While scientists and some politicians crank up the pressure on agriculture to stop the flow of algae “nutrients” into the rivers, farmers are going to school and planting “cover crops” to keep the fertilizer down on the farm.
Just ask hundreds of farmers who went to class in Fulton County on Friday to get certified on how to properly apply fertilizer to their fields.
Or ask Darrell Witty of Jerusalem Township who’s already practicing nonrunoff fertilizer techniques and also is one of nearly 500 farmers in northwest Ohio who’ve applied for a piece of $3 million in federal grants to plant cover crops. The idea is that a cover crop stabilizes the soil and soaks up some of the leftover phosphorus contained in fertilizer, causing less of it to get into waterways.
He plans to seed the soil with rye in about three weeks. And while he knows that a cover crop will be good for his soil, he doesn’t believe there’s much phosphorus left to soak up.
“I’m not losing phosphorus into the creeks. Very, very, very little. That’s the idea of the program. But cover crops are very beneficial for other reasons. It controls the weed growth for the next year and it is very, very good for the soil structure. The roots can go down 5 feet and that helps your capillary action,” Mr. Witty said.
He has installed new drainage in fields to lower the water table.
A retired refinery worker, Mr. Witty tends 600 acres in eastern Lucas County.
He injects fertilizer directly into the soil rather than broadcasting it onto the surface. He frequently pumps up water from the drainage tiles 2 to 4 feet below the surface of the soil to check whether fertilizer and sediment are washing away.
“Your larger farmers use much better management practices, or they would go out of business,” Mr. Witty said.
Farmers like Mr. Witty contend they’re doing their share for the environment.
“The farmers have been stepping it up for years,” he said.
Like many farmers, he blames outmoded sewage systems that line the Maumee River, the biggest one being the city of Toledo, for the nutrients that are feeding the harmful algae blooms in Lake Erie.
“I feel it’s time for government to step up and straighten out the sewage situation,” Mr. Witty said. Most cities are already deep into court-ordered programs to end the sewer overflows. Toledo is two-thirds of the way through a $521 million upgrade of its sewers and wastewater treatment plant.
Just the beginning
With farmers, the cover-crop and fertilizer school pushes are seen as just a start.
A bill enacted by the Ohio General Assembly and signed by Gov. John Kasich in June mandated training classes for many farmers and the establishment of a certification in fertilizer application.
The law requires farms of 50 or more acres to get the certification by 2017.
The class taught Friday in Archbold by the Ohio State University Extension Office was the first, and will be followed up with two more classes, in Findlay and Paulding, over the coming weeks.
With more than 14,000 farms located just in the Maumee River Watershed, the classes being conducted so far amount to little more than a drop in the bucket.
Policy wonks, environmentalists, public water providers, and scientists have been increasingly concerned about the threat of large harmful algae blooms in Lake Erie.
The water crisis that prompted a “do not drink” advisory from the city of Toledo Aug. 2-4 burst like a bombshell on the public’s consciousness.
An upset Toledo Mayor D. Michael Collins compared its impact to the terrorist attacks on New York of Sept. 11, 2001.
“While we didn’t have a terrorist attack, we had an environmental attack,” he said.
The water crisis has generated an outpouring of public interest and even generated some ideas that may not have any application, but they were interesting anyway.
At a Toledo Rotary Club panel discussion, Kevin Spitler, owner of the Toledo Hemp Center, said industrial hemp should be adopted as a crop by area farmers. The plant, while useful in making many products, is banned in the United States because of its close relationship with marijuana, and industrial hemp is imported from Canada. However, Mr. Spitler said hemp grows in the summer, and won’t serve as a cover crop.
Much of the emphasis since Toledo’s water crisis has focused on phosphorus and nitrogen coming off crop fields and livestock farms and ending up in Lake Erie. The phosphorus feeds cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, which makes the toxin microcystin. City water tests found microcystin at concentrations of greater than 1 part per billion in the tap water on Aug. 1.
Democrats claimed Senate Bill 150, the fertilizer applicator certification bill, was a cave-in to agricultural interests at the expense of safe drinking water.
“I haven’t heard anybody say it was a strong bill,” said state Sen. Randy Gardner (R., Bowling Green). He noted the bill passed unanimously in both chambers.
Mr. Gardner got $3.5 million inserted in the state budget in 2012 to fund the Healthy Lake Erie initiative, which he said likened to a “Marshall Plan” — like the one that rebuilt Europe after World War II.
As weak as it might be, however, it still pushes Ohio forward in the direction of getting a firm grip on the loss of fertilizer nutrients into the water systems. And it’s the first mandatory certification law of its kind in the country.
Teeth in law
Larry Antosch, a policy analyst for the Ohio Farm Bureau, said the certification requirement has some extra teeth.
“If an individual is found to be not applying in a proper manner the [Ohio] Department of Agriculture can suspend that certification. So there’s a process in place if someone was not applying properly,” said Mr. Antosch.
The program trains farmers and professional fertilizer suppliers and applicators to follow the “tri-state fertility guide” involving Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. That guide recommends amounts of nutrients — fertilizers — for corn, soybeans, wheat, and alfalfa.
He said the training covers all forms of crop nutrients, including commercial fertilizer, compost, biosolids, and manure.
One problem cited with the law is that it doesn’t take full effect until 2017.
But Friday, the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation said it will spend $1 million to help farmers in the western Lake Erie basin obtain fertilizer certification by April 22, which is Earth Day. That would bring farmers into compliance 29 months ahead of the state deadline.
Mr. Gardner also said he plans to advocate to make the law effective in 2015 when he returns to Columbus this fall.
“I do believe the 3-year time frame was unnecessary. Have that training and implementation in place this winter so that when we’re applying fertilizer next spring, anyone who does so in a critical natural resource area is doing it in 2015 rather than waiting until 2017,” he said.
He’s also going to advocate for the ban on applying manure and fertilizer to frozen ground to be adopted.
Two Toledo Democrats are already trying to make that happen — state Rep. Mike Sheehy of Oregon and Sen. Edna Brown. But being in the minority, they don’t have the leverage Mr. Gardner has.
Mr. Gardner is advocating for an official designation of “critical natural resource area” for the area that drains into the western basin of Lake Erie. That would make farmers, property owners, counties, and municipalities subject to more stringent measures by the Department of Natural Resources.
It could allow the DNR to limit applying fertilizer and manure on frozen ground.
That’s already been done in the state once. In 2011, after repeated algae blooms poisoned Grand Lake St. Marys in central Ohio and killed the fish, the DNR labeled the lake a distressed watershed.
The DNR banned manure spreading from Dec. 15 to March 1 and required every farm with livestock to have a covered facility big enough to store 120 days’ worth of manure. The designation applies to 50,000 acres in Mercer and Auglaize counties.
“We’ve now got 155 farmers in the watershed applying the manure within those restrictions, and they have all developed comprehensive nutrient management plans for their farms,” said Mike Bailey, chief of the state’s Division of Soil and Water Resources.
He said much of the success of the reduction in manure-tinged runoff can be attributed to the $10 million to $12 million provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service to help farmers build those storage facilities.
Mr. Bailey didn’t rule out declaring the Maumee River drainage area a distressed watershed.
“The governor’s asked his directors to come up with a long-term approach,” he said. “All options continue to remain on the table.”
Despite Mr. Witty’s skepticism of cover crops for collecting errant phosphorus, Lucas County Farm Bureau board President Bill Myers thinks it does just that.
“Having a cover crop is extremely beneficial. The cover crop will tie up the nutrients in the roots and will continue to grow in the middle of winter,” Mr. Myers of Oregon said.
State Conservationist Terry Cosby, who runs the program distributing cover-crop grants, predicts many farmers will plant winter cover even without grants.
He said it could make a difference. He said typical fertilizer application is 80 pounds per acre, and that about one pound is lost to run-off. With a cover crop, 20 percent to 50 percent of that one pound might be absorbed by the crop.
“I think people are going to be overwhelmed with the amount of cover crop that’s going into that area,” Mr. Cosby said. “The government’s not paying for all of this. A lot of folks are doing it on their own.”
Contact Tom Troy: tomtroy@theblade.com or 419-724-6058 or on Twitter @TomFTroy.
First Published September 14, 2014, 4:00 a.m.
