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 It's four a. m. in Maine, and just like his father and grandfather before him on this land, Fred Stone is up to milk the cows. Well, it was always known as cows first, people second, you know, and, uh, that's the way it's always been. For Fred, it's always been about the cows. I wish snow wasn't cold and, uh, I wish rain wasn't wet and I wish I still didn't love my cows and the more people I meet the more I love my cows.

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In the warm barn. What's the matter Piccolilli? They wait to be milked. Yes, I see you BB 8. With names like Moonbeam, Blue and Stormchaser, he knows them by heart. There's no phoniness about them. You know exactly where you stand and they're all different. I mean their personalities are all completely different.

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Yes, I see you. Every day he takes care of them. Come on honey, you're almost there. And in exchange, this. What he calls liquid gold. His family has been here since 1914. And for more than a century, the high quality milk and cream has gone to market.

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Now every drop goes down the drain. I told a lot of people that you either laugh or cry and I ran out of tears a long time ago. Fred Stone's milk is contaminated, heavily tainted with chemicals linked with cancer. I can't, there's nothing left. At some point in time, hopefully not tomorrow, I'm going to have to tell my father and my grandfather what happened to the dairy farm that they entrusted me with.

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And that's a part two. He now finds himself on a growing list of American farmers. There's so much sadness and anger. This has broken our hearts and crushed our spirit. And I don't know if we'll ever get that back. Told their farms are shot through with chemicals linked with liver damage, damage to fertility, thyroid issues, and cancer.

All of this land has been poisoned. Water. contaminated. All of these people touched by this advocate, Aaron Brockovich, ready to take on this fight. E. P. A. F. D. A. Political leaders. Where have you been? How did you miss this? That now we have an entire country, an entire country that could potentially be in peril.

from this forever chemical that's destroyed your land, destroyed our farming, destroyed our water and destroyed public health and welfare. Wow. Kudos. Good job. Called forever chemicals because they are nearly impossible to destroy. Prime soil, crops, milk tainted in the heartland, leaving many farmers on the brink of ruin.

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

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This is the story of how their farmland was destroyed right out from under them. Greed. Money. Will take you to ground zero of where it all began. You never wanted to be an activist. I just wanted to milk our cows. And be left to hell alone and show you how far back the paper trail goes when they have the choice of do we go public with this or do we sweep it under the rug? They chose the rug and with these chemicals now impacting 97 percent of Americans, according to the CDC, what you and your family need to know. I am glad News Nation is looking into this problem. All of us, the entire country.

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We'll deal with the fallout. Wow. Make it right. Don't do this to anyone else.

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We're on our way to Fred stones farm right now and we are passing some of the most beautiful farmland. It looks pristine. It looks untouched and you would never guess that in some of these areas potentially cancer causing chemicals are already sewed into the soil. This is a this is  =some weather for for working on the tractor, Fred. Fred's grandpa built this farmhouse. These walls have seen more than a century of hard Maine weather and even harder one harvests. My daughter and my son grew up in the, in the house with their grandparents living right here. What do you love about being a farmer?

The cows. Showing cows for nearly half a century, they raised and showed prize winning cows. Back then we were young and energetic and had all kinds of plans and dreams. And, uh, that all ended back in 2016. In 2016, an innocuous routine water test on their property revealed high levels of P. Fast man made chemicals.

The stones had never heard of before. They didn't have to, but volunteered to test their soil, cows, and milk. All came back high. Fred says he'll never forget what came next. Tanya, our milk inspector, comes out and says, You know, Freddie, she says, One of the ideas that the Department of Ag wants to do is they want to kill the whole herd.

And I said, Great, Tanya. That's a hell of an idea. I said, I'll tell you what. I will take all the cows down to the extermination site. I will put on my dress whites, that I wear when I'm showing. And we'll line them all up. And you can shoot them. And I'll stand there and I will take the first bullet. And you can kill the rest of them.

A week later, I get a letter from the state of Maine on suicide prevention. Can't make this stuff up.

Fred had to euthanize 80 percent of his cows. We were heartbroken. And, um, sorry. To be able to take those, those animals, that there was nothing wrong with them. I mean, they, those cows out there depend on you to take care of them. And take them down and shoot them. Just take them down and shoot them. For a long while, we were, I don't know, I guess you'd call it dead.

Fred says state officials told him his farm was an isolated case. We were then still being considered a unicorn that this didn't happen anywhere else. Did Fred and Laura Stone just get phenomenally unlucky? The answer lies 117 miles north in Unity, Maine.

Where a young couple pooled all of their money and put it into a dream.

They closed on a farm where they could settle down, grow organic produce, have a family, build a whole life.

And when it came to naming it, the choice was easy for Adam Nordell and Johanna Davis.

Songbird Organic Farm. We imagined that we would be here forever. We imagined that we would build a business that would support our, our family through our career and into our retirement. Um, so, we thought we were settling down for the long haul. Preventing development, preserving farmland was also a man's dying wish.

They found the farm through a service that connects retiring farmers with the next generation. The original owner had pancreatic cancer. Cancer diagnosis, a terminal cancer diagnosis. Um, So he needed to move quickly to find the next farmers to take over. Management of this land that farmer passed, but his dream flourished.

The land and business grew and they raised their little boy.

Then, as news of the contamination on Fred's dairy farm spread, a customer asked Adam and Johanna if they'd heard of PFAS, they voluntarily tested their land. The results were high. Our drinking water, uh, tested about 400 times the state's, um, drinking water threshold. 400 times the state threshold of 20 parts per trillion, their soil also tested high.

We were in free fall. Um, do we have a business? Do we have a home here?

Adam says his and his wife's blood levels are higher than employees who worked in PFAS factories. My blood levels after living for seven years on a farm that was spread with sludge four times, um, are higher than those workers in Decatur, Alabama. How old is your son now and how aware is he of all of this?

He said, is there PFAS, is it in my body, and is it, is that bad? Uh, and I, I don't even know what I said, I couldn't answer. Um. That's not something that I want to have to talk to my kid about when he's five years old. He has really high levels of this stuff in his body and he's tiny. High levels that could lead to lifelong medical issues.

Adam and Johanna shut down operations, recalled their products, alerted customers and eventually did the unthinkable. They shut down their farm. Why did you feel the need to take it down? This is no longer Songbird Farm. This is, this is no longer fun.

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?

The collector's item now. Fred too has taken down his farm sign. They were dropped by their milk distributor. It was a pretty sad day when Laura took the sign down. Took the signs down.

And that's that. The end of that.

Despite a 23, 000 water filtration system, the contamination in his milk came back. He is now 1. 5 million dollars in debt. Fred, his wife, and their children say they suffer from chronic, worsening, poor health. He 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 somebody 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. For more UN videos visit www. un. org I get angry at the place. I get angry at the land. Um, as if, as if the ground underneath us has betrayed us.

But of course the land is, this place is a victim too. The farm is a victim. So what happened to this prime American farmland? We have this bright idea that we're gonna take all this sewer sludge and we're gonna spread it on the land as fertilizer. Farmers were told it's a win win, right? You're doing your civic duty.

They got a bad deal. We got a bad deal. That was not a good idea. How long did chemical companies know this was a problem? How long did government agencies? It's politics and it's politics. It's lack of transparency. It's cover up. It's green. The paper trail and the reach. It's already here. It's just been lurking and creeping and we didn't know it.

The storm is here and it's not just in Maine. It's in every single state. And with 97 percent of Americans affected according to the CDC, are PFAS already in your blood? Are they in mine? I'm a little nervous, uh, but doctor, what do my test results show? The results when we come back.

So what happened to Fred and Laura and Adam and Johanna? How did PFAS end up on prime American farmland? 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. Sludge, a byproduct of sewage treatment plants, but it can be used as a natural fertilizer.

This land reclamation project demonstrates how nutrients contained in sludge can convert unused land into fertile, crop bearing farm areas. The answer lies in a type of fertilizer made from treated sewage called sludge, and a program that spread it directly on their land. Particularly in the 70s, we started taking that sludge and applying it to farmland as a fertilizer.

Welcome to the sludge pathway with epidemiologist Patrick McCroy. You know, the process starts with the manufacturing of PFAS. So, uh, DuPont, 3M, others actually manufacture these chemicals. Patrick says these manufacturing plants discharge to a sewer system, which goes to a wastewater treatment facility.

Then, there's PFAS in your home, from our clothing that's stain resistant to our sofas and carpets and our cleaning products. When we clean an item in the washing machine or dump a bucket down the drain, But they have to do something with all of those solids that settle out and that's what we call sludge.

So you have this contaminated sludge that then goes to a local farm where it's spread out as fertilizer. Most of the PFAS that ends up in most people is from what we eat, right? So if you look at the PFAS that's on the farmland, goes into crops, um, or goes into crops that are eaten by animals that we then eat, that PFAS is eaten by us.

At what point in this entire flow chart and process does the EPA test for PFAS? They don't. They don't. They never test for PFAS, right? EPA requires the sewer districts to test for a handful of heavy metals, but they never test for PFAS. So this sludge is going onto farmland without being tested for PFAS by the EPA?

Correct. By the EPA or by any state or local authority. It's just not tested. No one knows. Forgive me, that sounds crazy. So 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. Uh, these are some of the original, uh, permits from the Cane Lake Sewer District. They're spreading on our fields. Yeah, this one's from, uh, this one says October 86. And there's a signature of the commissioner. This 1986 letter from Maine's Department of Environmental Protection told Fred the material was safe to spread on his farm.

They said it was a safe, um, safe material to use on our fields. And again, we were We were doing our civic duty by using it. And, uh, keeping this material off from landfills and what have you. So, yeah, it was great. It was a win win situation for everybody involved. Ultimately, how many times did you end up sludging?

Oh, every year from, from 83 until 04. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is a nightmare beyond nightmares. When the

Nordells purchased their farm, they didn't know the land had been sludged four times by a farmer in the early 90s. They were told that it was their civic, civic duty, um, to help with the societal problem of, of municipal sludge. Um, so, they, uh, they got a bad deal. We got a bad deal. That was not a good idea.

PFAS are completely man made, created from the top secret World War Two nuclear bomb Manhattan project.

After the war, 3M bought the patent to develop these newly discovered chemicals and found they did a remarkable job resisting water stains. 3M created Scotchgard. PFAS made their way into firefighting foam and in our homes, in carpet and couches and under the company DuPont, in our Teflon pans, it's, it's in firefighter gear.

It's in flame retardant clothing. We put babies in, it's in the furniture that we spray the Scotch guards, so we don't stain something. It's in our makeup. It's everywhere. It's in our coffee cups. It's everything. It is pretty catastrophic that a chemical like this has gotten into every aspect of our life.

How many states are impacted by this? All 50. There's millions of acres of farmland that is still being sludged today. Probably tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of farms that are still using sludge. The Environmental Working Group claims at least 20 million acres of American farmland may be contaminated.

Now, according to the CDC, PFAS can be found in the blood of 97 percent of Americans. For I went in for a blood test.

I'm a little nervous, but doctor, what do my test results show? Unfortunately for someone like you who has made such an effort to get PFAS out of your environment, you did test positive. Fortunately, it was only three out of the six. My test results are positive for three out of six tested types of PFAS circulating in my blood.

The results place me above the threshold for concern for adverse effects. You're in a category where you need to be monitored to see if there's any long term impact of this on you. In particular, your cholesterol level, risk for breast cancer, and hypertension and pregnancy. We're not going to be able to stop.

the break in the dam and the flood that is about to come.

We've taken our own hazardous waste and destroyed our land, destroyed our water. And now we're destroying our food chain. How did we get here? They've ripped the heart and soul out of us. I think not only is that possible, I think it's probable that thousands of farms are going to be impacted. Where was the EPA when this was happening?

Why won't it do more now? We went to Washington to ask when we come back.

These documents show what Erin Brockovich calls the shell game. It's moving stuff around, you know, for the end result that makes them more money and leaves destruction in its path. So 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.

What they knew and yet did not tell us. Exactly. Most of this was secret, just kept in chemical industry files. until various lawsuits forced them to disclose it. It starts with animal studies in the 50s and 60s 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. Then, a test on firefighting foam has to be abandoned when the substance leaves all the fish dead. Then PFAS in food packaging, impacting the livers of dogs. And in the 70s, the first indication that PFAS already flowed in the blood of Americans.

So this is really interesting. This is in 1975, the first time that a scientist is alerting 3M, We're in just regular Americans blood. We are finding levels of PFAS. Why might that be? Right, right, exactly. So this was just, you know, unrelated to PFAS research per se. It was just scientists looking at chemicals in human blood found some of these PFAS chemicals and were like, why are these here?

What's going on? And what does that mean? So that means that by 1975 the marketplace is already flooded with P fast to the extent that it could actually show up in an average. Exactly. That just average person is already has P fast in their blood by 1975. In a phone call, a three M chemist pleads ignorance.

Court filings show that three M soon replicates this in their own studies. Then a letter from their lawyers appears to advise the company to conceal the chemical found in human blood was a type of PFAS. Around this time, DuPont warns 3M about toxic effects of PFAS in our food packaging. And by the late 70s into the 80s, documents suggesting 3M and DuPont are becoming aware that their own employees are getting sick.

This one is really, um you know, I think a smoking gun document. So 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. This document is actually a draft press release that their communications team developed in case that became public, right?

So they didn't actually tell The public about this. Then PFAS appears to be in the water. The levels they found back then, you know, would be considered very high today and workers keep getting sick more than two decades after scientists told 3M the blood of Americans contained PFAS. In 1998, 3M finally alerts the EPA that the type of PFAS in their scotch guard builds up in 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 bly eye in 1999. A whistleblower steps forward. A scientist at three M steps down and sends a copy of his resignation letter to the EPA. And 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, but 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 requests. By 2000, 3M agrees to phase out some PFAS in the course of an EPA investigation.

According to the 2019 Minnesota Attorney General Congressional Testimony, at this time, 3M publicly suggests it recently learned PFAS are in human blood, when they'd known since 1975. In 2005 and 2006, The EPA finds DuPont 10. 25 million and 3M 1. 5 million dollars. Then a major headline in 2023, a multi billion dollar federal settlement over PFAS contamination in our nation's tap water making its 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, right? They're rushing now to try to settle things before the full scope of the problem is even understood.

News Nation reached out to 3M and DuPont. 3M said in part, quote, As the science and technology of PFAS, societal and regulatory expectations, and our expectations of ourselves have evolved, so has how we manage PFAS. 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.

In an email, DuPont, which has made acquisitions and divestitures and undergone corporate reorganization and restructuring through the years, said in part, in 2019, DuPont Dana Moore's was established as a new multi industrial system. Specialty Products Company, DuPont Dynamores has never manufactured PFOA's, PFOS or firefighting foam further, though not a PFAS commodity chemical manufacturer DuPont acknowledged using select PFAS compounds within industrial processes pursuant to relevant environmental health and safety rules and standards.

and only as necessary to impart specific product performance criteria. The EPA still allows sludging to take place in all 50 states without PFAS testing requirements. The chemical industries hid the full extent of the problem from EPA until the late 90s. But starting in the late 90s, EPA had all the information and they've done very little.

What could the EPA do today to put a stop to this? The single biggest thing I think EPA could do today would be to require testing for PFAS before putting sludge on farmland. That sounds like a no brainer, given what we know. It should be a no brainer. What do you know? What is the EPA? We've set up a system that isn't doing its job and hasn't done its job for decades.

We thought they were, and it's maddening to wake up and realize, Wow, you've been asleep at the switch the whole time? They had fair warning. This was going to be a problem. And for political reasons, for lobbying reasons, it got slid under the carpet. And now we've got a real problem.

Everybody rolling? Still rolling. In June of 2023, we went to D. C. for an interview with Radhika Fox, then Assistant Administrator for Water at the EPA. The EPA has known that PFAS is potentially hazardous to human health since 1998. Why not take decisive action decades ago? The important thing is we're taking action now.

Now we're taking action. Swift action under the president's leadership. What would you say to Americans who say it's too little too late? I would say I understand your concerns. You know, I'm a mom of two kids and I know that I want to turn on the tap and know that the water that I'm giving my children is safe to drink.

I think every parent wants that and that is what EPA is focused on. We know the biosolid sludge is still spread in 49 out of 50 states currently on some of This is the most valuable farmland. Why is this still happening? Well, bio, land application of biosolids is one of, uh, the critical uses of biosolids from the, the treatment, uh, plants that, that are treating our wastewater.

Um, and in many instances, it's perfectly safe. Um, there have been some certain circumstances where there have been concentrations of PFAS and that's exactly why we are doing these risk assessments right now. Why doesn't the EPA ban sludging until it can guarantee that it's safe? In many instances, it's still safe to utilize biosolids because there isn't a prevalence of PFAS.

What is your message to Americans who feel that they are afraid to eat the food, afraid to farm their land because of PFAS contamination? The EPA cares about you, that we are here to protect you. That we are utilizing every tool in our toolbox to address the very complicated issue of PFAS. And so one of the best things that someone can do is really educate themselves about what's going on in their local community.

Um, I suggest talking to your local water system to see what they're doing. Are they testing for PFAS? Are they treating for it? Should it be incumbent upon the individual to do this, to call their water district to make sure that their water is safe? Or isn't it the EPA's job to guarantee that every time you open the tap, that that water is safe to drink?

So we are, As I said, we're working, uh, very diligently to get this National Drinking Water Standard in place. But 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. Still to come, a farmer who thinks he's found a solution, who is refusing to take his contamination results lying down. You know, people have fight, flight, or freeze. I go straight to fight. Stay with us.

Here you can see he fast tested. A celebration is underway at Misty Brook Farm. After 11 long months of contamination, this milk is finally being sold again. It's Keisha Holmes ears. Ever since I was five, I told my parents I was going to be a farmer when I grew up.

You're my friend, huh? Yes, you are my friend. Daddy, your weakness is cows. Yes. For Brendan and Keisha, honesty and trust is what made them choose this land from the moment they asked the previous owner how to get in to see the place.

I said, hey, is there a key to the house? He's like, key to the house? He's like, I haven't locked that since I built it. I'm like, alright, that's the place I want to live. So everything was on the line in terms of the success of this place. When we moved up here, it was do or die. We were either going to go bankrupt or make it work.

In year one, their farm grossed about 15, 000. By 2021, it grossed 2 million and employed 13. That must have been a good feeling. It's a good feeling. It's a milestone. My goal in life is to leave the piece of land that I am farming in better shape than I got it. And I, like, if I wanted to make money, I wouldn't have gotten into dairy farming.

Maybe I'd have gone and worked for DuPont. But money, I don't care about money. I care about quality and integrity. 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 it came back high, there wasn't hesitation.

They left the decision up to you whether or not to go public with it. Did it cross your mind even for a moment to keep this private and to just not tell anybody? No. You know, people have fight, flight, or freeze. I go straight to fight. And to me, I'm like, okay, I'm not the only one that this has happened to.

And my fight is like, I am going to make this public. I'm going to let any, I'm going to Talk to anybody who wants to listen. Um, the fact that these chemicals were spread on some of the best agricultural land in the state of Maine, um, people need to know that.

Johnny was like, when do we have to stop selling the milk? Brendan said, now. He's like, now, what are we gonna do, daddy? And, uh, Brennan said, well, I don't know, but we'll figure it out.

The first days, weeks, months, um, We called it firefighting. We were, we were definitely in a survival mode. Testing revealed their cows had become contaminated from someone else's sludged farm. The tainted feed for their cows was grown in Kentucky. We are, are not responsible necessarily for how it happened.

What, how the sludge was spread 20 or 30 years ago that that contaminated the soils where, where the feed came from, but we are responsible for how we move forward. We dumped 26, 000 gallons of milk. It's demoralizing. Mothers would call up saying that they would buy like five gallons of our milk to feed their like two year old and was that two year old going to be okay?

You know, like, we pride ourselves on producing milk The mothers can feed their Children and then have them call us up and be like, is my kid going to be okay? They drank your milk and it wasn't anything we knowingly did. Their own family's blood work also tested high for forever. Chemicals. Brendan and Keisha 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. Finally, after 11 months, thousands in loans and testing thousands of gallons dumped, 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 cream separating going on in here. This weighs about 90. They don't have to. They choose to put this sticker on their milk. They want the public to ask questions. Brendan says he knows PFAS contamination has a way of coming back. He worries that another farm's contaminated feed could taint his herd all over again.

Drought's the thing that keeps me up at night because in 2016 we had a severe drought. I had to buy five tractor trail loads of feed from Pennsylvania. I can't verify what soil that feed from Pennsylvania. And I would be rolling the dice.

Fred Stone tried, taking many of these steps. Sometimes the farmer doesn't fail the farm, the farm fails the farmer. The USDA paid him out 65, 000 for the cows he had to kill. So, we're working on getting another lab. Important testing is taking place on his farm that will determine exactly how contaminated his land is and if there is a path forward to his land being a farm again.

Who is next? Yeah, I think a summer calf and then we can do one of these guys and then Cloudy's baby and then the little baby. You know, people pay big money to get their ears pierced, just so you know. You ready for a blood drawing? Yeah, we'll try that. Okay.

And, um, this is the only thing we've ever known. You know, we're not going to give up until we're, you know, until we're, I guess, until we're dead. His results, ahead.

We

can be here for one more year. We'll walk these fields next fall. The feeling in your feet, in the tender winter wheat. Hear the song burn when she calls.

Hope falls with each pass of the blade, Will rise again as bread from the sourdough you made. The lands and furrows of the miller's stone, Who's to say we cannot live on this alone? We can be here, for one more year, for what these Fields next fall. The feeling in your feet. In the tender winter, we hear the songbird when she called

the may flies Rise above the spring fed string. There are ripples on the water that you might never see. How does it feel to look out on this land and to know that so much of it is contaminated? It really hurts. Some of my best, some of my best cropland. I learned how to rake hay on those fields when I was, Jay Tall has been a lot of bloodshed on this, on this farm.

I cast my line on a baited hook As if to capture all the chances that we took Our

disconnection from the value of our land, and our soil, and our water, to destroy it. is in turn to destroy us. We're better than that. And I do believe it will be the farmers. It will be the people. It will be those who have been damaged, which will be a lot of us are going to stand up and we're going to speak up.

As we can be here for one more year We'll walk these fields next fall The feeling in your feet, in the tender winter wheat Hear the songbird when she calls Hear the songbird when she calls