Lake Erie agreement confronts Ontario farmers with stiff phosphorus reduction targets
Sunday, November 8, 2015
The August algae bloom in 2014 in western Lake Erie was a wakeup call. Now an accord with two neighbouring U.S. states has set a goal of cutting phosphorus runoff 40 per cent below 2008 levels and two Ontario agricultural areas are involved – the Thames River basin and the so-called 'Leamington tributaries,' streams west of Point Pelee flowing into Lake Erie
by DON STONEMAN
At the north end of the Canada's Outdoor Farm Show (COFS) site north of Woodstock, less than a mile away from the Thames River as the crow flies, a handful of spectators watch a demonstration of a "dribble bar" manure-spreading technology from Europe.
The dribble bar can be used to spread liquid manure directly onto crops at times other than early and late season, when liquid manure is most often spread but bare fields are most vulnerable to rains and snow melts that carry away nutrients. Farm and Food Care is demonstrating it on behalf of the provincial agriculture ministry.
School teachers from the Greater Toronto Area, guests of the Ontario Agri-Food Education program, are impressed by the technology involved in farming. Maybe the crowd should be bigger and more of the watchers should be farmers because the dribble bar might be one of the technologies that will help them quit doing something that is blamed for polluting Lake Erie – late-season manure spreading.
The relaxed atmosphere of this demonstration and the slow-moving spreader belies the urgency of the problem at hand. In mid-June, Premier Kathleen Wynne committed the province and stakeholders, meaning largely farmers, to collaborate with Ohio and Michigan in restoring and enhancing the troubled western basin of Lake Erie.
The Western Basin of Lake Erie Collaborative Agreement, signed with state governors on June 13, but not widely publicized on either side of the border, commits Ontario to work towards a 40 per cent reduction in phosphorus entering the west end of the lake by 2025, with an "aspirational" goal of reducing it by 20 per cent within five years.
That challenge may be even higher than it looks. The goal is 40 per cent below a baseline 2008 phosphorus loading level. Environment Canada has determined that, at that level, algae blooms in the lake wouldn't occur nine years out of 10. Ironically, it was in 2008 that crop prices went substantially higher and farmers began ramping up production, including use of more fertilizer.
A report from the Lake Erie Nutrient Targets (LENT) working group that informed the premier and state governors at the June talks targeted two agricultural production areas in Ontario, the so-called "Leamington tributaries," streams west of Point Pelee flowing into Lake Erie, and the Thames River basin, which the COFS site straddles. A report released on May 11, Recommended Phosphorus Loading Targets For Lake Erie, known as Annex 4 and an 80 dense pages long, is less readable but more chilling.
The Annex 4 report says that, between 2011 and 2013, the Detroit River delivered an average of 41 per cent of the total load of phosphorus entering Lake Erie. "It is important to note that 55 per cent of the difference in annual Detroit River loads between 2008 (1,987 metric tonnes) and 2011 (3,077 metric tonnes) is due to changes in loads from the Thames River."
Doing simple math, that's just shy of 600 extra tonnes of phosphorus into Lake Erie from the Thames annually above those 2008 levels. Since the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change claims that sewage treatment plants are already working at top form, the 40 per cent reduction that Wynne aspires to becomes a taller order.
Eighteen months ago, phosphorus from the farm wasn't nearly as high profile a subject. Federal U.S. and Canadian officials announced that they had signed a Joint International Great Lakes Agreement in 2012, inducing a yawn. Final Lake Erie nutrient targets were to be published in 2016, followed by "domestic action plans" to achieve those targets two years later.
The August algae bloom in 2014 in western Lake Erie was a wakeup call. Nearly half a million people, mostly on the American side of the west end of the lake but also on Pelee Island, couldn't drink their tap water because of contamination from algae-produced toxins, fuelled by an overload of phosphorus.
The June LENT report proposes nine reduction strategies to reduce the annual phosphorus load in Lake Erie. LENT is not specific how that 40 per cent reduction below 2008 levels will be achieved. "This target does not mean that every source will need to reduce phosphorus by 40 per cent, rather it represents an overall reduction target to Lake Erie," the report says.
Still, the farm targets are clear. On the Canadian side, they are the Thames River watershed, stretching from its source in farm country north of Stratford to its mouth at Lake St. Clair just north of Tilbury, and all that farmed land draining into it. The creeks that run into Lake Erie from the southwest side of Essex County with its intensive vegetable growing area and greenhouses are a separate phosphorus source and also under scrutiny.
"I think that farmers down here and in the Thames can expect to be hearing a lot more about this," says Katie Stammler, water quality scientist with the Essex Region Conservation Authority. "People are going to be talking about reducing phosphorus and they are going to look to farmers for solutions."
Dribble bar demonstrations
Running six farm show demonstrations over three days, Farm and Food Care's environmental program manager Bruce Kelly is undeterred by the slim Wednesday morning COFS crowd. A happy Agriculture Minister Jeff Leal would show up in the afternoon. Kelly has been doing these demonstrations all summer long, often to substantial farmer crowds. The dribble bar tanker has been to a manure expo in Pennsylvania in July, attended by 1,000 people, including manure custom operators from Ontario. It has been demonstrated in front of 300 people at eastern diagnostics days in Winchester; to 20 dairy farmers, including anaerobic digester operators, in Lindsay in August; and to 90 farmers at Ontario Soil and crop Improvement Association director Gord Green's dairy farm near Embro on a Sunday in August. Next it was up to Amberley in Bruce County and then 90 farmers saw it at a soil and crop meeting in Huron County.
Kelly's message is clear. "If you are a swine producer and you just grow corn, you lock yourself into a manure application schedule that is susceptible to runoff . . . It's about timing." It's the same for dairy producers. "It's not about who has the best manure spreader on the third week of November," Kelly says. That is "not the best time to spread manure."
Farm and Food Care is deep into reducing phosphorus into Lake Erie. Kelly notes that three meetings were sponsored by Farm and Food Care this summer in response to an Environment Canada discussion paper. Comment on the paper ended Aug. 30.
At the first meeting, governments presented their 40 per cent reduction perspective. "It put the gauntlet down for agriculture to respond," Kelly says. At the second meeting, people who worked in phosphorus reduction and in science talked to commodity groups and general farm organizations about how this could be done and solicited ideas.
The third meeting, later in August, was for commodity and general farm organization representatives only; government people were not invited. According to Kelly, at this meeting representatives discussed "what the issues were, what the sensitivities were," and how their commodity groups might respond to a separate Environment Canada proposal for phosphorus reduction before the Aug. 30 deadline.
Of the LENT report's proposed phosphorus reduction strategies, Kelly says four cover non-farm issues – phasing out residential property phosphorus applications within five years, cleaning up some low-performing sewage plants on the American side of the border, and even ending the long-time practice of in-lake dumping of U.S. Army Corp of Engineers dredgings from harbours like grain-trading hub Toledo. There are five recommendations that touch on agriculture.
Managing application of fertilizer and manure on frozen and snow-covered ground;
The 4Rs Nutrient Stewardship Certification program and similar comprehensive management approaches (see page 27);
Performance-based incentives to reduce nutrients;
Investment in green infrastructure for both urban storm water and agricultural runoff;
Adaptive management to validate and refine reduction targets and timelines;
Collaboration toward an integrated monitoring and modelling network.
Ohio, where the Maumee River contributes 45 per cent of the phosphorus to Lake Erie, banned fertilizing and manure-spreading on frozen ground and snow starting last April 2. Ontario has "a de facto ban" on spreading manure on frozen and snow-covered fields on farms large enough to require nutrient management plans, Kelly says. But late fall applications before snow and frost are still susceptible to rain and snowmelt runoff.
A stretch for most farmers
The dribble bar Farm and Food Care demonstrates lets liquid fall through tubes that can dangle below a crop canopy. Kelly allows that spreading manure through these drop pipes on growing corn might be a stretch for most farmers and that it's better on hay or pasture. Anything to widen that critical manure spreading window in the spring. Walter Grose, co-owner of tanker maker Husky, thinks use of tram lines – paths in fields that are always travelled by machines in multiple passes – have proven to be a compaction-reducing profit builder in high-value vegetable crops and could work in corn as well.
Manure isn't the only phosphorus contributor, though. Adoption of a 4Rs nutrient stewardship certification program, "right source, right rate, right time, right place," is already in the works. On the last day of the show, Fertilizer Canada announced a memorandum of co-operation with the provincial government and the Ontario Agri Business Association (OABA) and said that $300,000 would be invested to help Ontario farmers "maximize crop yield with minimum environmental impact.
"We want (government) to recognize 4R is a solution-based approach" to "due diligence and accountability in the placement and use of plant nutrients," says OABA general manager Dave Buttenham. He described it as a documented approach to best management practices. "That doesn't necessarily mean it involves more paperwork. It is probably just recording what you are doing and why you are doing it."
The 4R program is not going to be mandatory. "But the other option – government policy and regulation – will be," Buttenham warned. "We are trying to be proactive as an industry."
The 4Rs have their place, but controlling manure and fertilizer applications are only part of the picture. Gabrielle Ferguson, environmental program specialist with the Ontario agriculture ministry, explains that Ontario is responsible for 20 to 25 per cent of the total load of more than 10,000 tonnes of phosphorus entering Lake Erie annually. The average total phosphorus load from cropland is estimated at about 0.63 to 0.78 kilograms per hectare/year. Of that, 60 to 80 per cent of sediment and phosphorus loading occurs during between Nov. 1 and April 1.
No one best management practice is going to solve the sediment and phosphorus problem, Ferguson says. (See A new tool for dealing with soil erosion on your farm, page 24.)
'Pay for performance'
The solution to runoff may lie in farm programs on both sides of the border, but maybe they aren't as good as they could be.
The U.S. Farm Bill and the Canada-Ontario Farm Stewardship program "do not always encourage farmers to utilize the most cost-effective actions or inspire new and innovative solutions to reduce nutrient runoff from their farming operations," the LENT report notes, and manure-handling technology supplier and farmer Jake Kraayenbrink of Moorefield concurs. He found out too late that there was a very short space of time when his Agri-Brink technology, which allows farmers to take tankers on fields without causing compaction, was eligible for grants under the Great Lakes Agricultural Stewardship Initiative (GLASI). He hopes that can be resolved in the future.
The LENT report refers to "pay for performance." This is encouraging to Don McCabe, Ontario Federation of Agriculture president. It sounds to him like farmers might get paid for doing things on the farm that are good for the environment and society in general. He thinks it seems like Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS).
Dave Reid, provincial co-ordinator for ALUS, was unavailable for comment. But Casey Whitelock, program co-ordinator for ALUS in Norfolk, where it all started in Ontario, says ALUS is about putting in things like buffer strips and farmers get paid for taking erosion-prone land out of production. She wonders where "performance" in reducing phosphorus fits into the current ALUS model.
So what is going to work? "A ban on winter spreading is an easy thing to agree to. We essentially do that now," Bruce Kelly says, allowing that "there is some discrepancy among those regulated under the nutrient management act and those who aren't."
Kelly thinks success lies in "really taking the 4Rs to heart," whether manure or chemical fertilizer is applied. "It's about making the phosphorus that is applied not susceptible to winter and spring runoff."
Soil and Crop Association president-elect Gordon Green, host of that dribble bar demonstration in August, says there is no shortage of good example projects farmers can consider for their farms. There is enough for four-day-long tours in his area alone, he says.
Phosphorus levels are not too high across the board, Kelly believes. "People who monitor phosphorus say that 65 per cent of phosphorus runs off in the spring thaw and another 25 per cent runs off in the three biggest thunderstorms throughout the year. The challenge then, to those of us who apply nutrients, is how to put fertilizer on, when do we put it on and get it to the plant so that it doesn't run off. It's about timing," Kelly concludes.
And that applies for getting phosphorus out of Lake Erie as well. Agriculture has five or 10 years to figure it out. BF