FORT COLLINS - Brock Faulkner, a Texas A&M University agriculture engineer, stood up Thursday in front of a room full of farmers in Fort Morgan and railed against the perception that Colorado's agriculture producers are foul factory farmers. That's an idea he said was generated by the 2008 documentary film "Food, Inc.," which heavily criticized American agribusiness.
"When this is what consumers think about production agriculture, and they're told that Rocky Mountain National Park has nitrogen deposition problems and it's because of factory farms in eastern Colorado, they're going to believe it if we don't go out there and tell our story, and we don't go out and do what it takes to do our part to reduce nitrogen deposition," he said.
Rocky Mountain National Park, with its more than 3 million annual visitors, is an economic powerhouse for Estes Park and the tourism industry in Larimer County, but the national park's increased levels of nitrogen found in soils and alpine lakes could mean that farmers across the Eastern Plains from Fort Collins to Burlington could have to change how they do business.
The reason for that is complex, but the motivation behind some farmers wanting to take action now is simple: "We never want somebody telling us what we have to do," Wellington sugar beet and wheat grower Troy Seaworth said.
He attended a nitrogen deposition and air quality symposium Thursday in Fort Morgan meant to educate farmers about how they are changing the ecosystem at Rocky Mountain National Park. The symposium was sponsored by the state, Colorado State University, the National Park Service and a host of agriculture organizations.
Seaworth wants the state and the federal government to give local farmers a chance to manage their impacts on air quality before being mandated to do so.
When Rocky Mountain National Park was created nearly a century ago, Congress mandated the federal government protect its world-renowned scenery and ecology unimpaired for future generations. Since then, the park's air quality has gained the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's highest level of protection from manmade air pollution.
Much of the air pollution at the park comes from vehicle tailpipes, power plants and industrial sources all around Denver and other Front Range urban areas, but much of it also comes from ammonia emitted from farms and feed lots throughout eastern Colorado.
"Ammonia comes from the degradation of manure, and it comes from nitrification and denitrification," said Faulkner. "The first place we have it is fertilizer application. We put organic fertilizer on the ground, there's nitrogen for the microbes. What happens is, we go through this lovely complex microbiological transformation, and some of it comes out as ammonia. We have emissions from livestock. Urea combines with manure soil, and guess what? We hydrolyze that urea and we release ammonia."
Those ammonia emissions, which farmers worry may be soon regulated by the government, react with other industrial air pollutants to create nitrogen particles that are blown into Rocky Mountain National Park. Once nitrogen is deposited in the mountains, it speeds up the decline of the park's forests, invites the growth of invasive plant species and harms native aquatic animals and plants by changing the chemistry of the park's streams and high alpine lakes, said National Park Service biologist Jim Cheatham.
"More than 26 years of scientific research indicates that deposition of excess atmospheric nitrogen is twice the tolerable rate and is impacting natural resources in Rocky Mountain National Park," park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said Friday.
Park officials are hoping a collaboration among park officials, the EPA, state environmental regulators and farmers will go a long way to alleviate the problem.
Finding Better Ways to Farm
Though ammonia regulations are not imminent, the state may soon fail to meet emissions goals it set as part of a collaborative 2007 Rocky Mountain National Park nitrogen deposition management plan, and the state is strongly encouraging farmers to do what they can to reduce their emissions on their own.
"You want these voluntary controls to work; you don't want to fail here," said Jon Slutsky, a Colorado Air Quality Control Commission member and owner of La Luna Dairy in Wellington. "Sooner or later there will be a regulation. Being a good corporate citizen is good for your bottom line."
Though voluntary emissions controls rarely work, voluntary "best management practices" for reducing ammonia emissions are what the state is pushing now because of the nationwide backlash against government regulation, he said.
"I think the right best management practices have to make economic sense," said Dave Anderson, a wheat and corn grower from Haxtun in Phillips County and the director of the Colorado Association of Wheat Growers.
Many of the methods wheat growers can use to reduce ammonia emissions are already being implemented because those practices are economically driven, he said.
Instead of spreading fertilizer across fields in mass quantities, it is either injected directly into the soil or included in irrigation water, he said.
"We spoon feed crops exactly where they need to be fed," Anderson said. "A lot of eastern Colorado agriculture converted to these methods over the last five years. It's economically driven. The current price of nitrogen is somewhere around 60 cents a pound, so you can't afford to have any of it get away from you."
There isn't much more wheat growers can do to reduce ammonia emissions, he said, so the best thing for the state to do is concentrate on helping cattle growers and feed lots manage their emissions.
For dairy farmers, keeping ammonia emissions low is a matter of managing urine and keeping the place clean, Slutsky said.
As a way to keep ammonia in check, La Luna Dairy doesn't stockpile cow manure, and workers there keep corrals clean and maintain them so the ground dries quickly to prevent urine from reacting with the manure as much as possible, he said. Cattle producers are also urged to use more absorbent bedding choices for cattle to prevent urine from touching the manure, he said.
"If our controls are voluntary, maybe we have a little more control over how we address this," he said. "If we involve the state or EPA and they start doing to us what was done to power plants, it's pretty onerous. For older dairies, there are things that would be very costly for a farm to implement. If we had to start ripping up concrete, redesign farms so we drain away urine, redesign manure systems, these are things that would really, really impact a farm."
CSU is developing a system that both Anderson and Seaworth said they hope will help cattle producers more easily manage emissions by being able to choose the best time to handle manure based on weather conditions.
The system would help farmers determine the best time to turn compost and other activities involving manure depending on when the weather is most likely to blow the pollutants toward Rocky Mountain National Park, CSU researcher Christina Williams said.
For Slutsky, using those kinds of systems for reducing ammonia emissions is a matter of good management.
"Good management will be asked of us more and more as the years go by," he said. "Ag has an unusual opportunity - a chance to help maintain a fragile ecosystem in a national park and minimize regulation in the future."
Written by Bobby Magill of the Fort Collins Coloradoan
(Copyright © 2012 Fort Collins Coloradoan, All Rights Reserved)
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