Manure runoff problem being cleaned up

The Brillion News

TOWN OF BRILLION – Manure spread on a farm field near Bastian Road and Calumet County K in the Town of Brillion ended up in a tributary of Plum Creek.

Nick Peltier, an agronomist with the Brown County Land and Water Conservation Department, said his department received a complaint on Tuesday, July 5, of a manure smell in the waters of Plum Creek near Holland Road in the Town of Holland in southern Brown County.

Peltier traced the manure runoff to a field along Bastian Road “just south of Highway K.”

He said that’s the headwaters of the east branch of Plum Creek, which runs north until it merges into the Fox River in the Village of Wrightstown.

Brown County notified the state Department of Natural Resources, which assigned Ben Uvass, from its Oshkosh office, to respond and oversee the cleanup.

Peltier said the Shiloh Dairy farm owns the field and is working on the cleanup together with the DNR.

Peltier said it is a problem for farmers who spread manure on field as fertilizer, and then a rain event washes the manure off and into nearby streams.

Although farmers often plow a field after spreading manure on it in the summer, a procedure called “incorporation” of manure into the soil, Peltier said that can’t be done on a hay field where farmers expect to get additional cuttings of hay.

Because of that, Peltier said farmers spreading manure on a hay field usually don’t spread it as heavily in the summer.

The Plum Creek headwaters are in northern Calumet and southeastern Outagamie counties, but the three branches of the creek join and flow north through southwest Brown County and empty into the Fox River at Wrightstown.