Mike Schlepp has been farming along the Coeur d’Alene River, downstream from the Silver Valley, since the 1980s. His farm is adjacent to the new bike path, The Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes.

Q: It seems that farmers below Silver Valley have a unique set of problems.

A: That they do. It didn’t take long after the mining companies started in the 1880’s or so in the Silver Valley. The farmers were the first ones to note that water isn’t the only thing that runs downhill. While most plumbers could tell you the same thing, the farmers really started noticing some dramatic problems, especially after certain flood events, and the mine deposits started to come on the ground.

This valley at one time was an unbelievably fertile valley, and there are still a lot of old photographs that document the crops that were raised on the Mission Flats area as well as through the valley here.

Q: What did they learn about politics?

A: The farmers learned a lot about Idaho politics and about the Idaho judicial system when they tried to stop the mining companies from polluting the river. It took them a while to work their way through the courts. Eventually they had some success at the Supreme Court level, and it was then, and only then, that the mining companies came through and purchased what are affectionately called “Pollution Easements.”

In effect what that says is, is for X number of dollars, the farmers agree to allow the mining companies to place their waste upon the land. Of course the easement was also written by the mining company lawyers, and this is also after the mining companies had already polluted the farmers’ fields. So it’s not really a strong basis for negotiating a good agreement. However, be that as it may, those are the things we deal with on a daily basis.

Q: So you’ve been left to deal with the effects of those pollution easements?

A: As a farmer I take a much more pragmatic approach than agency personnel or regulators in that I am more interested in how to remediate and restore the fields on my farm than I am just talking about the problem. My wife and I have worked decades now to improve the property. We are very proud of the success that we have achieved.

We have had a lot of our work documented by the University of Idaho. They are in their 3rd year of a three year study documenting how we’ve used phosphates in liming agents to bind up the zinc and the lead in the soil. It’s still there, but now it’s rendered in an inert form that isn’t bio-available to plants, humans or wildlife.

Q: So, you could tell something was wrong when you first starting working the fields?

A: Oh, absolutely. When we first came here, the field that you see out here that is in red which is a red top, a variety of Bent Grass. It actually is one of the first plants that can grow in extremely acidic or contaminated sites, but there were large areas out in that field that even that couldn’t grow on. That’s your first inkling as a farmer when you can’t get anything to grow, and it looks like just a giant parking lot. You know there’s something there that really needs some attention.

It’s time consuming. From a farmer’s perspective, it’s quite expensive, but it is nice to over time see the effectiveness of what you are doing.

Q: Is your farm part of the original 21 square mile Superfund site?

A: The Box? No, we are not. We are, I guess, part of the people who are now involved, now that the EPA is thinking outside the box. While it’s a no-brainer that contamination had come downstream over the years, I believe the designation of the Box was primarily dealing with the Bunker Hill Smelter and its effects. No, we were not involved in that at that time. Obviously, now we are, now that the expansion has taken place.

Q: How has the expansion of Superfund affected you?

A: As far as the day to day management decisions that my wife and I make on our farm, it doesn’t affect us. We were dealing with mining company impacts before the EPA started dealing outside the box. We’re dealing with them now, and we or our successors will be dealing with them long after the EPA rides off into the sunset and starts working New Jersey or some where.

What do I want to see out of it? What I’d like to see is that the agencies involved concentrate more on addressing the problem instead of just studying it and talking about it or just trying to place blame and not leave this legacy for our children. That’s what I’d like to see.

Q: Your farm is adjacent to the new bike path. What does that mean for you?

A: Regretfully, the EPA chose to make an agreement with one of the major polluters in the basin, Union Pacific Railroad Company. They had run uncovered ore cars, concentrated ore cars, through the valley, either taking concentrates out of the valley or actually bringing concentrates into the smelter for 100 years.

And I personally have stood by the railroad tracks and watched cars go by, and just the dust from the lead concentrate billowing off these ore cars. Well, you can imagine hundreds of ore cars a day, seven days a week for a hundred years.

The right of way as it passes through my farm is hyper-contaminated. The levels are much higher than anything the mining companies did. Here again, that’s well documented, EPA is aware of that, Coeur D’Alene Indian Tribe is aware of that, Union Pacific is aware of that, and unfortunately the decision was made to create a bike path out of it, instead of cleaning it up.

In effect, what they did is they put a two inch layer of asphalt over just the portion where the rails would be and did not address any of the rest of the right of way. Well, the problem is that concentrate dust didn’t confine itself just under the rails when it blew off. It actually contaminated the entire right of way. So that legacy is still left for us to try to get a handle on.

The real crux of the matter here is Union Pacific Railroad does not and never did own the right of way. They had an easement to go over the top of the farmers fields. They did not buy the ground that the right of way was on, so number one, the landowner is sitting there with liability that a major corporation placed on them, and EPA is letting that major corporation walk away from its liability.

Well, any good EPA attorney will tell you liability never goes away. It just gets transferred from one person or entity to another. So what my wife and I have undertaken is to the best of our ability, addressing those issues along the right of way that we can actually get to.

Q: How are you addressing the issues along the right of way?

A: Some of the burrow pits along the right of way that they call our ponds, because they are filled with water, are more than double the level of contamination of anything they’ve ever found in the lake. The other thing that the University of Idaho has been able to document is even with those high levels of contamination, we have been able to reduce the bio-availability of those contaminants to a point where as far as the University of Idaho has been able to determine, there is no harmful effect that they have been able to find, even if that water goes anoxic.

There is a real concern in the Coeur d’Alene Lake itself that if the bottom of the lake gets depleted of oxygen and becomes anoxic that it could release heavy metals back into the water column.

The University of Idaho has shown that, even though these ponds go much more anoxic than anything they can even theorize that the lake will go to, that these ponds have double the contamination of anything the lake has, that even under that scenario, they cannot document any reflux action, any benthic flux action of any of the tailings in these ponds

In my opinion, what this shows is that instead of having an extreme fear of all things phosphorous, when used in a very careful regimented managed way, the mine tailings at the bottom of the lake can be rendered inert so that the issue of benthic flux or the metals becoming re-suspended in the column is, quite frankly, moot.

There’s always a potential, and any good regulator who gets his funding by trying to trumpet a worst case scenario will tell you there’s always a possibility something can happen, and that is absolutely, positively correct. How I deal as a farmer, how I have to deal with things is not what is hypothetically possible, but what is probable, and in my opinion there is a much greater risk of a volcano erupting from the middle of Lake Coeur d’Alene and drying it up!

Now, how you extrapolate that work in our ponds to the lake would obviously take some management work, but there still is as,I’m sure you folks have found, there is still to this day, camps that say either the lake is almost better than pristine, or the lake is worse than Love Canal.

Q: So, what should the average tourist on the bike path keep in mind?

A: One of the things that I would strongly recommend is that people do educate themselves about especially where they live. Also, to be extremely cautious about how they recreate with young children. It’s young children that are most at risk for problems associated with heavy metals, particularly lead.

The couple of the metals that really, in my opinion, have a dramatic impact that really aren’t dealt with, are mercury, cadmium and arsenic. A prime example is people who camp off of the bike path and are exposing young children to hyper levels of arsenic and cadmium. And while there is signage along the trail, a lot of people don’t read signs.

As long as they stay on the asphalt, they will be fine, but if you live next to the right of way and can be exposed to any of the dirt, or you allow your children to play in the right of way, then you want to be cautious about it. You really do. Other than that it’s just educate your self. You are now moving into an area that is an historic mining site. Try to use common sense.

Q: This area has a history of flooding. How does that affect you?

A: The bulk of my farm lies in the Coeur d’Alene flood plain, and when you live in the flood plain, you better plan on it just plain flooding. As an example, what you see behind me here, in 1996 this area was all under water. Where my little dog is out there, actually you could put a boat in and go directly across the dike, across what was then Union Pacific Railroad right of way, clear to the other mountains.

We actually had people boating on top of our grass fields. If you were coming up the river instead of following the channel of the river, you could just cut across the whole enchilada. So yes, I’m somewhat familiar with flooding. More so than I ever, ever wanted to be.

And there are issues involved with recontamination. One of the things that is really helpful for our particular farm is the Union Pacific Railroad dike historically has held back most of the flooding, so the levels of contamination are primarily between the old railroad tracks and the river. By the time the river gets to a flood stage where it crests the railroad grade, the bulk of the worst of the contamination has already gone by and is now blessing Lake Coeur d’Alene.

As an example, the bulk of our farm which is on the cleaner side of the railroad dike is about 400 parts per million lead in the top six inches. On the other side of the railroad dike, it’s 5,000. which is comparable to the rest of the flood plain except for that area right next to the tracks. Then the levels are much higher than that.

That gives you an idea of the flooding impacts and how just walking up and over a railroad grade can make the difference between 400 parts per million and 5,000 parts per million lead.

Q: So, stay on the bike path.

A: I couldn’t recommend it more. Me and my wife personally have had problems with people taking their families off the bike patch and camping out in our fields – in our most contaminated fields – and it’s very disheartening to see people ignore signs and drag small, small children out into mine tailings to camp.

They may be very good, concerned parents at home and are very watchful about what their kids eat and how they recreate in their yard, but you need to realize, when you’re out camping, you need to be very careful. Here again, it’s common sense about where you camp and how you camp in this area.

Q: So, as a farmer, you’ve really been dealt an interesting hand!

A: I guess it didn’t take us long to learn that we were playing the Silver Valley version of Texas Hold Em, and that we’d have to go all in!

As I’ve told a lot of agency personnel, it’s their job. This is their job. This is our life. So, what we have done is, we have identified crops, number 1, that do not take up heavy metals. As an example, the Bank Grass that we grow. It is used world wide on reclamation projects, because it can grow in extremely contaminated areas; it does not allow the lead or heavy metal molecule through the cell wall. It might accumulate along the wall but it does not allow it into the plant. That’s how the plant is able to withstand the toxicity and not poison itself.

On the ground next to the river, that’s primarily what we use there. Also, by having a grass seed crop, we’re not working the ground up as often. You can imagine any farmer watching this is going to realize that if you are next to a river prone to flooding, the last thing you want to do is be forced into plowing that up in the fall and having that exposed over the winter to spring flooding.

So we try, as much as we can, to keep a permanent vegetative cover on that.
On our cleaner ground. Here again, we’ve taken the same management techniques that we use to bind up the metals in our most contaminated ground, and we apply that over our entire farm, so we have margins of safety piled on to margins of safety, any time we grow anything that is going into the food chain.

In addition, everything that we grow for human consumption is sent to the U of I quality assurance lab, and we always test it and make sure that it is well within margins. In fact, we’ve actually been able to grow potatoes and onions next to the Coeur d’Alene River that actually have no higher levels of lead in them than what you buy in the store for your family. So, we are very proud of actually being able to get to that point,even on our most contaminated sites.

Q: I imagine other farmers are now shaking their heads at all the additional things you have to deal with!

A: Well, they don’t call it opportunities, I’ll tell you that! As a former County Farm Bureau president, I know it was probably entertaining for a lot of farmers in southern Idaho to listen to me regale them with my tales of regulatory woe. But most farmers can’t even get past the fact that the bulk of my farm is a wetland; so I’m already under all of the rules and regulations associated with farming in a wetland.

You then add on top of that – you are farming a wetland in a Superfund Site – and it does kind of make one give pause on exactly how best to maneuver through the regulatory mine field. The problem you come up with right away is, you will have one agency that demands you do one thing, and another agency demanding one diametrically opposed. So, no matter what you do, you are going to be offending the federal gods. So you do the best you can.

It also did not take my wife and I long to realize that many of the agency people who have regulatory authority over our operation have absolutely no idea how to farm, how to farm in a wetland, or how to farm in a wetland in a Superfund site. That is why we’ve actually do so much work with the University of Idaho, also the University of Washington, also Eastern Washington University had graduate students out here. And we do so much work with the Food Quality Assurance Lab.

And here again, Panhandle Health District had questions on food safety a couple of years ago, and my wife and I were able to provide them more information than they had gathered in decades. It comes down to making a decision, whether to be proactive or reactive. Many people choose to just be reactive. My wife and I chose years ago to be proactive. What we’ve tried to do is lead by example.

Q: So, if you were the Czar, what would you like to see happen out here?

A: I would take the National Academy of Sciences recommendation and urge agencies to think out of the box, to try to use different approaches than what they are using right now, especially use a much more holistic approach.

The first thing they did when they decided to build a trail over the right of way, instead of cleaning it up is they locked in place the highest concentration of contaminants right in the middle of the flood plain. Now that the National Academy of Sciences has come out and asked them to take a much more holistic approach, that’s fine, but it’s hard to do that now that you’ve already made sure that no matter what you do, it’s not going to be holistic.

I guess the first thing I would do is try to figure out a way to mitigate the contamination that is perched right next to the river for tens and tens of miles. I guess that’s where I’d start.