Quiz: Midwestern Eutrophication

DS sent me this:

Question: Madison, WI residents have indicated they are willing to pay for clean lakes. What programs might be enacted to reduce local agricultural pollution?

One Solution: County residents could pay at least half of the cost of treating farming waste, e.g. the cost of transporting manure to a methane power plant.

Thoughts: We pay taxes and entry fees to protect state and national parks, so why not our neighborhoods? It's important to consider the "rainforest" model, i.e., it's not fair to save the rainforest unless residents are given a means to live -- via ecotourism, harvesting, carbon credits, etc. Since farmland and farmers are increasingly endangered resources, it's important that their economic welfare be protected. If polluters have to pay, the farmers may go out of business and agriculture may move to unprotected areas. If the community wants to have farmers nearby, it will have to share the cost of cleaning up pollution.

Further Notes: The main source of manure runoff isn't concentrated dairy farms, but staple crops spreading too much manure or at the wrong time of year (winter + ice = spring runoff). Possible solutions are regulations, treating manure to remove P, and (for dairies) doing something with extra manure that makes sense at small scales and large distances.

Maybe farmers wouldn't really move, but they could certainly sell their land to suburban fringe developers if regulation compliance was too expensive. (How much would "clean water" measures cost? How much is too much for farmers?). I gather farming already isn't a very profitable business, and supposedly industrial ag is necessary if we're going to support urban centers. Also, most dairy farms here are much smaller than the 1,000 head operations that can supply a methane generator.

DZ's Idea: It may not be a bad idea to tax ALL farms based on their tailwater (hard to measure but not impossible) and then rebate those taxes in proportion to the farms that have the cleanest tailwater (measured in random inspections). That would reduce FLOW in volume and encourage QUALITY in output.

Quiz Question: What do you readers propose that the people of Wisconsin do to maintain their farms AND their environment?