Spray irrigation on farmland draws big crowd

Tucker Burch, a former UWGB student who returned to campus on Friday, Feb. 5 as a guest of the NAS faculty, drew a crowd so large the venue had to be changed to a lecture hall. Burch was here to address human health risks from exposure to aerosolized zoonotic pathogens during spray irrigation of dairy manure. Burch is a Research Agriculture Engineer with the USDA-Ag Research Service. His speech focused on two objectives: 1) estimating human health risk due to the aerosolized zoonotic pathogens downwind of spray-irrigated dairy manure, and 2) determining which factors control risk estimates, such as distance from the sources or weather conditions. Burch received his undergraduate degree at Marquette in Civil Engineering after transferring from UWGB. He completed his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota where he studied the fate of antibiotic resistance genes during treatment and disposal of residual municipal wastewater solids.