A Few Notes from: A Legal Update by Mike Blaser
A Need to Put Environmental Performance in Perspective:
1. There are well under 800 municipal sewage systems in Iowa
2. There are well over 10,000 livestock operations that need professional custom applicators to apply manure to land in Iowa
3. The Iowa livestock operations produce multiple BILLIONS of gallons of manure to be used as fertilizer.
***Manure utilized as nutrient allows Iowa crop producers to avoid hundreds of millions of dollars of fertilizer costs - fertilizers made from natural gas, coming in part, from countries that don't like us very much. Be proud Iowa!
4. Producers and Custom Applicators do not have taxpayer-funded resources available to them to deal with manure production
5. In 2010 there were 116 reported bypasses (releases) from municipal systems, no fish kills. Every bypass (release) had a "surface water impact" as reported by DNR
6. In 2010 there were 49 total reported "incidences" involving manure for the Iowa livestock industry. 13 of these "incidents" had a surface water impact. Only 21 of the reported incidents in 2010 involved transport of manure or land application of manure, down from 24 in the prior year.
Livestock Operations and Commercial Applicators are doing a fantastic job of being environmentally responsible, and have improved dramatically over the past decade. There is still room for improvement, and we hope to see even less "incidences" in future years.
We'd like to encourage manure applicators in Iowa to join ICNAA - Iowa Commercial Nutrient Applicators Association go to:
http://iowacnaa.org/
http://iowacnaa.org/pdfs/membership.pdf
