× Expand DATCP The state agriculture department warned farmers against spreading manure on their fields for much of November because the risk of runoff was high.

In November, Dane County officials feared a crappy situation was escalating to a real shit show. Literally. Due to a wet spring, a snowy October and a late crop harvest, dairy farmers were running out of time to safely spread manure on fields and storage for the animal byproduct was reaching capacity.

Supv. Carl Chenoweth, chair of the county’s Land Conservation Committee, wrote in a Nov. 15 email to the committee that he believed the issue had reached “crisis level.”

“We have seen on many occasions, over the past few years, how climate change has impacted all facets of our daily lifestyles. We have increasingly been forced to address these issues in crisis mode. I believe this is such an occasion,” wrote Chenoweth. “Our actions, in the next few weeks, could prevent the loss of millions of dollars invested in efforts to improve the water quality of our lakes and streams throughout Dane County.”

Fortunately, Mother Nature provided drier weather in December, easing concerns about manure storage, Chenoweth tells Isthmus. He credits staff at Dane County’s Land Conservation Division for “managing this issue on a day-to-day basis” with farmers to avoid the worst case scenarios: overflowing storage tanks or runoff from lands spread with manure that flows into the watershed, where it can cause toxic algae blooms in lakes and contaminate groundwater.

“We got enough out in the fields, where it’s looking like we have enough manure storage heading into the winter months,” says Chenoweth. “If we have a wet winter and a wet spring, we are going to run into capacity issues again. That’s a potential problem, to some extent, every year. What was new this year was running into trouble in the spring and the fall.

Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District grappled with storage issues this autumn, too. Typically, the district spreads nutrient-rich biosolids — a fertilizer made from human waste — on farm fields throughout the year. But this fall, for the first time since the biosolids program was started in the 1970s, the district had to implement a backup plan.

The district’s Kim Meyer says the agency typically spreads about 36 million gallons of biosolids each year. In 2019, it only hauled 30 million gallons because there weren’t enough fields to spread it on. What the district couldn’t spread, went to the dump.

“The weather and the climate lately played a huge part in our storage issue,” she says.

Tina Hinchley and her husband, Duane, operate a 220-cow dairy farm in Cambridge. She says whatever a cow eats, it poops.

“If a cow eats 100 pounds of food a day, which they do, guess what? What goes in, comes out. You have 100 pounds of waste, manure mainly, coming out of a cow everyday,” says Hinchley. “Isn’t that incredible?”

Ideally, a great circle of life happens on dairy farms: manure produced by cows is used to fertilize corn and other crops grown to feed the animals. Producing runoff from manure spread on fields is not good for a farm’s bottom line or for the environment.

“There isn’t a farmer out there that would ever, ever, ever want to contaminate water,” says Hinchley. “We’re drinking the same water as everybody else.”

The traditional way of dealing with manure is known as daily haul: shoveling out the cow poop every day and spreading on fields or safely stacking for later use. This is done with solid manure. But daily hauling is labor intensive and as dairy farms grow in size, many convert to a liquid manure system which stores cow poop (and other waste) in open-pit concrete basins or under-barn tanks. The manure is then pumped out and “knifed in,” or injected, into fields to supply nutrients to crops with exacting precision. Liquid manure systems are more expensive to install but more efficient. The cycle of emptying tanks in the spring and fall to allow for enough storage in the summer and winter (when farmers don’t want to spread manure) is crucial to controlling runoff.

Hinchley says they got lucky this year. They got their crops out of the ground in late November and were able to empty their new under-barn manure storage tank before running into trouble.

“Some of us with pits, sometimes you only have a two-week opportunity to get that knifed in or spread on top. It was a real challenge this year and lots of folks were sweating it,” says Hinchley. “If a farm has an open pit, think about all the rain going in there. So now the storage capacity that they were predicting for their manure is being filled up with rainwater. Who could have predicted we’d have this much rain from 2018 forward?”

2019 was the wettest year on record for Wisconsin, according to the Midwestern Regional Climate Center. Amy Piaget, conservationist with Dane County’s Land Conservation Division, says farmers are wondering if this is the new normal.

“You can manage one bad season. But now we are going on three growing seasons that have been impacted and that definitely makes the challenges grow as time goes on,” says Piaget. “It’s a problem statewide.”

Dane County officials are hopeful new manure rules, implemented this year, will help mitigate future crises. The county ordinance updates permitting procedures for manure storage facilities and incorporates new state standards. Under the new rules, farmers are required to get a permit to spread all types of manure during the winter months. Previously, only dairy farmers who spread liquid manure had to get a winter spreading permit.

The permit, says Piaget, “identifies the lower risk areas and management practices [farmers] have to follow to reduce runoff. Our main goal is to build awareness so producers know they can come to us and we can provide assistance. If someone’s manure storage is in danger of overtopping, we want to know about it and work with them to find a solution.”

Chenoweth says the new ordinance will also help the county track how much manure is being spread and when, allowing for government intervention if needed.

“We do a lot of conservation programs to prevent runoff. We want to work with farmers. We don’t want them just to go out and throw [manure] behind the barn,” says Chenoweth. “Producers are doing a great job of embracing it. It’s a little bit of science. It’s a little bit of art. It’s a little bit of luck.”

Not everyone is thrilled about Dane County’s active role in manure management. Tom, who didn’t want to give his last name, operates a dairy farm with about 100 cows. He’s lost money the last five years running.

“The ordinances now, they got you controlled. You gotta keep track of where every little bit [of manure] goes. You got to keep track of how big the loads are. Paperwork up the butt,” says Tom. “The new county rules on winter spreading, we are going to be very limited in the places we can spread and how thick we can spread it. Could be a serious problem.”

Tom says he intends to abide by the law. But he thinks the oversight is unnecessary.

“It’s stricter than it has to be. There are weather conditions that don’t always match up to the rules. And we got no control over that,” says Tom. “I don’t need rules to stop me from putting manure in the creek.”