[Music] This is the story of manure and satellites and bugs in the soil and the smell of life and manure.

And cows and chocolate.

And tea you can't drink and weighing a load of manure.

And spreaders and slingers and compost piles and counting pies and manure.

And precision and a guess and computers and cycles and the cycle of life and manure and manure.

Everybody say manure.

Okay.

[Music] Each Labor Day, the Cow Chip Festival in Sauk City, Wisconsin celebrates a byproduct of America's dairy land.

Edible cow pie now being served just north of the beer garden.

I'd like to announce that registration is now going on for the cow chip throw.

Contestants in the cow chip throwing contest search hard to select the perfect chip.

Basically you want it either too light, but you want it in thickness so you can really get a hold of it and really throw it out.

This one's really too big.

Most of them would not want to throw a chip this big.

[Dog barking] This one here has a pretty good weight to it.

It's about the right size.

This one here they can really throw and get a lot of muscle behind it.

In Wisconsin, we have reason to celebrate the cow chip.

We have an incredible dairy industry.

We have almost as many cattle as people.

But the cow chip has lost its job and unemployed and unwanted.

It's turning up in places it doesn't belong.

[Cheering] In the 1960s, commercial fertilizer became cheap and widely available.

It's powerful.

It's precise.

It's lightweight.

And it largely took over the cow chip's job of providing plant nutrients for crops.

Since then, unscientific, old-fashioned, heavy and smelly manure has been branded worthless, a waste product dumped on already well-fertilized fields.

And though impossible to measure, it's safe to say that rainfall sends more manure into our streams, lakes and groundwater than anyone would like to admit.

Some simple math reveals the sheer weight of the problem.

Each of our millions of innocent, contented cows puts out over 100 pounds of manure a day.

Seldom discussed in polite conversation, manure is taboo.

No one wants to think about it.

But since no one wants to drink it either, it's time to bring manure out into the open, to celebrate it, to show that it's really not such bad stuff.

There are many people who swear by it and have put it back to work.

If you're ready, it's time to explore the fertile world of manure.

[Laughter] [Sound of a tractor] It's spring and time for many farmers in Wisconsin to haul manure.

This tank holds half a million gallons of liquid dairy manure.

While most farmers haul and spread small loads of manure every day, a growing number have some kind of container or pit that holds six to 12 months' worth of manure.

On this farm, custom haulers will spread it on cropland in loads of 9,000 gallons at a time.

Soil scientist Fred Madison explains how this farmer is taking advantage of a resource made right here in Wisconsin.

This liquid manure storage system is, certainly from a farmer's standpoint, one of the very easy ways to handle manure.

The manure goes directly from the barn into the slurry store system.

When the time comes, now when cropland is open, it's agitated.

The manure is hauled out on the field where it's spread, can be spread uniformly, so farmers are well aware of how much nutrient they're getting out there.

And then the farmers are also able to incorporate the manure into the soil very quickly.

They have an understanding of what nutrients are in that manure, and then they know the amount of manure that they're spreading on the land.

So they'll use that to calculate the nutrients that they're applying for the crop that they're going to grow in this field.

And all of the steps that they're going through here now are just exactly what you need to do to do it right.

The truck in the lead is spreading it, and he's being followed up by another farmer with a disc that's incorporating the manure in the soil.

That cuts down any sort of gaseous losses that we might have if there were any runoff or anything like that.

Stuff is incorporated in the soil now.

This is the best possible way we can do it.

When this is all done, somebody will know how much stuff is out here and then balance that off against the corn crop needs or whatever's going to be planted here.

And then that can be supplemented then with purchased fertilizer.

Manure is fertilizer.

Nutrients are nutrients.

The plant doesn't know the difference.

We've had a period in recent history in agriculture where we relied a great deal on purchased fertilizers to provide those nutrient needs.

And we've sort of treated manure as a waste.

And we just need to change that mindset a little bit and get farmers thinking again about the idea that you can grow corn with manure.

Okay.

Manure is part of the mindset at the Green Bay Botanical Gardens, where Barbara Heike runs a hands-on gardening program for children.

I have 64 children between the ages of five and eight.

They each have their own little four-by-five-foot garden plot, and we plant flowers.

Teaching the value of manure starts at an early age here.

As part of their classwork, the children brew up a potent concoction called manure tea.

Manure tea is good for anything in the garden.

It's a way of organic gardening.

And the children put it next to the plants that they really want to see grow like crazy.

We all know what manure is.

It's a form of poop.

When we first start talking about manure, the children are pretty giddy and gigglish.

And I have them all say that word poop a few times.

Sheep poop.

But in the children's garden, we say the more scientific name.

Who knows what that is?

Manure.

Right.

Everybody say manure.

I have the children take some manure, a little scoop of it, and put it into a burlap bag.

One more scoop of the whole scoop.

I don't want to do this.

It doesn't smell too bad, does it?

I can't smell it.

Gosh, crazy.

Crazy.

Okay, bad.

And we're going to pull the ends up to make our tea bag.

Okay.

Is the water turning brown now?

Yeah.

I think that's pretty.

All right?

Looks like soda.

Oh, cool.

Yeah, it does look like soda.

I don't think it would taste like soda, though.

At first, when the children would think about manure, they would turn their noses up and make faces and think it was an awful icky thing.

But after they got used to the idea that it was actually good for the garden, they were real enthusiastic about using it.

Let's give these little beets a drink here.

Right on the -- that's the way.

Okay.

How does manure tea work?

It gives nutrients to the plants.

It gives nutrients so it makes them grow.

It's just like when you get food, you grow, too.

But no people can drink manure tea.

No, no people can drink it.

Right.

Let's give those carrots a drink.

On the farm, there are many ways of using manure.

There's the box spreader, used on most farms for daily spreading, and the side slinger, known for greater accuracy.

Some farmers build expensive structures to store their manure for later use.

Liquid manure can be knifed in or injected, or splashed on the ground and worked in later.

At the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences in Madison, rural sociologist Peter Nowak and colleagues surveyed 1,400 farmers about the way they use manure and their reasons for using it the way they do.

Their results revealed that most farmers lack accuracy in their manure applications.

I think the fairest characterization is that the vast majority of our farmers mismanage manure.

They treat manure as a waste, and that manure is causing significant problems, significant problems to the environment, significant problems to the cash flow of these farmers.

Manure is a problem.

When you get into why farmers are behaving as they do, you'll find out they're behaving in a very logical, rational fashion in treating manure as a waste, disposing of it, and causing all these various other problems we're talking about.

So until we get at those root problems, why they're treating it as a waste, why they're disposing of it, I don't think we can really characterize the farmer as a villain.

Ah, the box spreader.

As far as I'm concerned, the last major technological innovation in the box spreader occurred when it went from horsepower being drawn by horses to a tractor PTO, power takeoff.

It's largely designed to get rid of a waste.

As the farmer goes across that field, you get a very uneven distribution.

You get great big clods going out, you get small pieces going out, and they're thrown in kind of a haphazard fashion across the field.

Now if you're going to attempt to credit that manure for crop nutrition purposes, the assumption is that you should have some sort of uniform distribution across that field.

A box spreader is largely incapable of providing that uniform distribution.

So I think that's one of the major disadvantages of the box spreader.

You can get down to even more fundamental things, such as how much manure is on a box spreader.

Believe it or not, believe it or not, that's a largely unknown quantity for the farmer.

The working loads that farmers use on box spreaders has little or no correlation, association with the manufacturer's capacity rating.

So farmers, in effect, are taking these loads of manure out to the field when they don't know how much is on there.

Wild ass guess is about the best they can do.

So we're putting the farmers in a position of giving them tools where they don't know how much they're bringing out there, and when they get it out there, they can't get a uniform distribution with it.

If you read the Greek literature, it's that old classic dilemma of excess.

When is too much a good thing?

When have you gone beyond normal bounds?

Manure is a good thing.

I think most farmers recognize that.

That manure builds up the tilth of the soil.

It's good for a soil.

You talk to farmers and they'll say, "We've got this eroded knob or knoll on the field, so I put an extra load of manure on there and try to incorporate it to build that soil back up again."

But due to all these uncertainties they have, how much they're putting out there, the evenness, the nutrient content of that, it's largely an unknown quantity of how much goodness is out there.

And so it's always better to err on the side of excess, and that's what's happening.

The farmer is both the source of the problem, but the farmer is also the source of the solution.

You aren't going to find the solutions in research institutions or in the halls of the politicians.

You're going to find the solution out on the farm.

And when we spend more time going out on the farm and listening and observing, then we'll find the solutions.

One person spending a lot of time on the farm is Paul Kivlin, who helps farmers measure the fertilizer value of the manure they spread so they can cut back on purchased fertilizer, a practice known as crediting manure.

After measuring the loads of dozens of spreaders, he's learned there's good news and bad news about manure.

I think there are two things that we know about manure.

One is that it's bad in our surface or our groundwater.

And the second thing is that we know that it's a good fertilizer source.

In order to use it as a fertilizer, we need to know two things.

One is the nutrient content, how much nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium there is in manure.

And the second thing that I think is probably most important is the application rate.

And a lot of farmers do not have a good handle on how much manure, how many tons per acre or how many thousands of gallons per acre is being put out.

And without knowing that number, it's really difficult to use the fertilizer quality that manure has.

Using the weigh pads, we weigh the spreader when it's full, weigh the rear axle of the tractor, and then weigh each axle of the spreader.

The manure is then spread.

We weigh the spreader empty, and we can subtract the full from the empty to get the actual amount of manure.

And then by just using a walk wheel and measuring off the length and the width of the manure that was spread, we can determine the acreage that was spread, the square footage.

And by working those two numbers, we can determine a tonnage per acre.

We weighed the spreader full at 32,630 pounds, weighed it empty at 19,020 pounds, which meant that we had a total tons of 6.5 tons per load.

We measured the length of the manure spread, the width of the manure spread, and we covered a total of .39 acres.

By dividing the .39 into the 6.5 per load, we come up with an actual spreading rate of 16 tons to the acre.

And what we normally find is that when we add up the total amount of manure nitrogen and total amount of legume nitrogen that's available on most dairy farms, most of them have more nitrogen than they know what to do with in terms of their crop need.

And it largely then becomes a matter of distribution, getting the nutrients to the fields that need nutrients.

To credit their manure nutrients more accurately, farmers can send samples to one of several private and public labs where their particular brand of manure can be analyzed for nutrient content.

Dairyland Laboratories' Troy Bauer explains the process.

The first step for manure analysis would be to weigh out about half a gram of sample, and then from there it'll be set in a furnace at 450 degrees.

This will give us our potassium and phosphorus.

We are determining the percent nitrogen in samples, and what we do is digest the sample and then distill the sample and then titrate the sample to determine the amount of nitrogen in the sample.

This is our ICP.

It does all of our mineral analysis, and specifically for manure samples, it would be the potassium and phosphorus.

The sample gets sucked up through the tubing and is ionized in argon flame.

The machine then detects the levels of each mineral that we're detecting, and then the computer converts it to percent potassium or phosphorus.

Time was when there wasn't much of a connection between this and this.

But outside of Wanakee in southern Wisconsin, Danco Prairie FS and Dairyland Labs are rolling out some gear that links global positioning technology with soil testing and mapping.

It's probably the latest thing that's come into the total crop industry, and that's using satellites.

This receiver picks up satellite signals that pinpoint the latitude and longitude of the vehicles.

With the satellite technology, the first thing the guys will do when they pull into a field, they'll drive in a certain point, like they did here.

They'll drive all the way around the outside of the field, and that'll give you your boundaries of the field.

Once they've done this, then they'll come back here with their computer.

They'll mark the points where they soil sample.

This is actually marking the latitude/longitude of this field, of this spot.

The lead driver sees the field map on his screen as he drives and marks the spots for the trailing four-wheeler to pull the soil samples.

They sample each field in a grid pattern, one sample for each half acre.

The samples are sent to a lab to test the fertility of the soil.

The accuracy is making sure we pull soil samples in the right spot and then be able to record that information where they're pulled.

In the past, what we'd do, we would average the field and went out and spread a blanket application of fertilizer over it.

Now today, with today's technology, we'll look at that same map again, look at the low areas, look at the high areas, and apply only where needed.

This comes out of the computer, the application map, and it's downloaded onto this card right here, and that card's plugged into the computer in the truck.

I've got five satellites in line.

The driver powers up the onboard satellite receivers that will tell the computer exactly where the truck is in the field.

And it should be a go.

The computer then controls the fertilizer application according to the soil fertility map.

Now when he starts up the truck and goes across the field, in the pink zone, we're not going to be applying any fertilizer.

And you can see we'll jump over into this blue zone where the truck will actually change on the go.

We're in this zone and apply fertilizer at 86 pounds an acre.

We jump to the green zone as he's driving across the field, then we'll jump to 138 pounds.

We jump to the yellow zone, we're going to jump to 197 pounds.

Using today's technology, we'll use latitude, longitude, and we can get down within a pound of fertilizer what's needed.

And if it doesn't need fertilizer, we won't apply it.

In the past, we would spread manure but not take the credits we should for it and come back and apply fertilizer.

So in a lot of areas, we actually had double application, plus we were already high so we didn't need any fertility in the first place.

With today's technology, it's allowed us to know where the low spots are, and the first thing we'll look at then is applying manure at these spots instead of commercial fertilizer.

We give them a map, where to spread manure, how much to spread, and our computer system now is set up.

We take the actual credits because we know the manure is where we want it and they're working as fertilizer.

We've got to be able to change and service our customer better.

The environment, people expect that and should expect us to improve the environment as much as we can, and this is a big step in improving the environment.

So just as a wrap-up, I think it's a benefit to everybody-- us long-term, our customers long-term, and the people in town.

The House of Wisconsin Cheese on State Street in Madison sells all sorts of bovine conveniences, and recipe books, and cheeses, and an abundance of black and white goods and accessories.

[mooing] At the candy counter, you can indulge your chocolate craving with these realistic knockoffs of nature's inevitable byproduct.

They're proudly handmade and signed by a confectionary artist from Cambridge, Wisconsin, Joe Melle.

I call my creations "meadow muffins," and I think they look somewhat like a meadow muffin, a large meadow muffin.

I make them with three different kinds of nuts.

Let me go ahead and dip one.

Okay.

What I've done is poured the melted chocolate out, which is about 120 degrees, and I'm now in the process of cooling it down on the marble slab.

The easiest way to do that is to keep circulating it and thinning it out, and then letting it cool from the natural coolness of the marble, and then bringing it back up to the center and working it around again.

And it's just about down to temperature now.

It's got to be colder than your skin temperature before you can dip.

So this is actually called tempering the chocolate.

They are gigantic pecan, cashew, and almond caramel clusters that I create by hand, cooking my caramel for five hours over a stove, then pouring them over the various nuts, and then creating a large glob, which I then dip in chocolate and create a meadow muffin.

They're really kind of a neat item.

I think they're, with a unique name like a meadow muffin, they display a little bit of Wisconsin and what we're all about.

And people just love them.

People just love them.

They're big and gooey and wonderful, and people really enjoy eating them.

[footsteps] Trempealeau County lies in the driftless region of the state.

They call it driftless not because it never snows, but because the glaciers never drifted over this land, never got a chance to grind it down flat.

Farmers here work their land in small fields and strips that hug the contours of the hills.

Many farms have nutrient management plans drawn up by the county's agricultural agent, Dennis Frame.

Dennis is conducting a study that looks at how much money farmers can save using manure as fertilizer and comparing that with what it will cost to put the plans in place in the hills of western Wisconsin.

I probably spend 50 to 60% of my time doing nutrient management work for the county in this study.

But the other time is financial analysis, balance sheet, cash flows, future growth.

I think when a person calls me out like Jack and says, "I want to go to 200 cows," you've got to look at the financial numbers and see, does it make any economic sense, can you afford it, where are you going to be in 5 years?

At the same time I do that, yeah, you'll be better off doing this, you've got to do, do you have the land base, can you control this environmentally?

When I was a kid, we hauled the manure on the fields closest to the barn because that was the handiest fields to get to, and we pastured more in the summer, so we didn't generate a lot of manure to haul.

Now our cattle are in confinement all the time, we generate manure 12 months of the year.

[train whistle] We try to get it out where the fields need it, we keep track of our credits as best we can there, and try to get it to the fields where we need it.

Before we started following the nutrient management plan, we spent about $10,000 annually on fertilizer, and in the last 4 or 5 years we haven't used any starter fertilizer on our corn.

But we've dropped from about a $10,000 a year fertilizer outlay down to about $2,500, mostly because we've used the nutrient management plan, following it, taking nitrogen credits from the alfalfa, and we've increased cow numbers from 60 to 70 up to 120, so we have more manure nutrients to work with.

The big problem we have is there are certain months of the year that we just can't get to the fields that need it most.

A couple years ago we were trying to spread out a field, soil test said we needed to get the manure on it, it was in the wintertime, and it got a little icy, and we came right down the hill backwards with the spreader, so that tells you why sometimes we don't follow a plan.

This really is the application map for the farm, and what I do is give this to Jack.

The problem that farms in Trumplow County have is, as you can see out here, we have a fair amount of steep ground and a lot of rolling topography, and then we have our flatter fields over, straight over there where you see the corn was chopped off and then the hay.

The problem with those fields is at the end of that hay field is where the stream runs, a fairly major stream.

So if we go back to our map and take a look at how this is supposed to work, anything here in this reddish-orange color is not winter spreadable.

Basically what that is is it's land that borders the stream, you have to stay 200 to 300 feet away from the stream.

On this farm, we're looking at about 11 fields that we can apply manure on in the winter.

Now, some of those fields are still in alfalfa, and we don't like to winter apply manure to alfalfa because we leave all this growth up here to get through the winter, and by putting manure on top of it, we really subject it to potential death.

So on this farm, as we look out over these fields, we've got a corn field over here that we can apply manure to, and we've got a field down here we can use half of for manure, and we have about another field and a half behind us, and that's the end of it.

Once those are done, the fields would have all the application rates that they need for the year.

Then we have to do what do we do with it the rest of the winter because the cows don't stop and the winter doesn't stop.

So the real problem on this farm gets to be the limited number of crop acres compared to the large amount of cows.

[birds chirping] A few years ago, the poultry industry in Trempealeau County began a major expansion.

County officials were concerned about the destination of the manure coming out of these barns, which are built on a farmer's land and run the length of two football fields.

In this particular barn this size, we will put 53,600 birds in the building.

We have 57 buildings in Trempealeau County that are fairly equivalent to this building right here.

Our plans are to build about another 50 buildings over the next couple of years between Trempealeau County and Buffalo Counties.

When they said they needed new barns, that meant we're going to get new growers, and it offered us an opportunity to work with growers who hadn't had much experience with that manure and say, "Let's find out what the quality is of this.

"Let's find out how many nutrients are in it.

"Let's talk about how to spread it."

Golden Plump officials agreed to require all new growers to have nutrient management plans before a barn was built.

I think initially you always get, "It's a new regulation.

"I don't like this.

I'm going to put my heels in."

And then when they start to think about it, they think, "Geez, this really is a good idea."

I will sit down in about a three- to four-hour conversation with the grower, explaining the business of raising chickens.

I explain the nutrient management plan.

I will go through examples with them, show them what the benefits are of the manure coming out of the barns, and basically explain to them the importance of utilizing the manure in the proper way.

We're always looking for the best water quality that we can provide to our birds for performance reasons.

So we've got a big concern on, you know, quality of the water in wells and streams and across the board, as good quality as possible.

In the long run, if we have poor water quality in the area, it's going to affect us as a company.

Once the poultry industry was behind us, then to be fair, you have to look at the dairy and you have to look at the rest.

And realistically, anybody who's doing a major expansion is looking at a nutrient management plan now.

This is Adam's Dairy.

It was built September of '94, so it's relatively new.

This farm is equipped to run about 500 cows and could easily be expanded.

On the scale of farms, this would be the largest farm in our county right now.

It's the newest operation, and it's kind of the one that-- well, I'd say it's kind of trend-setting.

We've had a lot of people want to look at expansion.

A lot of people have come here to tour this.

It's different, and it's more what you start to see if you go out west or you go down to California or whatnot, or even if you get out to the Michigan-New Yorks.

It really is a pretty simple dairy.

It's a freestyle barn with self-contained scrapers that run to a slatted floor.

What we put in here is a separator system, which allows us to take through a screw press the liquids out and run them to a back storage and put the solids out here dry.

The advantage to that is these solids can then be hauled a long distance from the farm.

Liquid dairy manure has so much water in it, trucking it very far is just not economical, where because of our proximity here to Eau Claire and gardeners and other things, we think there's going to be a market for this product.

The solids here can be composted, they can be turned, and they actually have a fair amount of nutrients in them, but they're not hot or they don't have a bad odor, so people will like that.

The liquids on this farm are put back on the alfalfa, which is an ideal crop to put the liquids on.

The nitrogen in there is tied up by the nodules in the alfalfa, so the nitrogen does not run to groundwater, and the alfalfa has real high needs for the phosphorus and the potassium.

So what we've got is a liquid that goes right where we need it, right after the crops come off, so for us it works really well here.

We're looking at around a $35,000 investment just for this separation system.

On a dairy this size it isn't too bad, but if you're dealing with a typical 40, 50 cow dairy, if we had a 50 cow dairy this would be a $700 investment per cow.

That wouldn't be economical, where on this size of a dairy it probably is.

The expansion of Jim Zoboda's 140 cow herd is blocked by what attracted his family to settle on the farm in the first place, a rushing stream that supplies water for the animals.

Almost all the farms 100 years ago were built close to water, because there was really no means of pumping.

The problem with the farm is when we look back here at the buildings, where are we going to go for growth?

We have to deal with the stream, you can't move it, you can't touch it.

The farm really becomes driven by the stream.

Now with the environmental concerns that we talked about, we've got to worry about the manure runoff and the nutrient runoff from those fields, plus the manure and nutrient runoff from that barnyard.

So every time there's animals here or manure here, any event storm will bring most of that nutrients here to the stream.

Jim's concerned about nitrogen and phosphorus reaching the stream.

We're all concerned about it, but we don't know how to physically, physically build a barrier here so nothing runs in here.

Well, right now I'm not planning any growth in the future, because it'd be limited as to what I could get a permit to do.

I can add animals, but the manure problem just keeps getting larger and larger.

Maybe 30 years ago we should have thought of a different type of building, but this whole system has been built in steps.

This is one of the first mechanical manure spreaders that I think we had on this farm.

And at that time we probably had 14 cows and probably young stock amounted to 10 head.

As the time went on, we had to get bigger spreaders and had to get tractors on the spreaders, and so this one was left to rest.

At the time, we didn't even think about manure because manure wasn't a big problem.

We had never thought about giving credits for our manure nutrients as far as that goes.

But the minute you start holding more cows in a more confined area, the manure becomes a bigger problem, and the problems just multiply is what it amounts to.

And so every time I brought a specialist here, most of the answers are we should take this barn and go across the road.

But as we look across the road over here, he really has lots of alternatives, lots of area here for runoff and protection.

You're quite a bit higher from the stream, so manure storage and all that would work well here.

I'm going to say to build it the way we probably designed it would be right around a million, but if you're going to borrow a million dollars, it probably wouldn't pay to do that.

You'd probably expand cow numbers.

You'd probably have to in order to be economical.

So we'd probably be looking at a facility that would hold-- I guess I would be in the recommendation range of somewhere between 250 and 300 cows.

So we'd be at somewhere between a million and a half.

By the time we were done, a million and a half and $2 million to get the feed storage, the parlor and the milking facility, everything built to the specs that we'd need it, including manure storage.

What are the chances?

Jim, what are the chances, either your wife will let you build a-- Slim to none.

What really are the chances?

I mean, are you even interested in doing that kind of thing?

I don't think I would be right now because I'd say that my age would be against me.

If he had a young boy who was really hungry to get in here that we knew was settled down and going to be here, that changes the whole equation.

What do we do with this manure?

Where do we go with storage?

If the stream is right there, the groundwater isn't very deep.

I mean, you can't dig down very deep, so we can't go with earthen storage on this farm at all.

So then we're looking at above-ground storage, which would be astronomical in cost.

We've talked about the price of this structure that I would need to hold my manure for 365 days would be between $85,000 and $100,000.

Well, I could generate a savings of $5,000 on nutrients or fertilizer, and that doesn't really mean that it's very efficient.

One of our concerns with regulated nutrient management is Jim's doing about, I would say on this farm, probably 60% or maybe 65%, maybe even 70% of everything he should be doing.

But going to 100% adoption requires installing storage here and requires some other things.

So that other step is going to cost Jim some money, and that becomes to the point for Jim that he's not profitable anymore.

It's not going to yield him any benefit.

My question keeps coming back in my mind since I've been working on this for four years, who's going to pay for that?

I do a lot of Jim's financial work.

I mean, I work with his lender, and I work with Jim pretty close, and he doesn't have the resources to take another $20,000 or $25,000 a year out to pay strictly for the environmental benefits, nor do I think he should have to.

I mean, it benefits you.

It benefits me.

It benefits everybody who fishes on this trout stream, who lives downstream and everywhere else.

So I guess the key is how do we share this cost with not only Jim but with society?

We cannot expect Jim to come up with the cash on his own.

The Zinnecker Farm is a small dairy operation outside of Troy in southeastern Wisconsin.

Instead of daily spreading, Dick Zinnecker piles his manure for composting using a specially modified spreader.

Composting cuts the volume of manure to be spread by half and stabilizes the plant nutrients.

To make good compost, he adds plenty of straw, which creates the right balance of carbon and nitrogen.

By mixing the straw with the manure, it makes it more fluffy.

It makes it so that when you pile it, the pile doesn't settle too closely together.

In other words, it has air space in between, and that's what you want.

The reason that you saw so much steam of that, because that was manure that was on that wagon for probably four or five days, the front part of it anyway.

And just by standing there, that heats up.

That's the nature of it.

It's warm to begin with.

Now that's going to happen again in the pile, right?

It'll heat up to get your process of decomposing started, the bacteria to go, right?

Dick also installed tanks in a system to separate the solids from the liquids, which he later sprays onto his fields when the plants can use it.

With this system, there's less risk of water pollution, and the solids are a better consistency for piling.

Using only manure as a fertilizer for our land, the object was to get the whole job done completely, and I'm happy with it because I think it works the way we do it now.

What comes out of this is manure that is not harmful smell.

It's a dirt smell.

It's decomposed.

Dick Zinneker farms with his wife Ruth using a system developed in Germany called Biodynamics, which places great importance on enhancing the value of manure.

The main part in Biodynamics is how you treat the manure and also the compost.

And the old-timers said, you know, the manure is the gold of the farmer, and nowadays, you know, the manure is kind of a waste, and people have to learn how to relate to the manure in the right way again.

It takes more the wholeness in account.

It takes the way the moon goes with the zodiac, we're planting to the ambassad.

And we have some herbal preparation we add to the compost, like chamomiles and yarrow and stinging nettle and dandelion, oak bark, and valerian.

We try to heal the earth through the preparation, and when you have a healthy earth or soil, you have healthy plants, healthy animal, and healthy human being.

Biodynamics is supposed to deal with the soil and the forces that are related to the outside, such as the moon, sun, planets, forces.

These preparations, in one way or another, affect the manure, which affects the soil so the plant can use it, and it also brings in some of the forces from the outside, no matter how small they are or how little they're, it's what it's supposed to do.

The Zinnikers treat and store the herbal preparations in special ways, meant to gather in and absorb the subtle life forces.

They are deer stag bladders.

The flower of the yarrow is put in these, and they're tied in a tight ball, and then she strings them up so that we can hang them in the sun for six months.

In other words, this spring, I think it was probably in April or May, when it wasn't going to freeze anymore, we took them and we hung them here on the shed where the sun was at most of the day, and we take them down, and then they are buried in the ground for about six months.

Here's the yarrow that's been in the deer bladder.

Try and make a little ball out of it.

And so by using the preparations, it's supposed to enliven the manure, which makes the plants sensitive to being able to collect these forces, so to speak, that are there.

And if you don't--you know, this is the fact.

I think this is a fact.

You know, everybody may not agree, but I believe, and many people do, that these forces are attracted to farming, and you can see it in many things.

We know that there's a lot of worms and bacterial life in there, and we know that these things are helpful, and you'll find more of it in organic or biodynamic than you will in heavily fertilized fields.

It seems to be disappearing.

And without this soil help, I don't think the plant can receive from the soil what it needs properly.

The Saxon Homestead Farm in Manitowoc County has seen a lot of changes since 1850.

Recently, the whole farm has taken on a new look, as the cows were moved out of the barn to graze in the fields.

The farming operation in the last four years has changed from a conventional dairy farm, where we crop corn, alfalfa, small grains, and cannery crops, to one now that consists primarily of grass and forage-based grazing land, and really a full grazing operation.

We farm about 650 acres, and we have currently about 225 dairy cattle and 75 buffalo.

Rotational grazing is a management system where we rely on the cattle to do the forage harvesting and the manure spreading.

The manure that these cattle spread, we feel, is worked into the ground by the various bacteria and insects that live in this type of environment.

Because it's forage that is growing all the time, consequently it's a perfect environment for a more diversified type of flora and fauna base, which in my opinion, as a dairy farmer, uses that manure quicker and more effectively than in a conventional system where it's spread many times on turned soil or open soil and then worked in.

Grazers create confusion in the government agencies that regulate farming, because many questions remain about the impact of grazing on streams and groundwater.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin are setting off to find some answers here.

Art Peterson, a soils professor who was supposed to have retired a few years ago, brought this rainmaking apparatus out of mothballs to do some old-fashioned basic research on runoff from the grass fields.

The truck is old, quite old.

It's a 1939 Army model that we were able to obtain in 1960 from Army surplus.

It's an old telephone truck, a thousand gallon tank, plus our pressure equipment on the trailer and a 500 gallon tank on the truck.

Come on Phil, make it up that hill!

This unit is measuring the rate that water soaks into the ground, or on the reverse side of that, we're measuring the amount that runs off over the surface.

One inch of rain over one acre weighs 227,000 pounds, and hits the ground between 15 and 20 miles an hour.

And if you don't have something cushioning it, that's what causes the muddy water.

As we see these hillsides here, everything is in sod or in vegetative growth hay, we'd call it, or pasture, the amount of sediment coming off here is barely measurable.

On a cornfield it'd be very easily measurable.

Working with Art Peterson is Jim Weersma, an environmental chemist from the UW-Green Bay, who is analyzing the runoff samples in his lab.

He's also applying the scientific method to answer some questions about a mysterious flying object, the cow pie.

One of the things that happens with rotational grazing is that you have a large number of cattle on a very small piece of land, typically overnight, for about a 12 hour period.

What we did is we allowed the cattle to graze one night, and the next day I literally walked back and forth all the way across the area of land that was grazed, and I counted the number of platters, and that's somewhere around 550 if I remember from a little over 200 cattle.

So they're pretty busy at night.

The distribution of the cow platters on a site that's been grazed is in kind of a random fashion, and different things happen to them.

This one's relatively intact.

This one is almost intact.

Looks like something slid through it.

This one has been stepped on.

This one's been stepped on.

We were interested in the longest time that a cow platter would last, and so just over to my left over here, we put some cow platters down.

We literally transplanted them, and let's go over there and take a look and see what happened to them.

What we were interested in is how fast the cow pies decomposed if they weren't disturbed by the cattle.

So what we did is we transplanted several cow pies.

We took some fresh cow pies and put them in here with about four inches of the dirt that was underneath them, dug a hole out, and then placed the cow pies right at the original level.

This is what's left after about two months.

You can see there's just a very little bit of this particular cow pie left.

It has mostly decomposed.

The organisms that live on this material and break it down have pretty well incorporated it all back into the soil.

This is quite similar to what we found on the field back here where we worked about two months ago, and now we're back on that particular site, and you can hardly find any cow pies in there, and I counted over 500 in that particular plot.

Right after a cow pie is deposited, it begins drying out at the surface immediately and starts to form a nice crust on it, and that crust absorbs the energy of the raindrops.

So when it rains, the cow pie isn't all put into suspension and doesn't all wash into the stream.

This particular cow pie that's in front of us here has had some rainfall hit it.

You can see it's partially washed on the top, and I'm just going to cut it away here so that you can see the crust that's formed on there, and you can see how this real tough crust here is protecting the more liquid material down below it.

The insects, various--there's all different kinds of them--start working on the cow pie and decomposing it and converting it into carbon dioxide and water and releasing the plant nutrients, primarily nitrogen and phosphorus compounds, which then are recycled back into the plants.

Since growing up on a farm, I've become very keenly interested in the ideas of water quality, and I think this is one way that farmers can really help the quality of the runoff that's coming off from their farms.

In Brown County, outside of Green Bay, big farms produce a heap of manure.

The largest farms are now housing 400 to up to 800 cows under one roof, and with each cow putting out over 100 pounds a day, these operations generate a lot of very natural resources.

Big operations rely on the services of a custom hauler who specializes in emptying the manure storage structures in the spring and fall.

The first step is to lower in an agitator, a kind of giant blender, which mixes the solids and liquids.

This pit holds about a million gallons, which is an average size for a larger farm.

Once the manure is beaten to the proper consistency, it's pumped through this mile-long hose to a tractor, which injects it into the ground.

The business used to rely heavily on some pretty rough estimates.

When we started out, we used to use a string and a level to measure the pit and come up with some sort of a gallons per hour that we were putting out there to adjust our speed.

And we finally found meters that did the job in the last, oh, about four or five years now.

And it's like coming out of the dark into daylight, you know, you knew what you were doing exactly, and we could adjust our speed on the tractor accordingly.

Probably right now putting on about 12,000 to the acre.

12 to 14, I'm not sure.

I'd have to check with them.

They used to probably put it on a little bit heavier than they do now.

You know, there was up to 20, 25,000 gallons to the acre.

That's almost half.

Well, not quite half.

Well, right, but 12 to 25.

12 to 15 is the average for a corn crop.

That's where we like to be.

You've got slippage on a tractor, and there's a radar right underneath the tractor.

And when you notice how he speeds up and slows down, well, that's because when he's slipping, he's got to speed up to make that tractor move.

And so you get accurate speed all the time because the manure is coming out there.

That same gallon is coming out there all the time.

So you've got to keep that tractor moving at the right speed.

It gives us the accuracy of what the farmer wants to put so many gallons on so he knows exactly how much in.

And P and K he's putting out in the field for nutrients.

We get long ditches and waterways.

We'll shut down through them so we'll keep it out of the waterways so if you get a rainstorm, it doesn't end up down in a creek or wherever, you know.

Keep it in the ground.

As you can see in the field now, you don't see any manure on the top.

It's all put in the ground, and rain can't get at it.

It stays put pretty much right where we put it.

Another custom hauler, Phil Schneider, has seen great changes in the industry.

In 1980, we started out just doing the neighbors, and then we kept on doing more and more.

Now we're doing about 150 pits, so it just kind of took off word of mouth and went from there.

Here, pits range from any size, 500,000 to--we've got some of them coming in 7 million now, so it's all kinds of ranges that we do.

Here I'm pumping out of a--it's about a million and two slurry store, and the rate is 1,200 gallons a minute we're pumping here.

We've got about 3/4 mile of hose out.

We're putting on about 11,000 gallons per acre, and we're splashing it on top here.

Well, the manure comes in the hose, comes up through the top, and then comes in the spinner here, which is run hydraulically, and that will broadcast it out about 35 feet.

That way you don't have it landing so close behind the tractor.

Less trips over the field is less wear on the hose and less compaction in spring for the farmer, plus you can get her out there further.

I made it.

I got a shop at home, and I pretty well know what I want to get to and kind of design my own stuff.

Works out pretty good that way.

Years ago, you used to put it on and just get rid of it, and now you're putting it on, cutting back on your fertilizers and so on down the line, and utilization factors come in because you got the product there.

You might as well utilize it instead of just getting it out there and getting rid of it.

But the bigger farmers and getting bigger all the time, it's a matter of distance.

You're going to have to haul it further down the road, and it's getting big that way.

When you talk 7 million gallons in one spot, it's a lot of manure that has to be moved out further down the road.

Well, there it is, more than you need to know about manure.

When it's in the right place at the right time, it's a powerful fertilizer.

It adds organic matter to a soil, builds it up, so more rain soaks in, and plants can spread more roots.

Manure heals the soil and feeds the earthworms and other creatures that live there.

Manure is amazing stuff.

So the next time you're in the country and see a farmer spreading manure, take a deep breath.

It's the smell of life.

[Music]