Let’s work together

Let’s say that a municipal wastewater treatment plant operator loads up a pick up truck with treated sludge, drives the truck to a bridge above a local creek and dumps the whole load into the churning waters below. Would not every farmer within 100 miles be outraged by this behavior? Would they not call on the county and state to sanction and fine the municipality for this environmental outrage? Of course they would.

Given this expectation, you’d think, then, that these same farmers would be willing to live under a proposed Marathon County animal waste ordinance rewrite that, in aligning county law with state ag performance standards, prohibits a farmer from stacking over 175 square feet of unconfined manure (about what you can load into a pick-up truck) within 300 feet of a water way.

Nope. Right now, farmers, championed by the Marathon County Farm Bureau, are successfully fighting the ordinance. But this is wrong.

It is everybody’s job to clean-up pollution within the Wisconsin River Basin’s impaired creeks, rivers and reservoirs. Municipalities have to reduce their phosphorus discharges, even if it means that sewer rates charged to residents have to increase. But farmers need to do their part, too. They can at least support minimum state standards to halt the worst pollution practices, knowing that the government has to provide 70 percent cost sharing.

We are fully aware of how disastrous farm commodity prices are these days. But, at the same time, municipal residents must contend with a cratered economy, too, and pay higher sewer bills to deal with pollution.

The bad old days of faulting somebody else for pollution, but never ourselves needs to end. We need to join hands, both farmers and municipalities, and get the job done.