- [Ward] Coming up on "Great Lakes Now," fascinating finds on Great Lakes beaches.

- To me, it's kind of a modern day treasure hunt.

You never know what you're gonna end up with at the end of the day.

- [Ward] The challenge of bringing water to the Niagara region's fruit crops.

- It takes six of us two full days, filling trailers, unloading trailers, connecting pipe.

- The future generation will be upset at us if we don't get water to our farms here in Niagara.

- [Ward] And news from around the Great Lakes.

(uplifting music) (air whooshes) - [Announcer] This program is brought to you by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at DPTV, Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation, and contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(air whooshes) - Hi, I'm Ward Detwiler.

Welcome to "Great Lakes Now."

When you head to a Great Lakes beach, you might be eager to experience the sand and the waves, but for some folks, the fun lies in the rocks, fossils, and other items they can find along the shoreline.

(air whooshes) We brought two such beachcombers to Leland, Michigan to find out what it's all about.

(air whooshes) - We're at the end of Reynolds Road, which is right next to Van's Beach.

This is where they find the Leland Blue.

- See my hunt, Chris, actually starts up here.

(rhythmic drum beat) - [Ward] Artist Geo Rutherford and self-described rockhound Chris Cooper both have a profound love for the Great Lakes, and both are scanning the beach in search of a treasure, but they're hunting for different things.

(upbeat music) - The water's actually pretty nice.

So here's a Petoskey stone there.

- [Geo] I thought this was called charlevoix?

- [Chris] Well, yes, that's the... Like the Petoskey stone is the hexagonaria.

Charlevoix stone is the favosites.

- [Ward] Cooper is looking for rocks and fossils.

- [Chris] In Michigan, you're only allowed to collect on state land 25 pounds of rock per year.

- [Ward] While Rutherford is seeking bits of plastic.

- When I go to state parks or I go to public land, like, I don't collect a lot of rocks, but I collect plastic just to kind of get a picture of how much is ending up on Great Lakes beaches.

- [Ward] They've come to a place called Van's Beach on the Lake Michigan shoreline just south of Leland, Michigan.

- Look at all the people on the beach.

- It's been so cold.

I'm not surprised that people are out here.

- [Ward] Cooper grew up in Northern Michigan, spent a few summers with some friends living on a boat and sailing throughout the Great Lakes.

He has a real love for and knowledge about rocks and what they can tell us about our past.

- Petoskey stone is a Devonian period coral that grew.

I think it's about 360 million years old, back when all of the water was salt water, and we were located more down towards the equator.

This is a stomatopoid, and you can see the layering of the bands in there.

It's like a fossilized algae.

And this is cladopora.

- Is that one with nice dry, like different sections.

- It's a type of a favosite.

It's another species of this.

And this came from up by Marquette, and this is called Jacobsville sandstone.

So the glaciers brought it all the way down here.

So this is kind of an interesting piece 'cause it has...

I don't see a whole lot of it that has the banding in it like that.

- [Ward] There's lots to find here on Van's Beach, but when rockhounds come here, they're searching for one thing, the highly coveted Leland Blue.

- [Geo] Is that Leland Blue?

I think that might be the thing he said what looks like Leland Blue, but it's not.

- Leland is everybody's favorite.

You know, everybody loves coming to Leland, look for the blue stone.

- [Ward] Leland Blue is actually manmade.

It's the leftover slag glass from an old iron foundry that operated in Leland in the 1800s.

- [Geo] I grabbed this because I thought it was an interesting contrast.

Is it coal?

- So they might have used that in the smelters to smelt down the iron.

- [Ward] These days, the bright blue glass is used to make jewelry.

- So this is something that I made, sprinkler zone, cut a circle of plexiglass.

You look right down in the water, and it cuts the glare.

- [Ward] Cooper uses a homemade bucket with a plexiglass bottom to spot some real beauties on the lake bed.

- [Chris] It's just poking through.

- It's a big one?

- Yeah.

- Look at that one.

(laughs) - [Geo] (gasps) Wow, that is a big one.

It looks like an egg.

- [Chris] That's a beautiful blue.

- [Ward] And whenever he hits the beach, Cooper always runs into people hoping to find a Leland Blue.

- Oh my God.

- Oh, beautiful.

- Nice fossil too.

- [Ward] 10 Years ago, Cooper's passion for rock collecting led him to create a Facebook group that now has nearly a quarter million members.

- I started Great Lakes Rocks & Minerals about 11 years ago and it started off slow, you know, and it was a group where people could come, get their rocks and minerals identified, and now we have 240,000 members, you know, all around the Great Lakes.

- Look at that one!

Tell me that's Leland Blue.

- Sure is.

- Yeah!

- There you go.

- [Geo] Oh, there you go.

- [Ward] While Rutherford appreciates the beauty of the rocks found scattered on the beaches, she is primarily focused on collecting plastic.

- Where that like debris line is, that's where the plastic is.

- Right.

- And so I find myself, when I do the beach hunt, I go down on the rock and then back along that line, and that's where I hunt through to find plastic.

- [Chris] Okay.

- [Ward] While most would view plastic on the beach as trash, Rutherford creates art with the bits and pieces she finds.

- It's kind of like you do your beach hunting in different steps.

Depends on the beach.

Some of them are obviously much richer in their plastic content.

This one's really clean.

I'm really impressed.

I've only found a few like little microplastics.

This is really common.

I didn't know what this was for a long time, the shotgun wad.

- Shotgun, yep.

- [Ward] Along with bits of plastic, Rutherford finds all sorts of odd objects such as Barbie doll heads or plastic Army men along with sand, and then uses all of it to create a unique work of art with test tubes.

The tubes are assembled in the form of what she calls a book, and each tube can be studied to learn about the unique qualities of a particular beach in the Great Lakes.

(relaxed music) - [Chris] So on there, you have curl up and squirm.

(Geo laughs) It's a monarch wing.

- This one's really fun.

So see, it gives you an instruction.

- Turn the page.

Oh, okay.

So as you turn it, it shows shells, glitter, all of the different things that you find on the beach.

- Some nurdles.

- And as you turn it, everything's different every time you turn it.

- I think this is kind of an interesting tube that kind of connects it to a traditional book and one that you take pages and you turn them.

It kind of gets you back to that- - Right, as I'm turning it, I can literally be like, wow, I'm at the beach, and like these are all the little finds.

- Yeah, that's kind of a fun part of it.

Yes, hello.

- [Ward] Rutherford is also popular on TikTok with more than one million regular viewers who tune in to watch her short cleverly produced videos about the Great Lakes.

- We got over a million views.

(relaxed music) I mean, I feel like what's interesting about connecting with Chris is that we're both interested in the same thing even though it's different.

It's fun to talk to somebody who is so familiar with the rocks that litter the shoreline.

And then on my side, I think it's interesting to know that someone loves Great Lakes trash.

(laughs) - Yes, and it's all about being out in the outdoors, doing what you love and meeting interesting people.

And you know, I collect trash at the beach just to clean the environment, you know, and somebody takes the trash and turns it into art, a book, you know, I can appreciate that.

- [Ward] The exact number of rockhounds across the Great Lakes is unknown, but it's safe to say there are thousands.

They flock to Lake Superior for colorful sodalite-rich syenite or yooperlite stones that glow when hit with ultraviolet light.

There's quartz around Lake Huron, sandstone at Lake Erie, granite and limestone at Lake Ontario.

- [Chris] You find the better stuff out the deeper you go.

- [Ward] Chris Cooper will tell you that some of the best treasures are found deep underwater.

He recently dove into the chilly waters of Lake Superior off Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula and spent two hours extricating a beautiful agate stone bigger than his fist.

(chill music) - So here's one of those zones.

You can see the beach rock has gone out.

So this is where the waves have come together, and the tide, the rip tide, has removed all the sand off of the rocks.

So this would be a good area to look.

- [Ward] But here in Leland it's all about the Leland Blue.

- [Rockhounder] Is this one?

I just grabbed it in the water.

- [Chris] Sure is.

Nice job.

(laughs) - Yeah, thank you.

It was your positive vibe.

- All right.

Good for you.

- That's the biggest one I've ever got.

- There you go.

To me, it's kind of a modern day treasure hunt.

You never know what you're gonna end up with at the end of the day or even when you get home.

Sometimes it takes it polishing it on your equipment to review the beauty of it.

(air whooshes) - For more about the rocks, fossils, and interesting trash you can find on the beach, or to get a link to Chris's Facebook group or Geo's TikTok videos, visit greatlakesnow.org.

As you know, the Great Lakes region enjoys an abundance of fresh water, but some farmers in Ontario's Niagara region can't get enough to their crops.

Field reporter Jeyan Jeganathan of TVO brings us the story.

(air whooshes) - [Jeyan] Every June for the last 21 years, a group of farmers in the township of Lincoln and the Niagara region have taken the issue of water scarcity into their own hands.

Adapting to climate change in extreme weather like droughts means farmers like David Hipple have had to develop creative solutions like laying large aluminum pipes all the way from Lake Ontario to his farm, roughly four kilometers south.

And so this would be one of the smaller ones?

- Yeah, usually this is probably from one that is to line up with the connections.

We have a mix of 40 foot and 30 foot lengths.

I think there's three or 400 of them that we have to connect together.

Okay!

- [Jeyan] That means feeding pipes through culverts and vegetation and under railroad tracks and even a six lane highway.

- It takes six of us two full days between driving trailers around, filling trailers, unloading trailers, connecting pipe.

- [Jeyan] And at the end of the season, David and his team have to repeat the process in reverse, packing up the pipes so they don't burst from the looming cold winter weather.

It's labor intensive work during an especially busy time for farmers like Hipple - Yeah, go in the ditch more.

- [Jeyan] Who has roughly 140 acres of land to cultivate.

He's an eighth generation farmer, and the plot of land has been with the family since the early 1800s.

Back then, it was a self-sustaining farm full of livestock, fruits, and vegetables.

Today, the farm acreage is dedicated to tender fruit and grapes.

- We have peaches and nectarines and apricots and yellow plums and blue plums and sweet cherries and sour cherries and pears, and we have table grapes and wine grapes.

- [Jeyan] The farm is also fitted with a giant pond stretching two acres across, 12 feet deep, and holds about 5 million gallons of water.

It's the main source of water for the farm's drip irrigation system, but that's not enough as.

- Usually fill it up, hopefully in the winter.

And once that storage was gone, we were done irrigating for the season.

Didn't matter if that was June or September.

There's years it's been both.

We've realized we were only doing 50% of what we had because we didn't have the water.

- [Jeyan] In prime growing season, Hipple estimates he would need about four gallons of water per tree per day.

And with about two to 300 trees an acre, you don't have to be good at math to know that adds up quickly.

And for a region that's known for growing tender fruit and grapes, it's a problem many farmers must contend with.

Sarah Marshall is the manager of Ontario Tender Fruit Growers.

- Most tender fruit in in Canada is grown here.

95% in Ontario is in the Niagara region.

- [Jeyan] Water is an important part of the equation in farming.

The one variable and one that's getting harder and harder to predict is weather.

Drought-like conditions, heat waves, prolonged rains, and early frost can do serious damage to a farmer's crops.

- Well, we certainly demonstrated the impact of drought in 2016.

That was a drought year.

Basically it reduced the crop size by about 25%, but it also decreased the crop value by about 30%.

- [Jeyan] What many consumers may not know is tender fruit in Canada is federally regulated and must be a certain size before it can hit store shelves.

Peaches, for example, need to be two and 1/8 of an inch across before they can be marketed.

- So if you don't have irrigation, you don't make that size, that fruit becomes lost.

So that's food waste, lost revenue.

We calculated out the difference and value.

Gross value to the crop in that drought year was about 15 million.

- [Jeyan] The irony of it all is the Niagara region is surrounded by fresh water, Lake Ontario to the north, the Welland Canal and Niagara River to the east, and Lake Erie to the south.

There are 12 municipalities within the Niagara region and their governments are well aware of the issue.

Erwin Wiens is deputy lord mayor and councillor for the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake.

- What's frustrating for the farmers is they see all the water around us, the envy of the world right here with all the water, and we're not getting it to our trees.

- [Jeyan[ Sandra Easton is mayor of the town of Lincoln on the region's Lake Ontario shoreline.

- When you're working with a system that you're going to need for an entire season and it requires assembly as though it were building blocks, there's something absolutely impractical about that.

- [Jeyan] For nearly two decades, farmers and local politicians have been pushing for a permanent irrigation network that would connect farmers to a consistent source of water.

The plan is finally gaining momentum.

- This is infrastructure.

This is pipes in the ground.

It may not be your traditional definition of pipes in the ground, but it's pipes in the ground.

- The future generation will be upset at us if we don't get water to our farms here in Niagara.

We're supposed to feed the nation, and we're happy to do that, but we need the tools to get us to that point.

- [Jeyan] The current proposal is to create a region-wide system, which farmers, both small and large scale, could buy into and take water.

It would see a grid of buried pipes delivering water to Lincoln and St. Catherine's.

Installing an irrigation system of such scale will require a lot of money, and details about how the water will get to farmers still needs to be hammered out.

- You know, if you're coming from the lake, then you're gonna need pumps because of the elevation.

Ideally, if we could do it using gravity, gravity fed systems from the escarpment, that would be probably the least expensive and the less energy required.

- [Jeyan] You don't have to travel far to see an example of a fully functional irrigation system.

Parts of Niagara-on-the-Lake currently use an open ditch system.

Brett Ruck was the town's irrigation and drainage superintendent when he gave us a tour.

- So right now we're in the village of Queenstown.

We're right down by the Niagara River, which is, you know, very close to Lake Ontario, which is just down at the mouth there.

The two pumps, 6,500 gallons a minute, would go through these.

One really offsets the other, so I don't run pumps, you know, 24/7.

- [Jeyan] The system consists of pumps that push water to supply channels that then flow into a series of drainage ditches that farmers can then tap into.

- So we draw out of the Niagara River here beside us, and about 25 feet off, there's intake structure that's down below, about it sits about 25 feet below the water here, and it draws water up through the two pumps that we have on the inside here.

- [Jeyan] The town has similar pump houses across the municipality.

In its simplicity, the system works well, but it does have its challenges.

For one, the system doesn't reach all of Niagara-on-the-Lake's farmers.

And secondly, the cost to use the system can be difficult for small scale farmers to absorb.

There is also the issue of regular maintenance of the ditches.

One of the biggest problems has been the invasive phragmites, a dense, fast growing perennial grass.

- What phragmites does in a channel, what would have to happen in a standard one meter wide channel, they said to get the same volume of water through a one meter channel, the channel would've to be 10 times as wide.

So, you can tell when you have a kilometer of phragmites, and it's so aggressive that it's choking out the systems.

- [Jeyan] Regular maintenance is something Hipple knows all too well with his system in Lincoln.

- There's always the unexpected.

Either, you know, a pipe wears out and it bursts, you gotta pull it out and replace it, or someone, you know, has some fun throwing rocks at a pipe and it bursts, or car accident drives in the ditch and bursts the pipe.

- [Jeyan] When it comes to a regional irrigation network, the hope is to get shovels in the ground in a couple of years.

The system will have its challenges and deal with barriers like highways, railroads, the unique topography of Niagara and support from all levels of government, and such an undertaking that's permanent, affordable, and reliable will need to happen soon.

- I don't think we've got a whole lot of time to fool around.

If we continue to have major droughts and we don't have water to support our farmland, then there just isn't going to be food in the future.

It's going to be so costly that it's going to be even more of a hardship than it is now.

(air whooshes) - For more about agriculture in the Great Lakes region, visit greatlakesnow.org.

And now it's time for The Catch where we bring you new stories and events from around the Great Lakes.

(air whooshes) - [Anchor] In May, the Supreme Court made a decision with some big implications for the Clean Water Act, specifically the regulation of wetlands.

Zaria Johnson, a reporter and producer for Ideastream Public Media in Cleveland, has been covering the story.

(air whooshes) - As it stands now, the Supreme Court is only allowing regulation of wetlands that have a continuous surface connection to a larger body of water.

That could be a stream, a river, or a lake, and the EPA has some time to come back with their own formal definition, that more specified definition of protected waters, and they're expected to drop that new definition.

Sometime in early September.

- [Anchor] And this might seem like a small change, but it's having a big impact.

- Wetlands, regardless of size or a connection to a larger body of water, really help to filter out some of those negative, bad things that end up in our water like fertilizers, pesticides, storm water runoff, things like that.

The wetlands are essential to the watershed in that way that they filter out that bad stuff before it enters those larger bodies of water.

So the story's really diving into how the decision might affect wetlands in Ohio and how Ohio might need to shift its regulatory practices in order to pick up the slack from the federal government.

- [Anchor] The decision caused concern among environmental advocacy organizations.

How much concern?

Well, that depends on the strength of state level wetland protections, which vary considerably from one state to another.

- It kind of seems like Ohio might be better off than some other states since Ohio has an isolated wetlands program that's pretty expansive.

In Ohio, the Isolated Wetlands Program will regulate any wetland regardless of size, even if it's not being regulated federally due to this new definition of protected waters.

- [Anchor] Another concern is that state regulatory agencies might not have the resources of the federal EPA.

- It'll be interesting to see kind of how the Isolated Wetlands Program is able to handle that load and able to sort of shift its workforce to take all that on.

And I think it'll also be interesting to see how those environmental organizations are gonna feel in Ohio about the Isolated Wetlands Program and their ability to handle this, if they're gonna feel that that's enough, or if they're gonna still have concerns that that program isn't doing enough to pick up the slack and maintain that water quality.

(air whooshes) - [Anchor] Algal blooms are a serious concern in the Great Lakes and elsewhere.

Lester Graham of the Environment Report at Michigan Radio explains the cause of algal blooms and the dangers they pose.

- Well, it's often called blue green algae or harmful algal blooms, but they're not really algae.

It's a bacteria, cyanobacteria.

And when this stuff blooms as it deteriorates or rises to the top, it can sometimes pop and release toxins.

Even though there's 20 years of research, we still don't know a lot about this.

We're finding out there are several strains of these harmful algal blooms that have varying degrees of toxicity.

- [Anchor] The scope and location of the algal blooms varies, but the biggest one is in Lake Erie.

- The forecast each year tries to estimate how big the blooms will be, how extensive, how many miles, square miles they'll cover.

This year, their rating this at a 3.6, which is much lower than usual.

It's less than average I should say, but there have been some that reach number 10, which is a really big area of algal blooms across the western basin of Lake Erie.

I went out with some researchers who regularly sample the western basin of Lake Erie to see if there's any algal growth and see if there's any problems.

And we were out during one of these routine trips around a large part of the western basin, and they found blooms this year very early, much earlier than they usually do.

- [Anchor] The blooms are dangerous to humans and animals, and the toxins can become airborne.

- We're also seeing it being aerosolized, and inhalation can be much more damaging to you than just ingesting water.

For fishing charter boats and for people who are out there in the lake enjoying it, whether they're tubing or skiing or whatever, if you see this stuff and it looks like what's been described, you know, green paint on the water, avoid it.

Just don't play around with it because it is very serious.

- [Anchor] Researchers who studied the algal blooms are trying to determine how weather affects their growth.

- It's really difficult to say exactly what climate change might do.

We do know it's causing these much more intense rains, which flushes the nutrients into the western basin of Lake Erie, and we're seeing warmer days, which cause this algal bloom, this harmful algal bloom to grow.

So between warmer days over time and a lot more of these intense rains, it's gonna get worse unless we do something about decreasing the amount of fertilizers and other nutrients that are getting into the water.

- [Anchor] As part of the ongoing series "Refresh," the Great Lakes News Collaborative has been investigating water pollution issues in the Great Lakes through examining the 1972 Clean Water Act and related legislation that's been created since then.

As part of this project, "Great Lakes Now" student journalist, Jada Vasser, recently took a look at the lasting impacts of the Great Lakes Critical Programs Act of 1990.

- Having the Great Lakes critical act for the people that live in the Great Lake states is super important because now we can use these lakes for numerous things.

- [Anchor] Things like fishing, recreation, and more.

The legislation directed Great Lake states to adopt policies and procedures to create and enforce water quality standards.

- We didn't really have specific things that we needed to regulate on besides, hey, you can't really dump heavy things into the water.

- [Anchor] The act was put into place using some of the same principles outlined in the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1978, which required involvement by both the US and Canada.

When the act was passed by the Senate on October 18th, 1990, it also forced the Great Lakes National Program Office to perform specific tasks including identifying and remediating areas where hazardous spills occurred.

And while the legislation has had positive implications for the health of the Great Lakes, Jada says there's still work to be done around new contaminants like the forever chemicals known as PFAS.

- Since the Clean Water Act was made 50 years ago, the problems that we're seeing now weren't being seen 50 years ago.

It's kind of bringing up new issues that needs to now be immediate.

(air whooshes) - Thanks for watching.

For more on these stories and the Great Lakes in general, visit greatlakesnow.org.

When you get there, you can follow us on social media or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates about our work.

See you out on the Lakes.

(upbeat music) (air whooshes) - [Announcer] This program is brought to you by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at DPTV, Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation, and contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle etheric music)