Sir, your timing is perfect. There is no better opportunity to have that kind of cooperation than we have, really, as of today. The International Joint Commission essentially, through a very intensive study that has been essentially confirmed by other parallel, university studies, has quantified the kinds of reductions that we are going to have to get.
Starting with Lake Erie—and this can be the perfect example—the states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York and the Province of Ontario should, under the auspices of the water quality agreement, be sitting down as early as tomorrow. Unfortunately it won't be tomorrow. It takes a little while to get all the people together and say that we have to get such-and-such amount of reduction in the western basin, in the central basin, and in the eastern basin and ask how we can equitably divide those amounts.
You could set aside the specific laws or whatever, because you can get wrapped around the axle very quickly with something like that. How much reduction can you get? What is an equitable reduction from either side?
Then most importantly, a lot of this is going to boil down to best management practices.
Some of the suggestions are these. Don't apply any of the phosphorus—and you're a farmer, and you know better than I—in the fall. Second, don't apply it on frozen and snow-covered ground; it's much more a question of the proper application at a time when you can get the absorption. Obviously you can't control the rain, but you can control the timing and the weather conditions—whether it's frozen land, or in the fall.
I think there is this opportunity for the province and the four states to sit down and ask how they can come up with an equitable way and how they can share the best practices under the auspices of the International Joint Commission.
