Manure Runoff

From the Milw Journal Sentinel HERE

...The largest farms in Wisconsin today, referred to as concentrated animal feeding operations in regulatory parlance, each produce as much organic waste as a city of 18,000, but this stuff typically isn't sent to treatment facilities. It is mixed with water to form a chocolate shakelike concoction that is sprayed or injected into farm fields.

This accomplishes two things: It provides an easy-to-apply crop fertilizer; and it gets rid of the feces that piles up so quickly.

Yet spreading liquid manure is a potentially big environmental and public health issue in places such as eastern Manitowoc County, where the clay-rich soil is slow to drain. To keep those croplands from turning into oversized puddles in big rains or snowmelts, fields have been laced with underground plumbing, called drain tiles. Those pipes carry excess water to the field's edge, where it spills into ditches or creeks.

..."Small farms, large farms, they're all basically converting to liquid manure, and it seems to have increased the frequency of fish kills," Hogler says. "It really started in the early to mid '90s."

Tooley says he is baffled state regulators aren't doing more to figure out what kind of mess they might have on their hands.

"Nobody wants to touch it," he says. "We're America's Dairyland."