Ohio Governor John Kasich wants to crack down on farm pollution of the Great Lakes, making some measures mandatory.
For example, about 7,000 farmers tilling about two million acres will need manure storages and manure-injection equipment to reduce phosphorous runoff.
Ontario has long worked with farmers to reduce phosphorous runoff, but the measures are voluntary, albeit backed with government subsidies as incentives to, for example, build manure storages, fence cattle out of streams and rivers and prepare and follow nutrient management plans.
Kasich signed an executive order Wednesday that signals a more aggressive approach to finding a way to stop the algae from taking over huge swaths of the shallowest of the Great Lakes.
The summertime blooms cause tainted drinking water, fish kills and beach closures.
An outbreak in 2014 contaminated the tap water for two days for more than 400,000 people around Toledo.
Kasich's order calls for issuing "distressed watershed" designations for eight creeks and rivers in northwestern Ohio that are the source for large amounts of phosphorus-rich fertilizer and manure.
Those designations would then require farmers to evaluate their land and make changes.
