Scott Murray did not want to leave the home in rural Juneau County where he and his family had lived for more than 20 years. But with the house surrounded on three sides by manure irrigation systems, life had become a nightmare.
“It even got into the walls of our home,” Murray said of the liquid manure spray that drifted onto his property from the Central Sands Dairy across the road. “It was an ammonia smell. It hurt so bad even to breathe.”
In 2011, the Murrays sold their house and moved.
The buyer?
Central Sands Dairy.
“And it’s a good thing,” Murray said, “because my property wasn’t worth a nickel.”
Life for the Murrays, along with other Wisconsin families, has been disrupted by the relatively rare practice in Wisconsin of using water irrigation systems to spray liquid manure on farm fields.