Farmers, more than most other people, are concerned about the quality of our soil and water. We pride ourselves on our stewardship.

So it’s a wonder that we didn’t pick up earlier on the downstream effects of some of our practices. Events in Ohio show us that we need to confront them, now and directly.

Last August, a half-million people in the Toledo area lost drinking water for several days because toxins created by an excess of phosphorus in Lake Erie made it unsafe to drink. Earlier, Grand Lake St. Marys, Ohio’s largest inland lake, had become unsafe for swimmers because of algae blooms that produced toxins vastly exceeding the United Nations’ safety threshold.

Agricultural runoff was a major contributor to the harmful algae in each case, although not the only one. Farmers have to help solve that problem.

In recent years, most farmers have increasingly acknowledged that we are major contributors to nutrient pollution. We were late to the game, in part because farmers were misled by organizations and institutions with a commercial stake in the maximization of yields and the sale and distribution of nutrients.

These groups repeatedly informed farmers that phosphorus had unique bonding characteristics that made it stable in the soil. We now know that is not always the case.

The same special interests are now spreading misinformation about a new federal rule that clarifies Clean Water Act protections for small streams and wetlands. The rule, proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers, protects waters that more than 5.2 million Ohio citizens depend on for drinking water. The rule is good for the people of Ohio, including farmers.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy has identified two guiding principles of the new rule: to preserve the integrity and quality of waters in the United States, while minimizing needless litigation and intrusions on farmers and other landowners. The EPA’s early drafts of the rule and its efforts to describe them have been far from perfect, but I believe Ms. McCarthy is acting in good faith.

The rule affects only waters that were already covered by the Clean Water Act. It acknowledges and reinforces existing exemptions in the law for common farming practices such as plowing, cultivating, seeding, and most agricultural drainage.

It regulates fewer ditches; for the first time, it exempts some stock-watering and irrigation ponds. In fact, the rule applies to fewer waters than were covered during the administrations of six of the previous seven presidents.

The rule’s detractors, trying to further their own political or financial interests, seek to use the EPA as a bogeyman and discredit the usefulness of any agency oversight of water quality on private land. They also discredit farmers who are trying to do the right thing for all Ohioans.

Farmers have a professional stake in the EPA rule, because it will clarify the law and give us certainty without undue encroachment on our operations. But while we are farmers, we are also parents, grandparents, Ohioans, and Americans. We are boaters, fishermen, and consumers of Great Lakes fish.

Ours is more than a commercial interest. We have an emotional and moral stake in passing on waters that are clean and pure to our children and our grandchildren.

One of the greatest experiences of my childhood was visiting my Uncle Jess and Aunt Beulah every summer. They lived on a 40-foot bluff overlooking Lake Erie. There was blue water as far as the eye could see.

I swam in the lake and fished for perch from the pier. Lake Erie seemed to offer up endless supplies for thousands of Friday fish fries in Great Lakes communities.

Then something happened. That treasure of my childhood became nasty and forbidding in the 1960s and 1970s. The quality of Lake Erie improved for a time in the late 1990s, but it now seems headed back in a direction none of us wants to contemplate.

Many Ohio farmers have similar childhood stories about the Great Lakes. I would hate to think that these stories may end for future generations, because we farmers failed to address that part of the responsibility for clean water that is ours.

Joe Logan, a farmer in Kinsman, Ohio, is president of the Ohio Farmers Union.

First Published January 4, 2015, 5:00 a.m.