A Great Lake Gone Bad

The following article written by Dan Egan for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel explains some of the threats to our surface and groundwater as a result of expanding CAFOs in Door County and neighboring counties. 

Manure is a potent fertilizer that does wonders for the crops that feed the cows that give the milk that makes Wisconsin America’s Dairyland.

It’s also making a mess of its waters.

Green Bay receives one-third of Lake Michigan’s nutrient load—due largely to the farm fields that drip phosphorus-rich manure into the streams, creeks and rivers that flow toward the bay.

Samples taken in many of those waterways over the past decade show average summer phosphorus levels twice as high—and sometimes four times as high—as what scientists say is acceptable.

Phosphorus at these levels is the trigger for late-summer algae blooms that smother beaches and, when they die and decompose, burn up so much oxygen that the waters of Green Bay are now plagued with chronic “dead zones”—vast stretches in which almost nothing can live.

Nutrient levels are only one factor in the Green Bay dead zone equation. Weather also plays a big role. Big spring rains in the fields can lead to big summer algae blooms in the bay. Other factors include higher temperatures and wind patterns.

Agriculture is responsible for about 46% of the phosphorus dumped annually into the lower Fox River and Green Bay—more than 250,000 pounds. Pipe-owning sewage treatment plants and industries are responsible for 16% and 21% of the annual phosphorus load, respectively. Most of the remaining comes from storm-water runoff from cities and suburbs lining the lower Fox River.

Changing climate factors aside, underlying all the trouble is the undeniable fact that Green Bay is being burdened with more manure than it can handle, and this is the one piece of the 2 dead zone equation that humans could start to fix tomorrow.

Brown Stuff in Brown County

Bill Hafs, a former county conservationist for the Brown County Land and Water Conservation Department, says a general rule for dairy farming is that each cow needs somewhere between two and three acres of land to live upon.

It’s not a precise figure because climate and soil types vary, but such a patch of land—about the size of three football fields—is basically what is needed to generate enough food to feed a cow and absorb the manure it produces.

Brown County, in the heart of the lower Fox River watershed, is home to some 105,000 cows squeezed onto an ever-shrinking number of agricultural acres. Crop acreage in the suburbanizing county dropped from nearly 230,000 in the 1970s to less than 165,000 today, an average of 1.54 agricultural acres per cow.

Gordon Stevenson, former chief of runoff management for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, notes that each cow can produce 18 times the amount of fecal waste as a human, when it comes to that material’s ability to degrade a water body. This means that Brown County cows alone generate about as much waste as a city of 2 million, roughly the size of Houston.

But none of this cow waste goes through sewage treatment plants.

Instead, much of it is liquified and spread across farm fields to fertilize crops—the cheapest and easiest way to unburden farmers of their lagoons filled with dung.

The problem of shrinking agricultural acres is compounded by the way the land that is left is farmed.

Alfalfa hay is considered an environmentally friendly crop because it acts as an anchor to prevent manure and soil from washing downstream. But the amount of hay production in Brown County has dropped from 86,000 acres in the 1960s to 33,600 in the past decade, according to figures provided by Hafs. At the same time, he notes, the amount of acreage for growing corn—a highly erosive crop—has gone from 49,000 acres in the 1970s to 67,700 acres in recent years.

Hafs, who now works for the Green Bay sewerage district, says the problem comes down to simple math—too much manure, and not enough grass-covered land to spread it upon.

“It’s an increase in livestock on less acres of land, and less land in alfalfa,” Hafs says. “It’s that simple.”

The trend is not toward fewer cows.

The lower Fox River is home to a swelling number of factory farms—a designation for dairies with the equivalent of at least 1,000 “animal units,” a formula for calculating the number of cows in a way that compensates for the smaller impact of calves. These industrial milk plants are referred to by environmental regulators as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs.

The 2012 phosphorus reduction plan required by the Clean Water Act reported there were 15 such operations in the lower Fox River basin. But this is a moving target.

DNR data provided to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in July shows the number of CAFOs 3 operating at least partially in the lower Fox River basin has since grown to 25. Those operations alone are home to 69,392 animal units—enough cows to excrete more waste than all the residents of Milwaukee County.

These giant farms fall to some degree under the purview of the Clean Water Act. The sections of the operations where the cows are concentrated—places like barns—are regulated for pollution discharges.

But once manure is sucked up and pumped out onto croplands, it bureaucratically transforms into largely unregulated “non-point” pollution.

Under the Clean Water Act, lands that receive this manure are required to have nutrient management plans. The stated goal of these plans—which prescribe manure applications based on things like soil composition, field slopes and type of crops—is to “limit or reduce the discharge of nutrients to waters of the state for the purpose of complying with state water quality standards.”

Operators of smaller farms, meanwhile, are encouraged to implement nutrient management plans and safely spread manure, but they are required to do so only if they receive government grants that cover at least a portion of the cost.

Brown County reports that 72% of its agricultural acreage is subject to nutrient management plans. Yet these plans are clearly not doing the job they are supposed to do, given the tremendous loads of phosphorus entering the lower Fox River and Green Bay.

“The standard line you hear is: There is no problem as long as we have nutrient management plans, the water will be protected,” says Stevenson, the former DNR regulator, who now sits on the board of Midwest Environmental Advocates.

Stevenson says the plans may look good on paper, but they are doing a miserable job in protecting the public’s resources.

“No one is looking at the gross volume that the landscape is seeing,” he says. “The landscape is telling us itself what’s going on.”

So are the fish beaching themselves in Green Bay.

This article was adapted by from “A Watershed Moment: Changes in America’s Dairyland Foul the Waters of Green Bay,” by Dan Egan, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It was originally published on Sept. 13, 2014, and is a part of the series, “A Watershed Moment.”

Dan Egan is the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes” and “The Devil’s Element.” He was a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and covered the Great Lakes from 2002-2021. Presently, Egan is the Brico Fund Journalist in Residence at the Center for Water Policy at UWMilwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences. 

See original article here.