Madison, Wisc.-Agriculture is willing to support a bill in the state legislature to prohibit statewide the use of phosphate fertilizer on lawns if amended to preempt local governments from adopting their own ban, according to the Wisconsin Agribusiness Council. “We don’t like it,” Ferron Havens, council president and CEO told Green Markets. “But we’re trying to make the best of the situation (since) it’s definitely going to pass.” The bill (AB396) would affect only private and commercial lawns and would allow exemptions for newly established turf, but would have no affect on agriculture. Havens said the objective is to make sure the rule-making authority is maintained to the state agriculture department. Some dealers, he noted, are concerned about the possibility that bags of phosphate-containing fertilizer would have to be kept behind counters. “We don’t want to have to do that,” he added, indicating that signs on the product or at counters indicating “not for use on lawns” would be more acceptable. Several local governments already have their own controls, and it wasn’t certain how these would be affected. Dept. of Natural Resources officials have stated that the action would be unlikely to affect the water quality in the Lake Winnebago system. But others, including conservationists, considered it a starting point on which to build in the future. The press quoted Rob McLennan, DNR’s Winnebago watershed supervisor, as saying that because the lake system is at the bottom of 6,000 square miles of drainage area, the phosphate from lawn fertilizers compared to other nutrients would be minimal.
Transparency Across the Fertilizer Value-Chain