Posted May 13, 2015
Several Washington
State dairies have settled out of court after a federal judge said farms may be
held liable for how they use manure fertilizer under a decades-old law on solid
waste, according to a Washington Times article available here.
Capital Press also published an article available here
and Yakima Herald here.
Community
groups alleged that Cow Palace Dairy and similar operations in the Yakima
Valley were applying more fertilizer than the land could handle, resulting in
nitrate contamination of the area’s water supply.
Until now,
large-scale dairies didn’t think a 1976 solid-waste law applied to their
businesses and the vast quantities of animal waste they produce. That changed
this year, when U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice said Cow Palace distributed
so much extraneous fertilizer that it amounted to “open dumping.”
Attorneys
for both sides said the changes could set a national precedent for the
operation of dairies and other concentrated animal feeding operations,
according to Yakima
Herald.
“We hope
this ushers in a whole new era,” said Charlie Tebbutt, the Eugene, Ore.,
attorney representing the Granger-based Community Association for the
Restoration of the Environment, or CARE.
Brendan
Monahan expects others to follow suit and predicts the new practices will
become the standard.
“I think
we are in a transitional stage of the dairy industry,” said Monahan.
In 2012,
the EPA concluded the dairies likely were significant contributors to high
nitrate levels in groundwater. In 2013, the dairies entered into an Agreed
Order on Consent (AOC) with the EPA agreeing to install 20 groundwater
monitoring wells, provide reverse osmosis water filter systems to residences
with contaminated water, line manure lagoons and implement stringent protocols
ensuring manure application to fields is limited to nutrient needs, according
to Capital
Press.
“In recent
months, the dairies under the AOC agreed to double line their lagoons,” said Monahan.
The new
settlement agreements with CARE, consent decrees interpreted and enforced by
the court, will install 14 more monitor wells and expand the scope of
mitigation to 2.5 miles from the dairies, said Monahan. It also adds giving
residents a choice between reverse osmosis filters or bottled water if they
experience 10 parts per million contamination and residences greater than 60
ppm get both, he said.
The three
dairy families will fund water mitigation at $2,000 per month each for five
years. The consent decrees expire in five years if there’s full compliance, however,
the dairies will continue to fund the water program until groundwater
contamination is under 10 ppm for eight consecutive quarters.
The
dairies have centrifuges or dissolved air flotation to remove nitrogen and
phosphorus from liquid manure. DeRuyter & Son has a digester that converts
methane gas from manure into electricity. DeRuyter and Cow Palace have been
working to convert that to produce natural gas.
For more information on environmental law, please visit the
National Agricultural Law Center’s website here.
