Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter - Farmers urged to use caution

MANITOWOC — As the weather warms, Manitowoc County Dairy Agent Scott Gunderson said people in the dairy and livestock industry need to be very conscientious of manure handling and spreading.

Four recent manure runoff events — and several wells possibly contaminated with manure runoff — have local agricultural experts, farmers and others scrambling for a way to stop it from happening again.

“We’ve got to get a handle on this,” Gunderson said. “We probably never could afford it, but we certainly can’t afford it now.”

Gunderson said, “I believe the vast majority of farmers are interested in protecting the natural resources. Unfortunately some, for whatever reasons, are not following common sense.”

Gunderson said that common sense means, for example, that you don’t spread liquid manure on frozen slopes. When the snow melts or it rains it will cause runoff.

Adequate manure storage is one of the big tools farmers can use to make sure they are spreading manure when they want to, and not when they have to, Gunderson said.

“If we have adequate winter storage and don’t need to haul, then we dictate when we apply,” he said.

And some areas, with certain geological features, require extra precaution.

“In high bedrock areas we have to be very careful,” he said.

In an ideal world, no problems with manure runoff would ever occur, but this is not an ideal world.

“(Spills) do happen,” he said. “We will never have a time when we have zero runoff events. Mother Nature has a way of throwing curve balls … But I think what we can do is a lot better job on these few instances. That’s where we can do a lot better job of preventing runoff events.”

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