Friends of Rural New York

Mega-farms stoke worries over waste spills

Sunday, October 09, 2005
Fran Henry
Plain Dealer Reporter
From a distance, all you can see are the long nondescript buildings that pass for barns these days in many rural areas. But you don’t wonder what’s inside. All you have to do is breathe.

The smell of manure fills the air.

And the people in five Ohio counties are bracing themselves for more.

Since April, the Ohio Department of Agriculture cleared the way for five more industrial-size dairies: a 4,500-cow dairy in Hardin County, which will be Ohio’s largest; a 2,100-cow dairy in Greene County; a 3,900-cow dairy in Williams County; a 1,600-cow dairy in Defiance County; and a 2,100-cow farm in Mercer County. Pork Champ will add 1,541 hogs to its Marion County operation.

Altogether, the farms’ 14,200 cows and 4,032 swine will produce enough manure each year to fill uncovered earthen storage ponds with 135 million gallons of manure - manure that’s liquefied as it’s hosed off the barns’ concrete floors.

Ideally, the liquefied manure is used in spring to fertilize upcoming crops for other farmers since very few large-scale animal operations have enough land for this purpose.

But plans can go awry, and the liquefied manure may be applied to fields in inappropriate weather - often on frozen ground. Or manure can be overapplied, allowing the putrid liquid to go where it’s not wanted, dripping viral and bacterial pathogens along the way. It can flow into ditches which in turn flow into streams and rivers and lakes.

It has happened in Ohio often enough to keep the rural population rallying in opposition - impotently, it seems - and sometimes taking dairy farmers to court. From 2003 to 2004, the state’s manure-related complaints doubled, from 51 to 103, according to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. And in the past 30 years, the number of agriculture-related fish kills has increased, from 180 to 311 per decade.

Manure accidents are happening nationwide, even as rural Americans coast to coast draw together in protest.

The Ohio Department of Agriculture’s livestock permitting department, however, retains complete confidence in the system.

Ohio has not had a major manure catastrophe because of the state’s “rules and regulations,” said Kevin Elder, director of the state’s permitting department. “We don’t have leaks unless someone makes a mistake and lets it spill. You can’t eliminate human error out of everything. It’s one of the reasons we have rules and criteria.”

So does New York, which touts its farm-permitting program “among the strongest of its kind,” according to Denise M. Sheehan, commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

But mistakes happen, as a Lowville, N.Y., restaurant owner observed from a front-row seat - the deck of his riverside restaurant.

Stinky situation

for nearby restaurant

Steven Fuller was no stranger in town when he opened his restaurant on the Black River. He knew a small dairy farm was a quarter-mile away, but he was unbothered.

What he couldn’t know was that the small herd would grow to 4,500 cows in seven years, putting the farm into a whole new category - a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.

As time passed, the restaurant’s riverside deck was not always the place diners chose to enjoy their steak Diane and Caesar salad.

Around Aug. 10, Fuller noticed that the already pungent smell of manure had intensified tenfold and a funky film coated the river. The cause quickly became the talk of the town.

Three million gallons of liquefied manure had escaped from Marks Dairy’s earthen-walled storage pond into a drainage ditch before gushing into the river. As the spill wended its way to Lake Ontario, it left a trail of 200,000 to 250,000 dead fish in its wake.

The Lowville spill is not the first in the nation’s large-scale livestock farm industry. Nor is it likely to be the last, considering the industry’s track record and the huge amounts of manure it must manage - 575 billion pounds a year, three times more than produced by the U.S. human population.

The storage pond system has become firmly entrenched since large-scale farming began to replace small farms about 50 years ago, placing livestock farming into fewer and fewer hands.

“It’s a very primitive, rudimentary way of dealing with waste product,” said Laura Krebsbach, associate regional representative of the Sierra Club, of Nebraska. “It’s called the latest technology and there’s no technology involved. They call it ‘state of the art,’ but it’s just a hole in the ground.”

Manure management specialists, however, disagree.

Ron E. Sheffield, an assistant professor at the University of Idaho biological and agricultural engineering department, said that “an engineered earthen storage structure has specific slopes, an emergency spillway, and the soils are compacted and placed in a certain way to achieve a very low leakage rate.”

Everything leaks, he said, even glass. “Solid doesn’t exist.”

The issue comes down to “a socially and environmentally acceptable rate of leakage,” he said. And this rate varies across the country according to local geology, availability of earthen materials and different soil characteristics.

Regional economist Bill Weida, retired head of the Colorado College economics department, believes the reason the system endures is very simple. “The cheapest way possible to get rid of manure is to throw it out the back door. What we’re left with is the [pond] system. They’re cesspools,” he said.

Academics could research alternatives, he said, but they don’t because agriculture professors depend on agribusiness to finance research.

“Land grant colleges were set up to . . . help small farmers become more efficient. But as state budgets got tighter and tighter, research budgets were cut and profs became required to find their own research money. The small farmers can’t pay for research, but agribusiness can.”

Agriculture educators are “paid hacks that will say anything for a buck as long as they keep getting research money,” said Weida, director of the Grace Factory Farm Project team that helps groups organize opposition to mega-farm development.

Although Karen Mancl, an Ohio State University agricultural engineering professor, supports the storage-pond model, when she tried to get money to research alternatives, she came up empty.

“I tried for about 10 years to find funding because it was part of my job description,” she said. “Then I got my job description changed.”

As for spills and leaks, Mancl blames mismanagement, not the pond. “You don’t have to fill the [storage pond] before you empty it. When the time is right, you should be taking manure out,” she said. “Too many operators wait till they’re full.”

Don Jones, an agricultural engineering professor at Purdue University in Indiana, doesn’t think the system warrants scrutiny. “I’m not convinced, based on the data, that this is an enormous problem.

“We’ve never had a breach of a lagoon in the state. We have more than 2,000 lagoons in the state without breaks. We take quite a bit of care in designing them and enforcing the [rules].”

Indiana storage ponds have indeed racked up thousands of leaks and spills, including two spills at ponds at Purdue’s Cooperative Extension Service, according to a 1998 National Resources Defense Council report.

Jones acknowledged that this report is accurate.

Storage and handling

mishaps nationwide

Indiana is hardly alone. Following is a small sampling of failures, recent and past, in manure storage and handling:

On July 21, a spraying device got stuck while spewing liquefied manure onto a field in Greeley County, Neb. The problem was discovered 26 hours later after 1.5 million gallons of manure had traveled five miles.

In August, Iowa suffered three manure spills. More than 8,000 fish died in Roberts Creek in Clayton County after an outside storage basin was allowed to overflow. Another spill at a hog and cow farm caused Coffee Creek in Delaware County to run black with manure for about a mile and a half, and some 1,300 fish died in Bear Creek in Delaware County when manure ran off a field and leaked from a dairy’s manure containment structure.

In April, an estimated 100,000 gallons of dairy cow manure spilled from a manure storage tank into a creek near Rockville, Minn.

Two Nebraska feedlots, holding 7,501 cattle, were fined in August for allowing manure discharges into tributaries of the Elkhorn River.

In 2001, an Illinois dairy farmer pumped about 2 million gallons of liquefied manure into a ravine to keep the farm’s 40 million-gallon storage tank from overflowing. However, the ravine’s small dams failed to hold back the manure, which spilled into a nearby creek. A similar incident in Hancock County in 1997 caused 800,000 gallons of hog manure to spill into Bear Creek.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources documented 259 out of 329 spills from Iowa CAFOs between 1992 and 2002. The spills claimed more than 2.6 million fish.

Two CAFOs in Lenawee and Hillsdale counties in Michigan have had so many spills and leaks into local waterways that the owner, Vreba-Hoff Dairy LLC, has been ordered to install a wastewater treatment system costing $1 million.

In 1995, an 8-acre storage pond broke open and spilled 25 million gallons of hog manure into North Carolina’s New River. The incident killed 10 million fish and closed 364,000 acres of wetlands to shellfishing.

In 1997, 100,000 gallons of hog manure overflowed from a lagoon and spilled into Minnesota’s Beaver Creek, killing about 690,000 fish.

All of the incidents had far-reaching consequences, as the Lowville incident illustrates.

The spill there forced Watertown, N.Y., to temporarily shut down its water intake pipes. And the state declared the river unsafe for water activities for two weeks. It reopened just in time for the North American Freestyle Kayak Championships.

But Steven Miller, the restaurant owner, doesn’t feel too secure about the area’s immediate future.

“People aren’t going to rush to the Black River to do sport fishing any time soon.”

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

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