The Emergency:
Right now, an invisible chemical threat is poisoning the groundwater across the Upper Midwest. We have officially crossed a tipping point—nitrate contamination from normalized, high-input agricultural practices is threatening the tap water of rural families and fracturing local communities. The finger-pointing has to stop. This is a systems failure, not an individual moral failure by producers.
The Asset:
Building on the launch of our Rethink N campaign video (see here), LSP is partnering with Emmy-winning director Dana Conroy to produce “Groundwater” (working title) a festival-quality, 8-to-12-minute documentary capturing this unfolding clean water emergency from the ground up. Filmed across Minnesota’s vulnerable Southeast Karst and Central Sands regions, the project highlights frontline neighbors navigating immediate health risks alongside the independent farmers proving that conservation actually improves their bottom lines—even as they face intense social isolation and Big Ag pressure for defying generational norms.
The Advocacy Engine (Through 2030):
A turnkey organizing tool built to replace traditional winter workshops with member-led community watch parties, campus town halls, taproom dialogues, and direct legislative caucuses to advance the “Healthy Soil, Clean Water” pillar of the Future Forward Farming 2030 campaign.
Willmar, MN native filmmaker Dana Conroy
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Dana Conroy-Emmy®-Winning Investigative Filmmaker & Director
Dana Conroy is an elite, powerhouse documentarian dedicated to bringing raw, human stories from underserved regions to the global stage. Born, raised and currently residing in rural western Minnesota, Conroy’s deep Midwest roots give her an authentic understanding of the region’s people, landscape, and values. A graduate of Pepperdine University’s film program, she has built an extraordinary career cutting through institutional noise to reveal profound human truths. She has earned a staggering 26 Emmy® Awards alongside a prestigious international Golden Bell Award for her work, cementing her reputation as one of the region’s most decorated and trusted visual storytellers.
The Power of Proof: How Broken Eyes Forced Industry Accountability
Conroy doesn’t just create films to raise awareness—she creates films that force systemic change. Her groundbreaking 2025 debut feature documentary, Broken Eyes, completely altered the public and medical conversation surrounding the multi-billion-dollar elective vision surgery industry.
Breaking the Silence: The film courageously exposed an underground network of thousands of patients permanently harmed by complications, moving the conversation out of hidden message boards and straight onto PBS public television.
Driving Medical Accountability: Broadcast widely and nominated for prestigious accolades, Broken Eyes achieved the ultimate victory for patient safety by shifting how the ophthalmic community approaches informed consent.
Forcing Client Reform: The documentary’s explosive success directly empowered patients to demand higher clinical screening standards, shattering the industry’s “faultless” marketing facade and forcing a cultural shift toward strict clinical transparency.
Critical Acclaim: The investigative masterpiece won the prestigious Upper Midwest Emmy® Award, proving that high-stakes, authentic human narratives possess the power to command institutional respect and shift public policy.
Conroy brings this exact same blueprint of relentless investigative journalism, cinematic excellence, and unyielding focus on structural accountability to the clean water crisis—ensuring this project will not just be watched, but acted upon.
Why This Partnership Matters:
The Filmmaker meets the Movement. A great film can open eyes, but it takes an organized movement to change laws. This project marries Dana Conroy’s Emmy-winning cinematic authority with the Land Stewardship Project’s multi-decade organizing engine.
Authentic Trust Over Parachuted Media: Because Dana is rooted in the Upper Midwest, she builds immediate, handshake trust with local farmers and rural families who rarely see their lives portrayed with true integrity. She captures the raw, unvarnished human truth on camera.
A Strategy for Lasting Impact: LSP ensures this film will never sit on a digital shelf or disappear into a streaming algorithm. We are building a turnkey advocacy engine to deploy this story directly where it matters most: member-led living room watch parties, rural taproom dialogues, campus town halls, and direct legislative caucuses.
Together, we are moving the public conversation past simple farmer-blaming and straight toward structural accountability—shifting the narrative for sustainable agriculture across the entire Midwest corn belt through 2030.
Filmography:
Broken Eyes (2025)
Broadcast widely on PBS stations as well as several film festivals, this powerful investigative feature exposed the hidden side effects of the multi-billion-dollar elective vision surgery industry. The documentary won the Upper Midwest Emmy® Award and forced immediate real-world change by shifting how the ophthalmic community approaches clinical screening and patient informed consent.
Eight Women Together Alone (2024)
This moving historical documentary traces the legacy of the “Willmar 8″—a group of ordinary bank tellers in Willmar, Minnesota, who staged the first bank strike in U.S. history to protest discrimination. Winner of the 2024 Upper Midwest Emmy® Award for Historical Documentary, the film showcases Conroy’s rare ability to navigate complex, high-stakes local politics while preserving the deep human dignity of the rural neighbors involved
Built with Love (2023)
Shot along the rugged coast of Norway, this acclaimed film follows the last remaining craftsmen preserving the ancient art of traditional wooden boat building. The documentary masterfully intertwines the preservation of a dying trade with a deeply personal ancestral migration story, highlighting Conroy’s unique gift for gaining the trust of fiercely private working people to capture their honest lives on camera.
How You Can Get Involved
We are not looking for passive viewers. We are building a coalition.
This project is intentionally designed as a collaborative, multi-state effort to shift the narrative around sustainable agriculture. We want our closest allies to have a direct hand in shaping its impact from day one. Here is how you can help lay the groundwork:
Connect Us with Frontline Voices: We want to ensure we are capturing the right regional stories. If you know trusted independent farmers or rural neighbors in your networks who can speak bluntly on camera about the real social costs, community peer pressure, and structural barriers to challenging the high-input status quo, introduce us.
Align Your Organization as a Project Ally: If your organization tracks agricultural conservation, watershed health, or rural community development, let’s explore a collaborative partnership. We want to ensure this film serves your strategic advocacy and narrative goals through 2030, offering your network early access and tailored screening tools. Explore an alliance.
Help Scale the Vision: While the initial short pilot launches production this winter, we are actively looking for long-term visionaries to help expand this infrastructure into a definitive, 90-minute regional feature covering the full Mississippi River Basin. If you share this vision for systemic change, let’s start a conversation. Connect about the vision.
