Antibiotics are commonly used in animal agriculture to prevent disease and help increase animal's ability to absorb feed. However, a substantial amount of the antibiotics added to animal feed may be excreted in urine and manure. These antibiotics can potentially appear in surface and ground waters from manure-applied lands. This could be problematic in the karst region of the upper midwest, where soils are relatively shallow and underlain with fractured bedrock, and landscapes are steep and prone to surface sealing. In these areas, macropores in tandem with fractured bedrock act as a conduit for transport of surface-applied chemicals to groundwater. Likewise, surface sealing causes substantial overland flow and chemical transport with sediment. A study is being conducted at the University of Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station at Lancaster, WI to determine the extent of antibiotic losses in both surface runoff and through leaching from solid beef manure and liquid hog manure applications in chisel plow and no-till tillage systems. Percolating water is collected with pan and wick samplers at 0.6 and 1.2 m depths and surface runoff is monitored using a tipping bucket and a split sampler. Antibiotics monitored are chlortetracycline, tylosin, and monensin. In this paper, we describe the experimental set-up and preliminary results.
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