Is there a good reason that a farm business should be exempt from good management practices as it pertains to petroleum? Don't give me the sob story of my "daddy was", or "we feed americur by God".
I did not just fall off the turnip truck. Farms pollute right along with the rest of society. Fertilizers run off of farms, period, end of story, wish all you want but it happens. Fuel spills happen, rivers flood the tanks float away, leaving the tank area the chisel plow swings into the tank and ruptures it, farmers bury tanks and fittings without knowing of or understanding galvanic corrosion. Waste oil gets "used" for other purposes from burning stumps to killing weeds, poured into transfer pumps during the winter to keep them from locking up ( they are promptly dumped come spring to avoid contaminating the livestock water supply).
These are just a few of the things I have witnessed or been guilty of myself. Per acre a town is polluting more than a farm, duh. A farm / farmer pollutes a vast amount more on a per person basis than a city dweller ever could. Financially, how could you afford to? Where on earth could a city boy put 70,000#s of DAP or 28%? How could he manage to collect 10,000 gallons of hog manure? It makes sense to spend your time where it produces the most return. That means one gov't official spends one day on one farm and is able to work a plan that covers large amounts of potential risk. If you have a fly problem in the kitchen where do you go first? You close the door, one great big hole. Next you address the holes in the window screens.
Simple fact is this is (finally)your ox is being gored. I don't blame you for being upset, I did not like a single plan I had to implement when I ran a fertilizer plant. I worked up SARA title II plans, OSHA training plans. All this for 4 full time employees and 3 seasonals. I did the back breaking labor of building the elephant walls to contain fertilizer tanks. I cleaned, filled and sealed minibulk chemical tanks, I've punctured triple rinsed and burned enough 2.5 gallon jugs to store a good part of Lake Superior. Sprayed 200k acres with pesticides from open cabs to charcoal filtered air systems in just 10 years.
Now guess what. The fertilizer industry is cleaner now than it was when I left. When I left it was far cleaner than it was when I started ten short years earlier. Am I supposed to believe it was not worth it? Everyone likes to squall about regulations. I hear the same squalling about atrazine in well water, one oil well in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and the world is gone crazy. Toss 50 gallons of oil into your local water supply or how about one gallon down your own well, now we are talking a problem, eh?
Get over it, it has been done wrong in the past and now it is time to get it right. Pollution is your cross to bear. For your great great grand daddy it was busting virgin prairie with horses. Great grand daddy dug tile by hand and fed threshing machines by hand. Grand dad learned how to be a mechanic and electrician working on early tractors, or milking parlors with no spare parts or any other sort of "convenience" while feeding a nation at war. Dad had to learn how to be a marketing expert, and a shrewd manager of time and input costs, he used machinery and chemicals to cover an amount of acreage thought inconceivable without slavery a mere 120 years earlier. Now you have to do all this without making a mess of the environment, you'll get over it, the world will prosper in spite of or perhaps because of these efforts.
