" Poor cows - it's not their fault that greedy humans keep stuffing more of them into their huge barns where they are forced to live their entire lives chained to a feeding and milking station. Nor is it their fault the way those humans misuse the waste the cows produce.

The four-letter word you need is CAFO, not cows. "

" How can Jessica rationalize her argument that residences are to blame? Skaneateles Lake has seen an explosion of new homes over the last decade, maybe even more so than Owasco Lake yet their nutrient levels haven't affected the lake. I wonder why? Does it have something to do with that nasty 4 letter word that Jessica doesn't want to say as the root cause? Cows. That's the reason for the decline in the lake along with Groton. Residential homes would have a minimal impact compared with cows which produce 23 times as much waste as a human. "

" P.S. Bizzaro -- the UNTREATED natural cow manure is not nearly as bad for the environment as the steeped-and-fermented LIQUID manure, which has been sitting and growing more bacteria and so forth, and which has no solids to slow down its downhill slide into the lakes and other water. "

" bizzaro -- if you want to try to work within the regulatory system, then you have to pressure the DEC --effectively-- to do their job and actually REGULATE.

However, the regulatory system is broken. My view is that once you regulate something, you've already lost -- you've said, "It's OK to pollute, we're just going to slightly slow down the rate at which you are allowed to pollute (on paper, but since they don't do their job, agribusiness (and any other industry, to be fair) can go ahead and pollute as fast as they want.

The answer is to fight it at an entirely different level. You need to educate yourself (and your local government) on how corporations (including agribusiness) came to have more Constitutional rights than natural human persons, and have that OBSCENE misinterpretation of our Constitution reversed. That's a big battle -- it's what allows corporations to do whatever they want in pursuit of profit, including destroying our environment, our quality of life, our communities.

It starts by local governments demanding the right to say what goes in their own local communities. It starts with this local governments passing local ordinances saying We will not allow the spreading of liquid manure or human waste on farm fields here, for example. Then you have to be prepared for the corporations to fight it -- and if they do, chances are good they will win, because they have this sick and wrongful interpretation of the Constitution (from a late 1800s case Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific Railroad -- when the Supreme Court acted under extreme influence of the then all-powerful railroad industry) to back them up -- and that is exactly the battle that needs fighting.

Dozens of communities have already taken exactly this stand, mostly in Pennsylvania, but also in Vermont and some other states. When enough stand up, whether it's against liquid manure, or sewage sludge, or industrial wind farms or nuclear dumps or strip mining or whatever -- it will force the case back to the Supreme Court, where corporations will have to show their ugliness to try to convince us why they should be considered "persons" with privileges greater than those of natural persons.

And hopefully, this time, the Supreme Court will decide in favor of the natural persons for whom the Founding Fathers intended our rights and freedoms, and put more restraints on companies, which was also the intention of the Founding Fathers, an intention that corporations have skillfully circumvented over the past couple centuries.

Check out www.celdf.org for more info. "

" Now that sounds more like it Jessica. Please acknowledge loudly the impact all the town ditching combined with the untreated cow manure and absent hedgerows adds to this. That is missing from the above article. This is a DIRECT threat and unchecked source of massive pollution in Owasco Lake. I checked several streams after runoff settles and the bovine fecal presence is OBVIOUS. What can be done? "

" Corporate agriculture does their work on an industrial scale, which means they are pours tons more cr*p (literally) into the land, air and water than residential (though I am also against people who put chemicals on their lawns, for the sake of their children, pets, wild animals and neighbors as well as the lake -- nature's color beats plastic green any day of the week, even when it's sun-crisped brown).

Until the DEC starts acting like the regulatory body they are supposedly supposed to be instead of the Agribusinessman's Buddy, we'll keep right on seeing those high levels of gunk in the lakes. "