll ever get that back,” said Fred’s wife, Laura Stone.

In 2016, an innocuous, routine water test on their property revealed high levels of PFAS — human-made chemicals the Stones had never heard of before.

They volunteered to test their soil, cows, and milk. All came back high. Fred Stone said their milk inspector informed him that the USDA was considering the possible extermination of his cows.

“I said, ‘That’s a hell of an idea. I’ll tell you what, I’ll take the cows down to the extermination site… and I’ll stand there and I’ll take the first bullet, and you can kill the rest of them.”

Fred Stone had to euthanize 80% of his cows.

“For a long while, we were, I guess you would call it — dead,” said Laura Stone.

Fred installed a $23,000 water filtration system, but the contamination returned. He says he went $1.5 million in debt trying to save his farm, all the while dumping thousands of gallons of precious milk. The Stones have been dropped by their milk distributor.

Fred Stone told NewsNation there is one thought in particular that haunts him now:

“At some point in time, hopefully not tomorrow, I’m going to have to tell my father and grandfather what happened to the dairy farm they entrusted me with. And that’s what keeps me up at night.”

Fred Stone’s family has set up a GoFundMe, you can find it here.

Organic farmers make a terrible discovery

About 120 miles north of Fred Stone’s farm, a young couple pooled all of their money and put it into a dream.

Adam Nordell and Johanna Davis brought their fiddle and banjo and put down roots, closing on a farm where they could settle down, grow organic produce, have a family — and build a whole life.

And when it came to naming it, the choice was easy for these two musicians: “Songbird Organic Farm.”

"We imagined that we would be here forever. We imagined that we would build a business that would support our family through our career and into our retirement, so we thought we were settling down for the long haul,” said Nordell.

The idea of preventing development and preserving this farmland was also a man’s dying wish. The couple found the farm through a service that connects retiring farmers with the next generation. The original owner had developed pancreatic cancer.

“A terminal cancer diagnosis,” said Nordell, “so he needed to move quickly to find the next farmers to take over management of this land.”

Under Nordell and Davis’ care, the land and business flourished, and they raised their little boy.

As news of the contamination on Fred Stone’s land spread, a customer asked Nordell and Davis if they’d heard of PFAS. They voluntarily tested their land.

“The results were high. Our drinking water tested about 400 times the state’s drinking water threshold,” said Nordell.

Maine’s PFAS threshold for drinking water is 20 parts per trillion. Nordell says their soil also tested high. He recalls the terror of that time: “We were in free fall, do we have a business? Do we have a home here?”

Then they had their blood tested for forever chemicals. Nordell says his and his wife’s blood levels are higher than chemical manufacturer employees who worked in PFAS factories.

“My blood levels after living for seven years on a farm that was spread with sludge four times, are higher than those workers in Decatur, Alabama,” said Nordell.

The couple shut down operations, recalled their products, alerted customers and shuttered their organic farm.

Davis described a gut-wrenching conversation with her little boy:

“He said, ‘Is there PFAS, is it in my body and is that bad?' And I don’t even know what I said, I couldn’t answer. That’s not something that I want to have to talk to my kid about when he’s 5 years old.”

The family hasn’t picked up an instrument in a long time now, they say the music just isn’t in them anymore. Health is a constant worry. And there are questions that defy answers. What does a farmer do with a farm that can grow nothing?

“It’s weird, I get angry at the place. I get angry at the land. As if the ground underneath us has betrayed us,” said Nordell. “But of course, this place is a victim too, this farm is a victim.”

How forever chemicals became a part of American life

When the contamination was discovered on Fred Stone’s land, he says he was considered an anomaly. Now, in the course of this two-year NewsNation investigation, a growing list of farmers are coming forward, saying they are grappling with the same discovery on their land.

Advocates like Erin Brockovich are sounding the alarm. She says when it comes to forever chemicals, “the storm is here. And it’s not just in Maine, it’s in every single state.”

“EPA, FDA, political leaders, where have you been? How did you miss this? Now we have an entire country, an entire country that is potentially in peril from this ‘forever chemical’ that has destroyed our land, destroyed our farming, destroyed water and destroyed public health and welfare. Wow, kudos, good job,” Brockovich said to NewsNation in an exclusive interview.

PFAS are colloquially called “forever chemicals” because they are nearly impossible to destroy. The class of chemicals, technically called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, were created from the top-secret WWII nuclear bomb Manhattan Project.

After the war, 3M bought the patent to develop these newly-discovered chemicals, finding they did a remarkable job in resisting water, oil and stains. 3M created a blockbuster product: Scotch Guard.

Beyond a range of industrial applications, PFAS made their way into almost every American home, in carpet and couches, dental floss and rain jackets, pizza boxes and shampoo. Under the company DuPont, forever chemicals entered our kitchens, in our non-stick Teflon cookware.

“It's in firefighter gear, or it's in flame retardant clothing we put babies in, it's in the furniture that we spray with Scotch Guard, so we don't stain something. It's in our makeup. It's everywhere. It's in our coffee cups,” said Brockovich. “It’s everything. It’s pretty catastrophic, that a chemical like this has gotten into every aspect of our life.”

Forever chemicals have become so ubiquitous that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say 97% of Americans now have detectable levels of PFAS in their blood. The U.S. Geological Survey says at least 45% of our drinking water has one or more types of PFAS.

But how did forever chemicals end up on valuable American farmland?

The answer lies in a type of fertilizer, made from treated human sewage, called biosolids, or more colloquially, “sludge,” and a system that spreads it directly on their land.

Spreading fertilizer 'sludge' on prime American cropland

“We have this bright idea that we're going to take all this sewer sludge, and we're going to spread it on the land as fertilizer,” said Brockovich.

Epidemiologist Patrick MacRoy explained how this sludge is produced.

He says the process starts with the manufacturing of PFAS. “3M and others actually manufacture these chemicals,” said MacRoy, and these manufacturing plants discharge waste to a sewer system, which goes to a wastewater treatment facility.

Simultaneously, there are the PFAS found in our homes, from the clothing that is stain resistant to cleaning products and sofas and carpets. MacRoy says when we clean an item in the washing machine, or dump a bucket down the drain, that PFAS-contaminated waste also goes to a wastewater treatment facility.

“They have to do something with all of those solids that settle out, and that’s what we call sludge,” said MacRoy. “Particularly in the 1970s, we start taking that sludge and applying it to farmland as fertilizer. You have this contaminated sludge that then goes to a local farm where it's spread out.”

“If you look at the PFAS that's on the farmland, it goes into crops (that humans eat) or goes into crops that are eaten by animals, that we then eat. That PFAS, is eaten by us,” said MacRoy.

MacRoy points out that at no point in this process does the EPA require sludge to be tested for PFAS before being spread on farmland: “EPA requires the sewer districts to test for a handful of heavy metals, but they never test for PFAS. It’s just not tested, no one knows.”

MacRoy says all 50 states are impacted by sludging. Forty-eight states still spread biosolids today, the only exceptions being Maine and Connecticut. The Environmental Working Group claims as much as 20 million acres of American farmland could be contaminated by forever chemicals.

“You have almost like a cycle that you take the hazardous waste, apply the sludge on the land, you now contaminate the land that contaminates the water, that's contaminated the food chain. We're into a real serious problem here with this forever chemical,” said Brockovich.

Fred Stone kept the 1986 letter from Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection, which he says told him the sludge was safe to spread on his farm.

“They said it was a safe, safe material to use on our fields. And again, we were, we were doing our civic duty by using it and keeping the material off from landfills and what have you. So yeah, it was great. It was a 'win-win situation’ for everybody involved,” said Stone.

Stone ultimately ended up sludging his land every year from 1983 to 2004.

When Adam Nordell and Johanna Davis purchased their farm, they didn’t know the land had been sludged four times by a farmer in the early 1990s.

“They were told it was their civic duty to help with the societal problem of municipal sludge. So they got a bad deal. We got a bad deal. That was not a good idea,” said Nordell.

Fred Stone says that without a federal safety net, he understands why other American farmers wouldn’t be jumping to test their land.

“You’re out there asking someone to shoot you and you’re giving them the gun and the bullets to do it with. And you know damn well that you’re committing financial suicide. That’s what we did,” said Stone.

The paper trail: What did chemical companies know?

NewsNation poured over court documents that show what Erin Brockovich calls “the shell game.”

“It’s moving stuff around for, you know, for the end result that makes them more money, and leaves destruction in its path,” said Brockovich.

Epidemiologist Patrick MacRoy reviewed the documents with NewsNation.

“We have in front of us here a large stack of documents that come from the chemical companies themselves, documenting what they knew about PFAS chemicals, their harm to people and harm to the environment. Most of this was secret, just kept in chemical industry files, right until various lawsuits forced them to disclose it,” said MacRoy.

He says the documents start with animal studies in the 1950s and 1960s, that showed impacts to the liver, kidneys, and spleen, and acute oral toxicity.

“Going all the way back to 1963, 3M knew there were risks with these chemicals. They put it in their own manual, that they're toxic, and they need precautions,” said MacRoy.

In 1970, a test on firefighting foam had to be abandoned when the substance left all the fish dead.

Then, in 1973, a DuPont study showed PFAS in food packaging impacts the livers of dogs.

And in 1975, the first indication that PFAS already flowed in the blood of Americans.

“This was just unrelated to PFAS research - just scientists looking at chemicals in human blood,” said MacRoy. “The average person already has PFAS in their blood by 1975.”

Court filings show that 3M soon replicates this in their own studies. A 1979 letter from their lawyers appears to advise the company to conceal that the chemical found in human blood was a type of PFAS.

A year later, in 1978, DuPont warned 3M about the toxic effects of PFAS in our food packaging.

And by the late 1970s to early 1980s, documents suggest 3M and DuPont were becoming aware that their own employees were getting sick.

“In 1981, 3M was concerned enough about the potential for birth defects as a result of these chemicals, that they actually reassigned all the female workers in the plant to jobs that didn't involve exposure,” said MacRoy.

By 1984, PFAS starts to appear in water. Specifically, DuPont detects forever chemicals in Little Hocking, Ohio. They do not tell the water utility.

“The levels they found back then, would be considered very high today,” said MacRoy.

And through the late 1980s through early 1990s, workers keep getting sick — from 3M finding elevating cancer rates among their workers, their male workers more likely to die from prostate cancer, to DuPont finding higher cancer rates in their Parkersburg plant workers.

More than two decades after scientists told 3M the blood of Americans contained PFAS, in 1998, 3M finally alerted the EPA that the type of PFAS in their Scotch Guard builds up in the blood.

“USDA and EPA, how in the hell did this get by you? It didn't. You knew something for the sake of money for lobbying power, you turned a blind eye,” said Brockovich.

In 1999, a whistleblower came forward; a scientist at 3M by the name of Dr. Richard Purdy stepped down and sent a copy of his resignation letter to the EPA.

“This letter basically says, you have asked me to try to help identify where the problems with the substance are. We've identified a huge list of concerns. We need to do more research, the management is shutting me down. And I feel ethically like I cannot work at 3M anymore, because they are ignoring the science they are ignoring our request to do more study,” said MacRoy.

By 2000, 3M agrees to phase out some PFAS in the course of an EPA investigation. According to the 2010 Minnesota Attorney General Congressional Testimony, at this time, 3M publicly suggests it recently learned PFAS are in human blood, when they had known since 1975.

In 2005 and 2006, the EPA fined DuPont $10.25 million and 3M $1.5 million.

A major headline came in 2023, with a multi-billion dollar federal settlement over PFAS contamination in our nation’s tap water, forever chemicals making their way into many U.S. public drinking water systems.

“There’s a reason why they’re settling these lawsuits now for water contamination, because the more we study it, the more we find problems, the larger the problem is going to be. They're rushing now to try to settle things before the full scope of the problem is even understood,” said MacRoy.

NewsNation reached out to both 3M and DuPont.

Statement from 3M:

As the science and technology of PFAS, societal and regulatory expectations, and our expectations of ourselves have evolved, so has how we manage PFAS.

3M announced in 2000 the phase out of manufacturing of PFOA and PFOS worldwide. In December 2022, 3M announced we will exit all PFAS manufacturing and work to discontinue the use of PFAS across our product portfolio by the end of 2025.

3M is committed to providing accurate information about PFAS with appropriate context. We have shared significant information about PFAS over the decades, including the results of studies 3M conducted on PFOS. 3M also published many of its findings regarding PFAS in publicly available scientific journals dating back to the early 1980s. Those journals were and remain available to the scientific community and the public.

Statement from DuPont:

In June 2019, DuPont de Nemours was established as a new multi-industrial specialty products company. DuPont de Nemours has never manufactured or sold PFOA, PFOS or firefighting foam.

While DuPont is not a PFAS commodity chemical manufacturer, it does use select PFAS compounds within industrial processes pursuant to relevant environmental, health and safety rules and standards. Such uses are necessary to impart specific product performance criteria and only in products that are essential to safety and the critical functioning of society.

Our use of PFAS is limited and is managed as a Substance of Concern (SoC) consistent with the company’s Chemical Management Policy – Substance of Concern. We are currently pursuing alternatives to PFAS where possible. Additionally, we have rigorous systems, processes, and protocols in place to ensure that PFAS are used safely, are controlled to the highest standards, and are minimized in our operations.

We support science-based efforts to develop guidelines for PFAS and commit to meeting these requirements in our global operations. We will continue to ensure our products and processes are fully compliant with laws and regulations on PFAS.

Safety, health and protecting the planet are core values at DuPont. We are committed to continuous improvement of our chemical stewardship process and to upholding the highest standards for the safe operation of facilities and the protection of our environment, our employees, our customers, and the people of the communities in which we do business.

The role of the EPA

“The chemical industries hid the full extent of the problem from the EPA until the late 1990s. But starting in the late 1990s, EPA had all the information, and they’ve done very little,” said MacRoy.

MacRoy says, “The single biggest thing I think EPA could do today would be to require testing for PFAS before putting sludge on farmland.”

In June of 2023, NewsNation went to D.C. for an interview with Radhika Fox, then-assistant administrator for water at EPA. When asked why decisive action wasn’t taken by the EPA in the late 1990s, Fox replied: “The important thing is we're taking action now. We’re taking swift action under the President’s leadership.”

NewsNation asked why biosolid sludge application was still continuing if the EPA could not guarantee its safety. Fox replied that “land application of biosolids is one of the critical uses of biosolids from the treatment plants that are treating our wastewater. And in many instances, it’s perfectly safe.”

She advised: “One of the best things that someone can do is really educate themselves about what’s going on in their local community. I suggest talking to your local water system to see what they're doing, are they testing for PFAS, are they treating for it? We are working very diligently to get this national drinking water standard in place. At the end of the day, it is a partnership with our states and with local communities to together protect the American people.”

In April of 2024, the Biden-Harris administration issued the first-ever national drinking water standard, they say it will protect 100 million people from PFAS pollution.

The EPA still allows sludging to take place in all 50 states without testing requirements.

A group of Texas farmers are currently suing the EPA. The lawsuit contends that in failing to regulate PFAS in biosolid sludge, the agency violated the Clean Water Act and Administrative Procedures Act. The EPA is currently trying to get this lawsuit dismissed.

“The relief they seek — an order directing EPA to identify PFAS in its next biennial report, and to regulate PFAS thereafter — is simply not available,” the EPA wrote in a September 2024 court filing.

A celebration at Misty Brook Farm

After 11 long months of contamination, the sound of milk being poured into glass bottles instead of down the drain is music to Brendan and Katia Holmes’ ears.

They proudly peel and stick a bright yellow “PFAS tested” sticker on each bottle, carton and jug going to market. They don’t have to, but they want the public to ask questions.

They say honesty and trust are what made them choose this land to begin with from the moment they asked the previous owner how to “get in and see the place.”

“I said, ‘Hey, is there a key to the house?’ He said, ‘Key to the house?! I haven’t locked it since I built it.’ I’m like, alright, that’s the place I want to live,” said Brendan Holmes. "When we moved up here it was do or die, we were either going to go bankrupt or make it work.”

In year one, Misty Brook Farm grossed about $15,000. By 2021, it grossed $2 million and employed 13 people.

“It’s a good feeling. It’s a milestone. My goal in life is to leave the piece of land that I’m farming in better shape than I got it. If I wanted to make money, I wouldn’t have gotten into dairy farming. Maybe I’d have gotten work for DuPont. But money I don’t care about money. I care about quality and integrity,” said Holmes.

Which is why when a customer asked them if they’d ever tested their milk for forever chemicals, they immediately put up thousands of dollars of their own money for testing. And when the results came back high, they say there wasn’t hesitation.

"People have 'fight, flight, or freeze.' I go straight to fight. And to me, I’m like, 'OK, I’m not the only one that this has happened to.' And my fight is, I’m going to make this public,” said Holmes.

They told the public and broke the news to their boys. Katia recalls the family’s conversation:

“Johnny was like, ‘When do we have to stop selling the milk?’ And Brennan said, ‘Now.’ Johnny’s like, ‘What are we going to do, daddy?’ And Brennan said, ‘Well, I don’t know... but we’ll figure it out.”

“The first days, weeks, months, we call it firefighting, we were definitely in survival mode,” said Katia.

Brendan Holmes had choice words for the chemical companies that profited off of PFAS products and did not disclose what they knew for years.

“When they had the choice of do we go public with this or do we sweep this under the rug, they chose the rug,” said Holmes.

He described the gravity farmers across the country are facing with forever chemical contamination, and the lack of a safety net or recourse when contamination is found.

“Suicide among dairy farmers and farmers in general is incredibly high because a lot of these farms are third fourth and fifth generation and you are going to be the person to lose it, your great great great grandfather cleared the land, and you’re the person whose going to have a bankruptcy auction because you can’t hold onto the land.”

They dumped 26,000 gallons of milk.

“We pride ourselves on producing milk that mothers can feed their children, and then to have them call us up and be like, ‘Is my kid going to be OK because I drank your milk?’ And it wasn’t anything we knowingly did,” said Holmes.

Testing revealed their cows had become contaminated from someone else’s sludged farm. The tainted feed for their cows in Maine was grown in Kentucky.

“We are not responsible necessarily for how it happened, how the sludge was spread 20 or 30 years ago that the contaminated soils were where the feed came from. But we are responsible for how we move forward,” said Katia.

Their own family’s bloodwork also tested high for forever chemicals. The Holmes found themselves putting it all on the line, again.

“We borrowed the money and we bought 50 cows that were uncontaminated. $73,000 we borrowed for a new herd,” said Brendan.

After 11 months, thousands in loans and testing, making sure every ounce of feed and water was untainted, enough time passed that all of their cows came back clean. Their milk is now at “non-detect” levels of PFAS, and sales have resumed.

Since the contamination primarily came from outside the borders of their land, they found themselves in a more tenable situation than farmers like Fred Stone. But Holmes says he knows PFAS contamination has a way of coming back. He worries another farm’s contaminated feed could taint his herd all over again.

“The thing that keeps me up at night — in 2016, we had a severe drought, and I had to buy five tractor-trailer loads of feed from Pennsylvania. I can’t verify what soil that feed from Pennsylvania came from. And (with another drought) I will be rolling the dice,” said Holmes.

Update on farmers surviving PFAS contamination

NewsNation is updating these farmers’ stories after our two-year investigation.

Brendan and Katia Holmes are still selling milk at Misty Brook Farms, praying no contamination comes back.

Adam Nordell and Johanna Davis successfully sold their farm to the Maine Farmland Trust, it will be used as a research site to understand how PFAS moves through food and water. They have dedicated themselves to advocacy.

Fred and Laura Stone received new test results: