Corn and soybean farmer Michael Ganschow was an easy recruit for Lauren Lurkins, the Illinois Farm Bureau’s director of environmental policy, as she was encouraging farmers to install wood chip bioreactors on their farms, reports The Daily Republican.
“I met Lauren in 2016, and less than two years later, she’s showing up at my farm with equipment, digging a hole and filling it with wood chips,” Ganschow said to a crowd of farmers, agriculture leaders and state and national representatives and staff Tuesday morning at the latest in the IFB’s series of Nutrient Stewardship Field Days.
Ganschow is a sixth-generation farmer in Bureau County, and his grandfather was among the first Illinois farmers to implement no-till practices.
“Conservation has always been a big part of what we do,” he said.
A wood chip bioreactor might sound like something straight out of Marvel Comics. In reality, it’s essentially a trench filled with wood chips that filter out nitrates that would otherwise pollute tile drainage water, and then streams, and then the Mississippi River, and then the Gulf of Mexico. You get the idea.
Once a pipe system directs drainage water through control structures and into the bioreactor, bacteria in the wood chips eat the nitrates from fertilizers that go unused by crops, and then convert those nitrates into nitrogen gas that’s just as safe for the environment as the 78 percent of stable nitrogen in the air we breathe.
Read more at The Daily Republican.
