Agricultural best management practices and groundwater protection

Excerpt

Public concern over groundwater contamination has grown in the last decade. This concern stems from our increasing dependence on ground-water and the increasing contamination of private and public wells.

Until recently, public concern for ground-water contamination centered around pathogens that could be treated effectively with disinfection. Increasingly, however, chemical contamination appears to be a more pervasive and intractable problem. Landfills, lagoons, underground storage tanks, chemical spills, well injection sites, septic tanks, pesticide and fertilizer use, concentrated livestock operations, and other more minor sources are known to be leaking chemicals into groundwater at concentrations that sometimes exceed drinking water standards or health advisories.

Best management practices (BMPs) are methods, measures, or practices designed to prevent or reduce pollution. They include structural and nonstructural controls as well as operation and maintenance procedures. The practices can be in varying combinations to prevent or control pollution from a particular nonpoint source (19).

Agricultural pollution is regulated under several federal statutes (19)

▸ The 1972, 1977, and 1987 Clean Water Act (CWA) amendments specifically address nonpoint-source pollution, of which agriculture is a major contributor in most of the United States. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) nonpointsource program is administered …