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Manure becomes pollutant as its volume grows unmanageable
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, this is irony: The United States has reduced the manmade pollutants that left its waterways dead, discolored and occasionally flammable.
But now, it has managed to smother the same waters with the most natural stuff in the world.
Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem, scientists and environmentalists say. The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields.
That excess manure gives off air pollutants, and it is the country's fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas.
And it washes down with the rain, helping to cause the 230 oxygen-deprived "dead zones" that have proliferated along the U.S. coast. In the Chesapeake Bay, about one-fourth of the pollution that leads to dead zones can be traced to the back ends of cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys.
Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as more familiar pollution problems, like human sewage, acid rain or industrial waste. The Obama administration has made moves to change that but already has found itself facing off with farm interests, entangled in the contentious politics of poop.
In recent months, Oklahoma has battled poultry companies from Arkansas in court, blaming their birds' waste for slimy and deadened rivers downstream. In Florida, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed first-of-their-kind limits on pollutants found in manure.
In the Senate, Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) has proposed a bill that would allow farmers in the Chesapeake watershed to cut pollution more than required and sell the extra "credits" to other polluters. The EPA, in the middle of an overhaul for the failed Chesapeake cleanup, also has threatened to tighten rules on large farms.
"We now know that we have more nutrient pollution from animals in the Chesapeake Bay watershed" than from human sewage, said J. Charles Fox, the EPA's new Chesapeake czar. "Nutrients" is the scientific word for the main pollutants found in manure, treated sewage, and runoff from fertilized lawns. They are the bay's chief evil, feeding unnatural algae blooms that cause dead zones.
Around the country, agricultural interests have fought back against moves like these, saying that new rules on manure could mean crushing new costs for farmers.
"It's clearly going to put a squeeze on people that they've always said they didn't want to squeeze," including family-run farms, said Don Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation.
The story of manure is already a gloomy counterpoint to the triumphs in fighting pollution since the first Earth Day in 1970. An air pollutant that causes acid rain has been cut by 56 percent. By one measure, the output from sewage plants got 45 percent cleaner.
But, according to Cornell University researchers, the amount of one key pollutant -- nitrogen -- entering the environment in manure has increased by at least 60 percent since the 1970s.
"We've dealt with the kind of conventional pollutants," that helped spark the first Earth Day, said Donald F. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
"Now, we see the things that are eating our lunch, if you will, are natural products . . . that are just overloading the system."
The reasons for manure's rise as a pollutant have to do, environmentalists say, with a shift in agriculture and a soft spot in the law.
In recent decades, livestock raising has shifted to a smaller number of large farms. At these places, with thousands of hogs or hundreds of thousands of chickens, the old self-contained cycle of farming -- manure feeds the crops, then the crops feed the animals -- is overwhelmed by the large amount of waste.
The result in farming-heavy places has been too much manure and too little to do with it. In the air, that extra manure can dry into dust, forming a "brown fog." It can emit substances that contribute to climate change.
And it can give off a smell like a punch to the stomach.
"You have to cover your face just to go from the house to the car," said Lynn Henning, 52, a farmer in rural Clayton, Mich., who said she became an environmental activist after fumes from huge new dairies gave her family headaches and burning sinuses. The way that modern megafarms produce it, Henning said, "Manure is no longer manure. Manure is a toxic waste now."
In the water, the chemicals in manure don't poison life, like pesticides or spilled oil. Instead, they create too much life, and the wrong kinds.
"You get Miracle-Gro for your water," said David Guest, a lawyer for the group Earthjustice who has fought for tougher limits on pollution in Florida.
The chemicals in manure serve as fertilizer for unnatural algae blooms. They drain away oxygen as they decompose. Scientists say the number of suffocating dead zones -- oxygen-depleted areas where even worms and clams climb out of the mud, desperate to respire -- has grown from 16 in the 1950s to at least 230 today. The Chesapeake's is usually the country's third largest, after the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Erie.
The law, however, has treated manure and other agricultural pollutants differently than pollutants from smokestacks and sewer pipes.
The EPA does not set a hard cap on how much manure can wash off farms, instead issuing guidelines that apply only to the largest operations. There, the rules might limit how much manure farmers can spread on individual fields, for instance, or order them to plant grassy strips along riverbanks to filter manure-laden runoff. Even that level of regulation has only been in place since the 1990s.
But now, the EPA has signaled an intent to tighten its grip.
Last Monday, the agency announced that reducing manure-laden runoff was one of its six "national enforcement initiatives." New rules went into effect in December that will impose even tighter restrictions on large farms.
Last fall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also considered a change to its guidelines, which would have limited the amount of manure farmers could apply to their fields. But then it scrapped that idea, saying the issue needed more study.
Last week on the Eastern Shore, where farmers raised 568 million chickens last year, the problem of excess manure was still big enough to see from the road.
"See how dark that one pile is? That's chicken manure," said Kathy Phillips, 61, an environmental activist who patrols the peninsula for piles of manure stored outdoors. As a steady rain fell, she said that pollutants were probably leaching off that mound -- as tall as a van and the color of dark-roast coffee-- and into ditch water that would eventually reach the Pocomoke River, then the Chesapeake.
Phillips usually surveys these piles from the air. She has a mental map of dozens of these off-smelling mounds.
"I don't want to be the Poop Lady," said Phillips, who got into environmentalism because she loved to surf Ocean City's beaches. "But, you know, somebody had to talk about this. It's like this dirty little secret."
A few miles north, the poultry giant Perdue has come up with one way to dispose of excess manure. At a $13 million plant outside Seaford, Del., tons of poultry manure are dried, heated to kill off bacteria and compressed into pellets of organic fertilizer that is sold to golf courses or homeowners.
"This is sort of a reverse chicken," said Perdue spokesman Luis Luna, as bulldozers moved manure below. "In a chicken, the food goes in and the poop goes out. Here, the poop comes in and the plant food goes out."
That helps Chesapeake's manure problem, but it isn't the whole solution. Luna said there is enough manure on the Shore to keep more plants like this running-- but Perdue isn't planning to build more yet. So far, the fertilizer doesn't sell well enough to make that cost-effective.
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Down on the Farm, an Endless Cycle of Waste
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: December 29, 2009
GUSTINE, Tex. — Day and night, a huge contraption prowls the grounds at Frank Volleman’s dairy in Central Texas. It has a 3,000-gallon tank, a heavy-duty vacuum pump and hoses and, underneath, adjustable blades that scrape the surface as it passes along.
In function it is something like a Zamboni, but one that has crossed over to the dark side. This is no hockey rink, and it’s not loose ice being scraped up. It’s cow manure.
Lots of cow manure. A typical lactating Holstein produces about 150 pounds of waste — by weight, about two-thirds wet feces, one-third urine — each day. Mr. Volleman has 3,000 lactating Holsteins and another 1,000 that are temporarily “dry.” Do the math: his Wildcat Dairy produces about 200 million pounds of manure every year.
Proper handling of this material is one of the most important tasks faced by a dairy operator, or by a cattle feedlot owner, hog producer or other farmer with large numbers of livestock. Manure has to be handled in an environmentally acceptable way and at an acceptable cost. In most cases, that means using it, fresh or composted, as fertilizer. “It’s a great resource, if used properly,” said Saqib Mukhtar, an associate professor of biological and agricultural engineering at Texas A & M University and an expert on what is politely called manure management.
But as the increasing incidence of environmental and health problems linked to agriculture makes clear, when manure is mismanaged the nutrients in it can foul streams, lakes and aquifers; the pathogens in it can contaminate food products; and the gases it produces, including ammonia, methane and bad-smelling volatile compounds, can upset neighbors and pollute the atmosphere.
Even with best practices, manure can cause environmental headaches. So researchers are working on ways to improve its handling, to modify the nutrients in it and to develop alternative uses.
Mr. Volleman, who came to Texas from his native Luxembourg 16 years ago, takes pride in his operation, which produces about 25,000 gallons of milk a day. “It’s all about keeping it clean, keeping it comfortable and producing high quality milk,” he said, adding that what is good for his cows is good for him. “They’re writing my paycheck.”
Dairies differ from feedlots, poultry operations and hog farms in how they handle manure. At a feedlot, for example, manure is often collected only once every six months, after the thousands of fattened cattle have been shipped out. Dairy operators seem like neatniks by comparison, but even among dairies, manure management varies according to location, climate, regulations and other factors.
At a large operation like Mr. Volleman’s, it is the inexorability of excrement, as much as the sheer volume, that defines the waste-handling process. A cow’s digestive system, with its series of forestomachs, is built to handle lots of roughage. And you cannot turn it off.
So among the 40 employees at Wildcat Dairy are some whose main task is to handle the manure, 24 hours a day. They collect it from the huge open-sided barns, which house up to 1,200 cows each. The animals bed down in sand, but there is a concrete alley running the length of each barn for food and others for excrement.
While the cows are at the rotary parlor — a stainless-steel merry-go-round of milking stalls that the Holsteins ride every eight hours around the clock — a worker on a tractor tows the tank-pump contraption up those manure alleys. The worker hops off the tractor as needed to rake solids in the bedding area into the alleys for collection.
When the tank is about half full, the worker drives it to a nearby patch of dirt, opens a valve and spreads — sprays, really — the manure out to dry. Twice a week, the solids are scraped into windrows and then spread on fields as fertilizer.
Even dried, manure contains a lot of water, so it is not economical to truck it very far — beyond about 10 miles, it is cheaper for a farmer to buy inorganic fertilizer. Some dairy producers compost their manure, making it more valuable as fertilizer, but composting costs time and money.
Mr. Volleman’s manure is spread only on his fields and those of nearby farmers. “We bring the manure to their fields, they spread it out to grow crops, we bring the crops back to feed the cows,” he said. “So it’s kind of a circle — a closed circle.”
The liquids in the manure are part of a closed circle as well. Everything at the dairy is sited with gravity in mind, so that all liquids — the runoff from the drying area, wet manure left behind in the alleys, wastewater from the milking parlor and rainwater — drain into the first of three interconnected lagoons that are lined with compacted clay.
The first lagoon is bubbly and dark, with anaerobic bacteria digesting the organic matter to reduce odor. By the third lagoon, the water is clear and dilute enough to be pumped to irrigation equipment on Mr. Volleman’s fields.
But the margin for error in handling both the solids and liquids is thin.
Farmers must plan where and when they spread dried manure, both to avoid odor complaints from downwind neighbors and to avoid overapplying nutrients that may run off in a rainstorm. “It’s like any other business,” Dr. Mukhtar said. “If you’re not keeping track of where your nutrients are going, you may be reapplying those nutrients on the same piece of land. That’s more than the plants can take and the soil can hold.”
One problem, said Robert T. Burns, a professor in the department of agricultural and biosystems engineering at Iowa State University, is that manure typically has more phosphorous than needed. “Manure is an unbalanced fertilizer from the plant’s view,” Dr. Burns said.
Diet modification can help, to some extent. Phosphorous is added to dairy feed as a supplement, and research has shown that it tends to be added in excess, said William P. Weiss, a professor in the animal sciences department at Ohio State University. “You can get good milk and good health at much lower levels,” Dr. Weiss said. “And every gram less they feed is a gram less excreted.”
Nitrogen, on the other hand, comes from protein, and a lactating cow needs to consume a lot of protein. “Decrease it a bit, and then milk production falls off,” Dr. Weiss said.
With nitrogen, the problem is usually not that there is too much, but that much of it is eventually lost from the manure in the form of gaseous ammonia. The bacteria in feces contain an enzyme, urease, that breaks down urea in urine into carbon dioxide and ammonia. As with phosphorous, diet can affect the amount of nitrogen retained in the manure. As corn-based ethanol production has increased in the United States, many dairies and feedlots now give their animals a large amount of so-called distillers’ grains, the waste corn after fermentation, which are plentiful and cheap. A recent study of feedlots in the Texas Panhandle, by scientists with the United States Department of Agriculture, showed that feeding a diet high in distillers’ grains produced significantly higher ammonia emissions from the manure.
Emissions problems can also be reduced by changing how the manure is applied. Tilling the soil immediately after application of dried manure can help reduce odors, Dr. Mukhtar said. And if manure is directly injected into the soil in slurry form, Dr. Burns said, the ammonia can better bind with the soil. Currently in Iowa, a major hog-producing state, about 80 percent of hog manure is injected.
When it comes to the liquid end of things, there are delicate balances to be maintained as well.
Regulations vary by state, but in Texas, manure lagoons have to be big enough to handle a severe rainstorm of the type that occurs, on average, only once every quarter-century. The danger is that an overflow from a lagoon, with its high concentration of organic matter and nutrients, could eventually reach a creek or some other body of water and kill fish.
Mr. Volleman points out that his lagoons, which have a total capacity of 120 acre-feet, or about 40 million gallons, are 20 percent larger than required. “We’ve never overflowed,” he said. And the dairy has berms around its 80 acres to minimize the risk if an overflow occurred.
But not every dairy operator is scrupulous. “There are bad actors in every walk of life,” Dr. Mukhtar said. “Progressive dairy producers will be the first ones to say, ‘Let’s nail their tails to the wall.’ ”
Problems can arise if a dairy adds cows without increasing lagoon capacity, or if a farmer is not careful about controlling the inorganic solids that enter them. Mr. Volleman, for example, used to flush his barns with water instead of vacuuming them. But he found that there was too much sand and other solids entering the lagoons.
Controlling solids is crucial, said Dr. Mukhtar, who has evaluated other methods for doing so, including a “weeping wall” system, manure storage areas with porous walls that filter the solids from the liquids.
Even when solids are controlled, Dr. Mukhtar said, sludge builds up in a lagoon and eventually has to be removed. Neglecting to do so results in less water, and less bacteria, in the mix. “All of a sudden this is not a properly functioning lagoon,” he said. “That’s where we have odor issues.”
Another option is to digest the manure in a tank (or, alternatively, put a cover over a lagoon) to produce gas that can be burned for heat or electricity. Another approach, gasification, heats the manure to collect combustible gases.
Those options, however, are expensive. Even in a good economy, a dairy producer may be reluctant to add costs. And the industry is currently suffering — milk prices are low, producers are losing money and some are going out of business. “Given these times,” Dr. Mukhtar said, “there is really not a whole lot of incentive to do all that.”
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New Mexico Dairy Pollution Sparks 'Manure War'
By John Burnett
12/09/09
The picture on many milk cartons shows cows grazing on a pasture next to a country barn and a silo — but the reality is very different.
More and more milk comes from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where large herds live in feedlots, awaiting their thrice-daily trip to the milking barn. A factory farm with 2,000 cows produces as much sewage as a small city, yet there's no treatment plant.
Across the country, big dairies are coming under increased criticism for polluting the air and the water. In New Mexico, they're in the midst of a manure war.
Manure Management
Everyday, an average cow produces six to seven gallons of milk and 18 gallons of manure. New Mexico has 300,000 milk cows. That totals 5.4 million gallons of manure in the state every day. It's enough to fill up nine Olympic-size pools. Every single day.
Dealing with the waste — so-called "manure management" — is the dairy industry's greatest environmental challenge.
Farms dispose of waste in two ways.
First, workers hose the muck off the concrete floor of a milking barn, and it flows into a plastic- or clay-lined lagoon where the liquid evaporates.
Second, waste from the feedlot where the cows live is collected and used as fertilizer for grain crops.
But the New Mexico Environment Department reports that two-thirds of the state's 150 dairies are contaminating groundwater with excess nitrogen from cattle excrement. Either the lagoons are leaking, or manure is being applied too heavily on farmland.
"As we get more and more monitoring data, what we see is that more and more dairies have contamination underneath them. So something isn't working about those facilities," says Marcy Leavitt, director of the department's Water and Wastewater Division.
The problem is worsened by the tendency of large dairies to cluster together.
Dairy Row
On Dairy Row along Interstate 10 between Las Cruces, N.M., and El Paso, Texas, more than 30,000 cows live in 11 farms located one after the other.
In the past four years, the EPA has repeatedly cited these dairies for violating the Clean Water Act because manure-laced stormwater was washing into tributaries of the Rio Grande.
"You hear it often in community meetings. People describe that maybe five, six, seven years ago they could go out in front of their home and enjoy the afternoon, eat some food," says community organizer Arturo Uribe, who lives in Mesquite, Texas, which is in the middle of Dairy Row. "But now what these folks are saying is when they go out there, there's too many flies."
Even more serious than odor and flies is the threat to the watershed. In the town of Dexter, in southeastern New Mexico, a dozen residential homes are surrounded by sprawling dairies on three sides.
Homeowner Herbie Rodriguez says he has been buying five-gallon bottles of water to drink and cook with, though his family still washes with contaminated well water.
"We were told that we couldn't drink the water because it's contaminated," Rodriguez says. "On a white, brand-new T-shirt, you can wash it in the water, brand-new, it would come out brownish, beige. That's how you could tell how bad the water was."
The trend in the dairy industry, like the rest of commodity agriculture, is toward fewer and larger farms, which concentrates more manure in smaller geographic areas. Citizens are reporting dairies contaminating ground and surface water across the nation — in the Yakima Valley in Washington; Brown County in Wisconsin; Hudson, Mich.; and now Dexter, N.M.
In many places, the powerful dairy lobby blocks tough state regulations, and the federal EPA lacks broad powers to crack down on agricultural runoff. But in New Mexico, the winds might have begun to shift.
The Winds Of Change
Among state regulators, there's no question who's to blame for fouling the groundwater in Dexter. The water table is shallow in this part of the state, and monitoring wells downgradient of the dairies all clearly show excess nitrates. The dairies are under state abatement plans to control manure runoff.
New Mexico's dairy industry denies the New Mexico Environment Department's figure that two-thirds of its farms are polluting groundwater. Robert Hagevoort, a dairy extension specialist and industry spokesman, suggests that critics are too quick to blame dairies.
"They may have a septic tank that's leaking. That is the No. 1 reason why domestic wells in New Mexico are contaminated," Hagevoort says. "With that, I'm not saying there's not issues and we're not working on some of these dairies. Dairymen are very adamant about being a good steward to the environment. They want to make sure that their families that live on these dairies can drink that water, can bathe in that water and their animals are healthy as well."
And no one wants to drive the milk cows out of New Mexico. Dairies contribute an estimated $1.2 billion to the economy in a poor state with little private industry. Even Rodriguez, whose well water is contaminated, works at a dairy.
But after decades of acceptance, there's a sense here in the state that the dairies' free ride is over.
"Public sentiment is clearly shifting towards wanting to see more protection from the groundwater pollution that follows CAFO dairy operations," says Dan Lorimier of the Sierra Club.
New Mexico is currently in the process of rewriting and tightening regulations for dairy discharge permits. This year — for the first time ever — the state rejected a proposed dairy in the town of Caballo after citizens protested that it would pollute the Rio Grande watershed.
'The Right Thing To Do'
Pro-dairy billboards have sprouted around the state. One shows a family watching cows graze on green pastures with the message: "Caring for our land isn't easy. But it's the right thing to do."
Jana Hughes, a homemaker who lives next to a dairy near Hobbs, N.M., and recently formed a group called Citizens for Dairy Reform, was shown a photo of that billboard.
"False advertisement," Hughes says. "I mean, as someone who lives around dairies and knows dairies, that is not how it is. We're talking 2,000 cows confined in a small area, living in their own feces and urine."
Some dairymen try to site their farms as far from civilization as possible. John Woelber built his $5 million, 2,300-cow operation in remote high desert in Valencia County, 10 miles from his nearest neighbor.
"The reason we're out here in the middle of nowhere is so we have no complaints; we have no neighbors that will come up and say, 'You've got too many flies,' or, 'It smells,' " Woelber says.
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States struggle to meet rural behavioral health needs without federal funds
By Lynda Waddington
9/11/09
Facing increased demand for behavioral health services in rural areas that rivals what was seen during the 1980s farm crisis, agencies in at least 28 states have been looking to Iowa for advice on the problem.
“I’ve spoken with people from the states of Oklahoma, Utah and Colorado — and that has just been in the last week,” said Dr. Mike Rosmann, executive director of Harlan-based AgriWellness.
Along with Iowa State University Extension, AgriWellness operates the Sowing the Seeds of Hope program, which provides residents in seven states a support hotline and up to five free visits with a counselor that can help with martial and family conflict, financial concerns, general stress and overall crisis situations. The program is geared toward rural patients and is open to families who do not have mental health coverage or are under-insured.
A global economic crisis and significant fluctuations in commodity markets have severely impacted agricultural interests throughout the nation, and crises related to unmet behavioral health needs are affecting farming communities everywhere. But evidence suggests that states like Iowa, where an assistance network is already in place, have avoided the worst of it.
“In the other states, agencies get calls from rural people who don’t know who they can speak with or where they can go to get assistance,” Rosmann explained. “It was difficult for states to provide behavioral health services before, but now, because of financial difficulties, the number of farmers and ranchers who need assistance is growing and, without a hotline and additional services like our Sowing the Seeds of Hope in place, states are scrambling to meet these needs.”
Although other states began contacting Rosmann and AgriWellness about two years ago about providing similar programs, interest has intensified over the past year, coinciding with increased financial strain in several agricultural sectors. While Rosmann can offer advice about operating mental health services for rural residents, the one question he does not know the answer to is how states will find the money to fund the services.
“Although the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network has been authorized as a part of the Farm Bill, Congress has unfortunately not made appropriations for it,” Rosmann said.
With federal appropriations in place, the program would have made competitive grants available through extension services to establish hotline services as well as provide behavioral health care access in the nation’s most geographically rural areas. Without the funding, individual states must use their own resources to begin outreach and assistance to rural areas — a task made more difficult by strained state budgets nationwide.
“We are still hopeful that a federal appropriation will come through. Without it, I just don’t see how these other states are going to be able to get the ball rolling,” Rosmann said.
Although appropriations were not contained in either the U.S. House or Senate versions of the relevant appropriations bill, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said Thursday morning that he will continue to fight for the program both through the appropriations bill conference and through direct negotiations with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“In Iowa we have things like Sowing the Seeds of Hope, which is a program available to farmers. Farmers in other states might not be so fortunate,” Harkin said by phone. “That’s why I’m going to continue to fight for funding for this as it moves through conference. I recognize the need to provide this, and I’m going to continue to fight for it.
“I’ve got to tell you that getting the funding is going to be an uphill battle, but I’m going to do everything I can because I remember what happened in the 1980s and I don’t want a repeat of that — where farmers were committing suicide and families were breaking up because of the undue stress that happened in the 1980s. And, for a meager amount of money, you can provide a lot of assistance to farmers and ranchers who are in real trouble.”
Specifically, Harkin is hoping to redirect money that is either already included in the farm appropriations bills or at the disposal of the USDA.
“I hope we can be successful,” Harkin added. “As I said, we know it is needed. We learned from the 1980s that some of these things can be very, very helpful in getting people through a rough patch. I just can’t tell you whether or not we will be successful or not, but we’ll do our best and see what happens. … We know we have some hurdles, but we’re going to continue to try.”
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Health Ills Abound as Farm Runoff Fouls Wells
By CHARLES DUHIGG
Published: September 17, 2009
MORRISON, Wis. — All it took was an early thaw for the drinking water here to become unsafe.
There are 41,000 dairy cows in Brown County, which includes Morrison, and they produce more than 260 million gallons of manure each year, much of which is spread on nearby grain fields. Other farmers receive fees to cover their land with slaughterhouse waste and treated sewage.
In measured amounts, that waste acts as fertilizer. But if the amounts are excessive, bacteria and chemicals can flow into the ground and contaminate residents’ tap water.
In Morrison, more than 100 wells were polluted by agricultural runoff within a few months, according to local officials. As parasites and bacteria seeped into drinking water, residents suffered from chronic diarrhea, stomach illnesses and severe ear infections.
“Sometimes it smells like a barn coming out of the faucet,” said Lisa Barnard, who lives a few towns over, and just 15 miles from the city of Green Bay.
Tests of her water showed it contained E. coli, coliform bacteria and other contaminants found in manure. Last year, her 5-year-old son developed ear infections that eventually required an operation. Her doctor told her they were most likely caused by bathing in polluted water, she said.
Yet runoff from all but the largest farms is essentially unregulated by many of the federal laws intended to prevent pollution and protect drinking water sources. The Clean Water Act of 1972 largely regulates only chemicals or contaminants that move through pipes or ditches, which means it does not typically apply to waste that is sprayed on a field and seeps into groundwater.
As a result, many of the agricultural pollutants that contaminate drinking water sources are often subject only to state or county regulations. And those laws have failed to protect some residents living nearby.
To address this problem, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has created special rules for the biggest farms, like those with at least 700 cows.
But thousands of large animal feedlots that should be regulated by those rules are effectively ignored because farmers never file paperwork, E.P.A. officials say.
And regulations passed during the administration of President George W. Bush allow many of those farms to self-certify that they will not pollute, and thereby largely escape regulation.
In a statement, the E.P.A. wrote that officials were working closely with the Agriculture Department and other federal agencies to reduce pollution and bring large farms into compliance.
Agricultural runoff is the single largest source of water pollution in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the E.P.A. An estimated 19.5 million Americans fall ill each year from waterborne parasites, viruses or bacteria, including those stemming from human and animal waste, according to a study published last year in the scientific journal Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology.
The problem is not limited to Wisconsin. In California, up to 15 percent of wells in agricultural areas exceed a federal contaminant threshold, according to studies. Major waterways like the Chesapeake Bay have been seriously damaged by agricultural pollution, according to government reports.
In Arkansas and Maryland, residents have accused chicken farm owners of polluting drinking water. In 2005, Oklahoma’s attorney general sued 13 poultry companies, claiming they had damaged one of the state’s most important watersheds.
It is often difficult to definitively link a specific instance of disease to one particular cause, like water pollution. Even when tests show that drinking water is polluted, it can be hard to pinpoint the source of the contamination.
Despite such caveats, regulators in Brown County say they believe that manure has contaminated tap water, making residents ill.
“One cow produces as much waste as 18 people,” said Bill Hafs, a county official who has lobbied the state Legislature for stricter waste rules.
“There just isn’t enough land to absorb that much manure, but we don’t have laws to force people to stop,” he added.
In Brown County, part of one of the nation’s largest milk-producing regions, agriculture brings in $3 billion a year. But the dairies collectively also create as much as a million gallons of waste each day. Many cows are fed a high-protein diet, which creates a more liquid manure that is easier to spray on fields.
In 2006, an unusually early thaw in Brown County melted frozen fields, including some that were covered in manure. Within days, according to a county study, more than 100 wells were contaminated with coliform bacteria, E. coli, or nitrates — byproducts of manure or other fertilizers.
“Land application requirements in place at that time were not sufficiently designed or monitored to prevent the pollution of wells,” one official wrote.
Some residents did not realize that their water was contaminated until their neighbors fell ill, which prompted them to test their own water.
“We were terrified,” said Aleisha Petri, whose water was polluted for months, until her husband dumped enough bleach in the well to kill the contaminants. Neighbors spent thousands of dollars digging new wells.
At a town hall meeting, angry homeowners yelled at dairy owners, some of whom are perceived as among the most wealthy and powerful people in town.
One resident said that he had seen cow organs dumped on a neighboring field, and his dog had dug up animal carcasses and bones.
“More than 30 percent of the wells in one town alone violated basic health standards,” said Mr. Hafs, the Brown County regulator responsible for land and water conservation, in an interview. “It’s obvious we’ve got a problem.”
But dairy owners said it was unfair to blame them for the county’s water problems. They noted that state regulators, in their reports, were unable to definitively establish the source of the 2006 contamination.
One of those farmers, Dan Natzke, owns Wayside Dairy, one of the largest farms around here. Just a few decades ago, it had just 60 cows. Today, its 1,400 animals live in enormous barns and are milked by suction pumps.
In June, Mr. Natzke explained to visiting kindergarteners that his cows produced 1.5 million gallons of manure a month. The dairy owns 1,000 acres and rents another 1,800 acres to dispose of that waste and grow crops to feed the cows.
“Where does the poop go?” one boy asked. “And what happens to the cow when it gets old?”
“The waste helps grow food,” Mr. Natzke replied. “And that’s what the cow becomes, too.”
His farm abides by dozens of state laws, Mr. Natzke said.
“All of our waste management is reviewed by our agronomist and by the state’s regulators,” he added. “We follow all the rules.”
But records show that his farm was fined $56,000 last October for spreading excessive waste. Mr. Natzke declined to comment.
Many environmental advocates argue that agricultural pollution will be reduced only through stronger federal laws. Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, has recently ordered an increase in enforcement of the Clean Water Act. Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, has said that clean water is a priority, and President Obama promised in campaign speeches to regulate water pollution from livestock.
But Congress has not created many new rules on the topic and, as a result, officials say their powers remain limited.
Part of the problem, according to data collected from the E.P.A. and every state, is that environmental agencies are already overtaxed. And it is unclear how to design effective laws, say regulators, including Ms. Jackson, who was confirmed to head the E.P.A. in January.
To fix the problem of agricultural runoff, “I don’t think there’s a solution in my head yet that I could say, right now, write this piece of legislation, this will get it done,” Ms. Jackson said in an interview.
She added that “the challenge now is for E.P.A. and Congress to develop solutions that represent the next step in protecting our nation’s waters and people’s health.”
A potential solution, regulators say, is to find new uses for manure. In Wisconsin, Gov. Jim Doyle has financed projects to use farm waste to generate electricity.
But environmentalists and some lawmakers say real change will occur only when Congress passes laws giving the E.P.A. broad powers to regulate farms. Tougher statutes should permit drastic steps — like shutting down farms or blocking expansion — when watersheds become threatened, they argue.
However, a powerful farm lobby has blocked previous environmental efforts on Capital Hill. Even when state legislatures have acted, they have often encountered unexpected difficulties.
After Brown County’s wells became polluted, for instance, Wisconsin created new rules prohibiting farmers in many areas from spraying manure during winter, and creating additional requirements for large dairies.
But agriculture is among the state’s most powerful industries. After intense lobbying, the farmers’ association won a provision requiring the state often to finance up to 70 percent of the cost of following the new regulations. Unless regulators pay, some farmers do not have to comply.
In a statement, Adam Collins, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said farmers can only apply waste to fields “according to a nutrient management plan, which, among other things, requires that manure runoff be minimized.”
When there is evidence that a farm has “contaminated a water source, we can and do take enforcement action,” he wrote.
“Wisconsin has a long history of continuously working to improve water quality and a strong reputation nationally for our clean water efforts,” he added. “Approximately 800,000 private drinking water wells serve rural Wisconsin residents. The vast majority of wells provide safe drinking water.”
But anger in some towns remains. At the elementary school a few miles from Mr. Natzke’s dairy, there are signs above drinking fountains warning that the water may be dangerous for infants.
“I go to church with the Natzkes,” said Joel Reetz, who spent $16,000 digging a deeper well after he learned his water was polluted. “Our kid goes to school with their kids. It puts us in a terrible position, because everyone knows each other.
“But what’s happening to this town isn’t right,” he said.
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New Culprit Seen in Ozone Depletion
By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: August 27, 2009
Government scientists who study the depletion of Earth’s protective ozone layer are pointing to a previously unheralded culprit: nitrous oxide.
Most of the nitrous oxide in the atmosphere emerges naturally, through the action of bacteria in the soil, the researchers say. But the gas is also produced by human activity, through the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers, the application of livestock manure to fields, the burning of biofuels and in other ways.
Though nitrous oxide is not regulated under the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 agreement to limit emissions of ozone-depleting chemicals, the researchers say it is emerging as the leading artificial cause of ozone loss.
The researchers, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, report their findings in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
They note that the health of the ozone layer has been improving since the adoption of the protocol and that nitrous oxide looms large today as an artificial destroyer of the ozone layer, in part because the emissions of other harmful chemicals have been so sharply reduced. But major chemical targets of the Montreal agreement, chlorofluorocarbons, inhibit the ozone-destroying actions of nitrous oxide, the researchers said. So as their levels fall, the harmful influence of nitrous oxide increases.
The Environmental Protection Agency is already contemplating action on nitrous oxide because it is a heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. In April, the agency declared it and five other gases, including carbon dioxide, to be pollutants that endanger public health, making them subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.
In a statement, the agency said Thursday that work on a reporting system for emissions of nitrous oxide and the five gases was under way. John S. Daniel, one of the authors of the new report, said scientists had for some time known of the ozone-depleting potential of nitrous oxide. But, Mr. Daniel said in a telephone news conference, “there is a sort of gap between the scientific understanding and the policy.”
The researchers did not make any policy recommendations in light of their finding.
“It is not for us to gauge how much risk there is,” said A. R. Ravishankara, who led the work. In any event, he said, at the moment researchers could not say with confidence “how much nitrous oxide comes from where.”
“The uncertainties are significant,” Dr. Ravishankara said.
Dr. Ravishankara estimated that worldwide the ozone layer had been reduced by about 6 percent from what it was before industrialization.
At ground level, ozone is a pollutant, but in the upper atmosphere it blocks ultraviolet radiation that would harm plants and animals on Earth’s surface. When researchers discovered that chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons were depleting this high-level ozone layer, and especially after the discovery of a highly depleted ozone hole over Antarctica, international negotiators produced the Montreal agreement.
Because of the unusual atmospheric chemistry above Antarctica, nitrous oxide does not affect the ozone hole there, Dr. Ravishankara said.
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Manure means money to handlers gathered in Iowa
BOONE, Iowa (AP) - For the folks who make a living spreading manure on farm fields, the business end of hogs, cows and chickens can be a gold mine.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 1.3 million tons of manure is applied as fertilizer each year to about 15.8 million acres of farmland in the U.S.
Much of it is handled by custom manure applicators. And many applicators were among the 1,500 people who attended the Upper Midwest Manure Handling Expo in Iowa yesterday.
They checked out spreaders and tanks and watched manure-handling demonstrations.
Gary Wilton is a custom manure applicator from Medora, Ill., and he says he can get some guff from folks who don't understand how complicated his business is.
Wilton says when he tells people he's going to look at a $600,000 machine, they say "Just to spread hog manure?" |
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