Today, in the third installment of “With Water in Mind,” the Star Tribune editorial page begins a five-day series on the way that farmers are polluting the Mississippi River — and the way federal farm policy rewards them for it.

Today’s editorial:

The outrage is that most farmers would readily change their cultivation practices, reducing erosion and nutrient runoff, if they weren’t tied to traditional crops and production patterns by federal farm subsidies. Congress has created several important conservation programs in the last two decades, but the majority of federal farm subsidies still reward farmers for planting the wrong crops in the largest possible quantities.