Wisconsin's climate may need to adapt to Donald Trump
So it’s likely Trump will replace Robert Kaplan, the interim regional administrator of the EPA Chicago office who last summer sent a team of investigators to review water pollution permit files in the state Department of Natural Resources office in Madison, said Tressie Kamp, an MEA attorney. Kaplan also spearheaded months of public discussions that resulted in detailed recommendations for keeping dairy manure out of water as well as a plan for supplying emergency water to Kewaunee County, where one-third of test wells have been tainted with hazardous bacteria from animal waste.
Impacting rural drinking water wells, waterways and wetlands
Phosphorus flowing into the lower Fox River watershed, defined as the 39-mile stretch of river between Lake Winnebago and Green Bay.
Kewaunee County CAFOs generate and land-apply over 340 million gallons of untreated liquefied manure and 81,332 tons of untreated solid manure annually to the county’s cropland (Mueller, 2014). At current rates, Kewaunee County dairies and its small beef cattle herd disposes of over 12.4 million pounds of nitrogen annually, exceeding the crop nutrient uptake capability of county farmland by more than 1.15 million pounds each year (Petition for Emergency Action Pursuant to the Safe Drinking Water Act, 42 U.S.C. §300i, 2014). This excess nitrogen, once a potentially valuable crop amendment, is then released into the local environment, where it converts to nitrates at harmful levels that have had devastating effects on the region’s shallow groundwater resources, negatively impacting rural residents’ drinking water wells, local waterways and wetlands. The Rap Sheets: Industrial Dairies in Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, 2015
