Related For 50 years, a single company has extracted millions in profits from one of Minnesota’s most important and ecologically vulnerable regions, the Pineland Sands. The 770-square-mile area in northern Minnesota is home to globally threatened jack pine forests and abundant streams and wetlands. It is also underlain by a critical, shallow and highly vulnerable drinking water aquifer. In its wake, the company has left poisoned rivers and drinking water and clear-cut forests. The company reaping all this devastation isn’t another corporate mining consortium or transnational oil pipeline, but a sprawling potato harvesting and processing empire run by the R.D. Offutt Company (RDO), based in Fargo, North Dakota.