What water quality problems does the DNR face? Robin Pruisner explains.

TRANSCRIPT:

A lot of people want to point fingers at the farmer when it comes to too much nutrients in our waters, and while I'm not going to say it's not the farmers fault, everyone needs to share the blame on this. So when we start talking about regulation, a regulation where we would tell a farmer you can only apply so much amount of fertilizer, that gets very dangerous from the farmer's perspective because farmers today need to stay profitable. They can't keep farming if they lose money, so they have to be able to raise crops and enough crops [to] get a good price for them. In order to keep their yields up high enough, they need to use things like fertilizers and insecticides. So if we start putting massive regulations on farmers, farmers aren't going to be able to stay in the business. And in the end, we're all going to be affected by that because we all need to eat. And farmers are who raise that food for us.