Groundwater quality assessment through cooperative private well testing: An Ohio example

Abstract

WE are witnessing growing concern over the protection of groundwater. Policy development is progressing on many fronts, as is the planning and initiation of protection programs. Given these emphases, one might assume that problem assessment, as it applies to agricultural contamination of groundwater quality, is well advanced. Unfortunately, such an assumption is true for only a small portion of North American agricultural landscapes. The lead sentence in the groundwater quality section of The Conservation Foundation's 1987 report, State of the Environment: A View Toward the Nineties reads, “Relatively little is known about the quality of the nation's groundwater despite the importance of this resource” (6) . Likewise, the introduction to a 1987 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) report, The Magnitude and Costs of Groundwater Contamination From Agricultural Chemicals , states “Little is known about the scope of most groundwater contamination generated by human activities” (10) . The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has mounted a statistically designed National Pesticide Survey expressly because existing data were inadequate to assess the nature and extent of pesticide contamination in the nation's groundwater (11) . In examining the extent of nitrate contamination in the United States …