McFarmer, yes, it is your opinion. Which, in my mind, is more informed than mine, as mine was formed by reading articles in newspapers and magazines. I don't trust either to give the complete story, and your input about the county encouraging and owning is new information for me. Duly noted.
And, you make good points about the producers of the pesticides and fertilizers that are now contaminating our waters. Those companies should bear much of the cost of mitigating the hazards from their use. But, as with cigarettes, were the farmers completely ignorant of the hazards of the chemicals they were putting on the fields? As with cigarette users, I think not. I am not saying the farmers should shoulder all the burden, but if putting a filter buffer back in and losing some farm land is not too much to ask. Currently, and I know prices fluctuate, an acre that produces 225 bu of corn yields about $785 at the co-op. Take out the costs of planting and maintaining that corn, and the profit lost is much less.
If there is a 30' buffer, it takes a mile of buffer to equal 7 acres. As a percentage of total productive farm land, that's less than 1%, if it goes across a farmable section. Granted, you can't farm all 640 acres of a section, but that is still, maybe, a loss of 1.5%. I don't want to take a hit of 1.5% from my paychecks, but we lose about that to inflation every year or two.
There is no perfect solution. CRP was supposed to help take poor farmland out of production. We are losing lots of CRP every year, as farmers apparently are able to make more by farming marginal land than they were being paid have CRP. Something has to be ceded by all parties. Everyone is losing something in the process.