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.

While Green Bay holds a mere 1.4% of Lake Michigan's water, it receives one-third of the lake'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 4 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. Most phosphorus that makes its way into the bay from farm fields is unleashed in spring, when there is not ample crop cover to absorb and anchor the manure that farmers have spread as a cheap source of fertilizer. Big spring rains in the fields can lead to big summer algae blooms in the bay.

Higher temperatures are another factor. They affect the size and severity of dead zones, both by increasing algae growth and by lengthening the number of days each summer that water separates into a warm upper zone and a frigid lower zone. The longer the water stays separated, the longer the lower layer must go without being replenished with atmospheric oxygen, and the more likely fish-choking dead zones are to emerge.

Wind patterns also play a role. If it's calm for a prolonged period in mid- and late-summer, that provides petri dish conditions to incubate the oxygen-burning algae blooms.

Experts say all of these elements appear to be coming together more often in recent years.

"The conditions out there are more favorable to have higher algae blooms," explains Dale Robertson, a research hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. "That's partially due to warmer temperatures. It's partially due to wind loads. It's partially due to a lot of things."

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 dead zone equation that humans could start to fix tomorrow.

A pollution pie chart

In 2002, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources formally declared the lower portion of Green Bay and the heavily industrialized Fox River that flows into it as "impaired" under the Clean Water Act.

The impairment designation required government regulators to craft a plan to reduce flows of the offending pollutants — in this case phosphorus and the dirt known in regulatory speak as "total suspended solids" — into the lower Fox River. The primary source for both pollutants is erosion from farmlands.

It took a decade, but state and federal regulators came out with that plan in 2012. It is essentially a fertilizer diet designed to restore some semblance of ecological balance to the bay and the lower Fox River, defined as the 39-mile stretch between Lake Winnebago and Green Bay.

The hope is that this will not only alleviate dead zones but could someday lead to the re-opening of swimming beaches within a reasonable drive — or even bike ride — from downtown Green Bay, something that hasn't been available to area residents for decades.

This is not an unreasonable goal for a city of 105,000. Kids in the Bronx can swim at neighborhood beaches.

The plan demands a lot of money from a lot of phosphorus-discharging industries and cities — but not agriculture, even though dairy farming is, by far, the largest single source of the watershed's phosphorus problem.

Contaminants that run off farm fields are designated by regulators as "non-point" pollution, which Congress essentially exempted from provisions of the 1972 Clean Water Act.

Congress instead went after pipe-owning or "point source" polluters. As a result, cities and industries along the lower Fox River have already spent more than $250 million on pollution controls in recent decades that have greatly reduced discharges of phosphorus and other pollutants. Now, because of the impaired waters listing, these point source polluters are facing a new wave of expensive pollution control upgrades that may do little to keep Green Bay's fish from suffocating in their own water.

The problem is the law — the law of diminishing returns.

Consider the Green Bay Metropolitan Sewerage District.

The district, now known as NEW Water, serves about 220,000 toilet flushers in Brown County and sends about 31,600 pounds of phosphorus into the lower Fox River each year, which is less than 6% of the watershed's overall phosphorus load. But to meet the government's new phosphorus target, environmental regulators have told the district it must reduce its annual load by 9,300 pounds.

Sewerage district officials estimate that building treatment systems able to pull those pounds annually from their waste stream will cost ratepayers between $223 million and $394 million. That would amount to as much as $42,000 per pound to remove a product that in its commercial fertilizer form costs farmers somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 or $2 per pound.

It's a similar story up and down the lower Fox River.

"We could spend $1 billion, and if we're not wise, we could see no water quality improvement," warns Michael Finney, a former DNR employee who now works with the Oneida tribe to develop sustainable farming on tribal croplands in the Fox River basin southwest of Green Bay.

The conundrum is perfectly illustrated with a pie chart.

Problem in a pie chart Green Bay and the lower Fox River are suffering from a chronic overdose of phosphorus. There are lots of sources for the nutrient — city sewerage systems, industries, runoff from lawns and streets — but as this chart shows, agriculture is by far the largest contributor. The state has a plan to put the river and Green Bay on a phosphorus diet under the Clean Water Act. This likely will require expensive pollution-reduction investments for cities and industries, but agriculture runoff remains largely beyond regulation under the Clean Water Act. Sources of total phosphorus loading in the lower Fox River basin, in pounds per year These numbers reflect phosphorus flowing into the lower Fox River watershed, defined as the 39-mile stretch of river between Lake Winnebago and Green Bay. They do not show the more than 700,000 pounds flowing into the river from Lake Winnebago annually. That phosphorus load is expected to be addressed with a separate reduction plan from the state. Source: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

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.

Yet the Clean Water Act doesn't have the teeth to chew on the biggest piece of this pollution pie.

"The key word will be 'voluntary,' when it comes to non-point" sources, says Bradley Holtz, agricultural runoff management specialist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

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 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."

Photo Gallery Erin Wilcox, water resource specialist for the Green Bay Metropolitan Sewerage District, or NEW Water, holds a water sample from Duck Creek, one of the tributaries to Green Bay that is targeted in a new phosphorus-reduction plan to reduce algae blooms in the bay. Photo Gallery: Runoff from farms cause problems for Lake Michigan

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.

Smarter farming

Leery of spending hundreds of millions more on wastewater treatment upgrades that will remove a toothpick-thin wedge from the lower Fox River's phosphorus pie chart, the Green Bay sewerage district has struck a deal with state regulators. They want to explore whether ratepayer dollars would be better spent working with farmers to reduce their massive discharges than paying for expensive sewerage district upgrades.

"We're interested in cleaning up the water at the lowest price per pound of phosphorus," says the sewerage district's Hafs. "I think it will be cheaper for us to work with agriculture than to build new treatment plants."

State regulators have given the district four years to create what is essentially an outdoor laboratory on farm fields west of the city of Green Bay. The idea is to see just how much phosphorus can be removed if strict controls are used on the farmlands in the Silver Creek drainage owned by the Oneida.

The idea is to employ things like erosion-reducing crops, wetland restorations andbuffer zones along drainages and streams to filter out manure before it washes downhill toward the bay.

The target in the DNR plan is to get the average summer phosphorus levels in the creeks that feed the Fox River down to 0.075 milligrams per liter, a dramatic reduction. Some of the creeks' average summer levels have topped four times that amount.

In a conference room at the Green Bay sewerage district's headquarters, just down the river from a Georgia Pacific paper mill that is facing stiff state-mandated phosphorus reductions, Hafs scribbles with colored markers on a white grease board to show what is going to happen.

He draws a square field overlaid on top of the natural undulations that carry off water in big rains. These channels rimming farm fields are often tilled and planted with crops instead of respected as intermittent streams that require buffer zones to keep sediment and phosphorus on the farm.

He scribbles a big "NO" across that square with a red marker. Then he sketches how a farm field can be planted within those natural channels with vegetation buffers in a manner that keeps crop soil and its contaminants from draining downstream. That gets a big "YES."

One farm is as square as a postage stamp. One has the borders of a suspicious mole. One is built to maximize crop output. One is designed to coax crops from the soil, to the extent that nearby waters are protected.

This will cost money.

It will also mean extra farm work due to planting, tending and harvesting irregularly shaped fields that may begin to look more like golf courses (responsible for 0.3% of the watershed's phosphorus load) than checkerboards. More acreage also will be converted to soil-stabilizing crops like alfalfa, which doesn't yield as much feed per acre as corn.

None of these strategies is new to anyone familiar with soil conservation practices developed decades ago after the horrors of the Dust Bowl.

The twist is that Hafs wants to demonstrate what can be done when all these strategies are employed to the maximum extent possible within a single watershed. Unlike traditional erosion control programs, this one has a specific goal for the volume of phosphorus and sediment leaving Silver Creek — much like pollution monitored and controlled at the end of a "point source" pipe.

Hafs says if the sewerage district can reach that goal of 0.075 milligrams of phosphorus per liter, "there is your cookbook for every other watershed."

The idea then would be to use sewerage district dollars to pay farmers along the other creeks feeding Green Bay to use similar practices.

Hafs won't talk about how much money the district would be willing to use to subsidize changes in farming operations. But it will be cheaper for ratepayers so long as it's less than the hundreds of millions of dollars the district says it will have to pay for treatment plant upgrades.

The experiment has Tracy Valenta, a former sewerage district employee who did groundbreaking researchon the Green Bay dead zones, happy that the plan might lead to lower levels of cow excrement tumbling into the bay.

But she also wonders why she and her neighbors should have to pay for it.

"I flush my toilet in the city of Green Bay and my rates are going to go up, and it's to subsidize agriculture," she says. "Why is the sewerage district being held responsible for someone else's waste?"

It's the way the Clean Water Act works — or doesn't work. And not just in Green Bay.

A Government Accountability Office report last December noted that the spectacular strides made after the act's passage more than four decades ago have turned into stutter steps and stumbles backward. It reported that more than half of the nation's lakes and rivers assessed in a 50-state survey still don't meet minimum water quality standards.

The nonpartisan congressional watchdog office specifically blamed the act's failure to hold non-point polluters accountable.

"More than 40 years after Congress passed the Clean Water Act...many of the nation's waters are still impaired, and the goals of the Act are not being met," the report said. "Without changes to the Act's approach to nonpoint source pollution, the Act's goals are likely to remain unfulfilled."

Nowhere is this national failure more acute than in the cow-muddied waters of lower Green Bay and in the western basin of Lake Erie, where a phosphorus-fueled toxic algae bloom in August knocked out the public water supply for a half-million people. The National Guard had to be called in to deliver water by the truckload.

Sticky territory

Regardless of what happens with the Oneida experiment, it is going to be very difficult for the dairy industry of Northeastern Wisconsin to smart-farm its way out of this trouble. The new target phosphorus reductions, crafted for each watershed feeding the lower Fox River, are staggeringly steep.

For example, the goal for one small river that feeds the lower Fox River is to reduce its agricultural load of phosphorus from more than 38,000 pounds per year to just over 6,000 pounds — a decrease of 83%.

Farms draining into this little river alone are responsible for discharging more phosphorus waste than the 220,000 people served by the Green Bay Sewerage District. Slashing some 32,000 pounds of phosphorus from its waste stream won't happen without a profound change in the number of cows allowed in the watershed, or at least in how their manure is managed.

Yet some farmers responsible for generating much of this pollution remain largely unaware of the new plan's details.

"You could probably enlighten me more than I could enlighten you," Mark Wiese says when asked how he expected to meet these requirements at his 8,000-animal unit dairy.

This is sticky territory. The idea of a dairy cow chewing its way through a green pasture is as much a part of Wisconsin's cultural fabric as the freshwater that defines the state's borders.

But how many fields filled with cows do you see these days on the farms of eastern Wisconsin? You can smell the cows, but you rarely see them. Pastures dappled with cow pies are being replaced with barns the size of airport hangars and man-made manure ponds sloshing with millions of gallons of liquid waste.

Val Klump, director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Great Lakes WATER Institute, says it may be time to treat agriculture as the big, heavy industry ithas become.

He looks at the ongoing $1 billion PCB cleanup funded by the paper companies that polluted the Fox River and lower Green Bay as an example of how industries can be held accountable for cleaning up the messes they make.

"Nutrients and sediments have a bigger impact on water quality in the bay than PCBs ever did," he says. "And look at how much we're spending on the PCBs."


State agriculture officials appear headed in the opposite direction, however. They have launched a campaign to boostmilk production in the state from 27.5 billion pounds annually to 30 billion pounds by the year 2020.

"It is vital that all players in the dairy industry and state government are laser-focused on reaching the initiative's goal," Bill Bruins, president of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau, said when the campaign was announced two years ago.

Something is going to have to give, and not just in Wisconsin.

The Lake Erie debacle has emerged as the Great Lakes' highest profile water pollution problem since Cleveland's Cuyahoga River burned in 1969.

And now agriculture may be about to feel a heat equal to those flames.

"We're where we were at in 1972 with point-source pollution, when people were saying, 'What do you mean, paper mills have to do something? That's going to destroy their businesses!'" says Finney, who works for the Oneida tribe.

But the paper industry didn't die, despite better pollution controls, because modern society still needs paper.

Just like it needs milk.

twitter.com/danpatrickegan degan@journalsentinel.com