Never mind what you read on Facebook: US Sugar does not pump polluted water into Lake O

Editor's note: The News-Press started this weekly feature to answer water questions, including those submitted by the public during the 2018 Save Our Water Summit and emailed by readers.

Want to start a rather heated Facebook discussion? Run this question, which we received at our Save Our Water Summit, up a Caloosahactchee/Lake Okeechobee water advocacy group flagpole: “Is anything being done to prevent “Big Sugar” from backwashing polluted water back into Lake O? What is U.S. Sugar doing to prevent polluting Lake O?”

That’s what an audience member at The News-Press’ Save Our Water summit wrote on a card passed to staffers to be used as fodder for this ongoing Q&A feature. It’s informed by a notion widely held in the social media sphere, that Lake Okeechobee is U.S. Sugar's dumping ground for its dirty water.

The problem is, the question’s first assumption is false, as U.S. Sugar spokeswoman Judy Sanchez points out in an email response.

“Has the paper been answering the previous Water Summit questions with facts?  If so, it seems to me that the paper should have determined (and could easily verify the answer with the South Florida Water Management District) the answer to Question No. 1, as it well established that no sugarcane farmers determine when pumps are turned on into Lake Okeechobee.”

The district does indeed confirm that the pumps are its responsibility, and that the only reason water is moved into the lake is for flood control of neighboring cities. Sanchez emphasizes that the agency doesn’t pump water into the lake to prevent sugarcane fields from flooding.

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As for the second part of the question, she writes, “Since the 1994 Everglades Forever Act, U.S. Sugar’s and other sugarcane/vegetable farmers’ in the Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake Okeechobee … have been cleaning every drop of water that leaves their farms.  The current water management system is designed to send the vast majority of our farm water south to the Everglades to provide water to the state’s water conservation areas, recharge urban aquifers and provide clean water to Everglades National Park. By implementing new soil and water management techniques to reduce phosphorus that are known as Best Management Practices, (area) farmers have dramatically reduced nutrients leaving the farms by an average of 57 percent a year. Farmers pay 100 percent of these on-farm practices. We have cleaned our water twice as clean as what was asked of us, and we pay an Agricultural Privilege Tax that helps further clean farm, lake and suburban water in the state’s Stormwater Treatment Areas. 

"As a result, today 100 percent of Everglades National Park is meeting the protective 10 parts per billion phosphorus standard, and almost 95 percent of the entire Everglades is meeting that same standard.  Any water that leaves our farms and enters any public waterways is cleaned by the same Best Management Practices that have been so successful in Everglades restoration that our BMP program has been used as a model for cleaning water elsewhere in the state …  Few of those complaining about farmers can say the same about their own run-off.”

— Do you have a water question? Please send along to water@news-press.com. Stay connected: follow @thenewspress on Instagram, and on Facebook, join our Save Our Water Solutions Group.