Believe it or not, farmers do not know how much manure is contained in one of those things when they load it up, because there is no correlation between the manufacturer s capacity rating and the working loads that farmers put in it. To make matters worse, it distributes the manure unevenly. Nowak isn t pleading for a next-generation manure spreader. There isn t a quick technical fix, he says. What we re seeking is some flexibility.
Farmers don t farm equal farms.
How we treat them should be proportionate to the risk that where they farm and how they farm contribute to surface water pollution. It s a chemical time bomb Phosphorus build up is global in scale, and Bennett, Carpenter and coauthor Nina Caraco will be expounding on the subject in another paper soon to be published in the journal BioScience. In the Mendota paper, Bennett et al call the excessive phosphorus concentrations in Dane County soil a chemical time bomb. The idea I think is a valid one, if the words are too inflammatory for people. If we re building up the amount of phosphorus in the soil and we know that soil sets the ground rules for the lake, we re setting ourselves up for a backlog of problems that we don t know how to solve.