“The way things are is not how they have to be.”

A firsthand account from the Rev. Greg Kaufmann, Northwest Synod of Wisconsin, retired pastor and member of the EcoFaith Summit 2025 Planning Team. Excerpted from his Green Blades Preaching Roundtable reflections for Advent 3.

"In 1980, my wife and I purchased a small farm 7 miles to the west of Chippewa Falls in northwestern Wisconsin. Since we planned to set up a sheep milking dairy operation, we had to have our water tested annually. Thankfully, the water table in the Chippewa Falls area was pristine. In fact, Chippewa Falls bottled and sold its water, claiming it was the purest spring water in the country. Every year for 20 years, the results were the same. Pure spring water.

We did set up the sheep dairy, based on rotational grazing. We were organic and sustainable (not the same things!) Due to my wife’s declining health, we ended up selling our dairy business after 20 years. Currently our daughter and her family continue to rotationally  graze livestock on our pastures.

Imagine my surprise when I received a letter from the county a few months ago, informing me (and all residents in the surrounding agricultural area), that our pure spring water was now so contaminated by nitrates that it is unsafe to drink without expensive filters being installed. What had changed? How could this be? What did I not understand?

Their solution to the problem of too many nitrates in our groundwater? The township installed a filtration system at the centrally located fire station and provides to township residents free filtered drinking water! All you have to do is drive there and fill your water jugs…

“The way things are is not how they have to be.” 

To take a page out of our Gospel lesson for Advent 3, it would be like the tax collector telling the person they have overcharged, that they can go to the temple and ask for assistance to help them afford to buy food.

What does repent look like in an agricultural system that has ignored the cries of the earth, and now is ignoring the warning shout of the water table? As I talked with area farmers, we realized that the one thing that has changed is that a massive confinement dairy (1000s of cows) with a gigantic slurry containment pond was developed in the past 25 years. The amount of slurry waste is so great that the farm doesn’t have enough acreage to spread the slurry on. The soil can’t absorb it and it heads straight on down to the water table, which is relatively shallow in our township. Our well is only 100 feet deep.

These Advent 3 texts call me to look closely at my own farming practices, and to challenge the agricultural system that encourages 'get big or get out.'"