Huge factory-like dairies in Yakima, Washington, that confine tens of thousands of cows were applying millions of gallons of manure onto a few fields and calling it “fertilizer.” In fact, some people in the U.S. dairy industry have referred to that [fertilizer] as 'liquid gold.' The best thing that can be said of that characterization would be that it was a euphemism; it might be better characterized as, metaphorically, a bigger load of shit than they were dumping into the environment.
The cost to the environment, the water, the community, and the animals of operating in this dirty manner was huge. The picture painted above doesn’t even account for the acres covered in piles of dry manure or the cow pens so filled with manure that the dairy cows lived standing knee deep in their own waste. Each dairy cow produces as much raw sewage as 20-40 people, so these dairies were producing about the equivalent amount of waste as all of the residents of Hoboken, NJ and dumping it, untreated, onto the ground. The tons of excess waste drained out of the cesspools and manure piles and overloaded the fields, leaking into the groundwater and contaminating it with high levels of nitrates. That groundwater just happened to also be the nearby community’s sole source of drinking water.
Excess nitrates in drinking water pose serious human health risks, and can cause blue baby syndrome, several forms of cancer, and autoimmune dysfunction, among other things. The government sets the limits at 10 parts per million (ppm). Some of the homes in this community had wells testing above 70 ppm. Some government regulators at both the EPA and the state level, saw the problem but couldn’t do much against the politically powerful factory farm lobby. If you aren’t familiar with the political lay of the land here, industrial animal agriculture generally gets what it wants in America. Nice job, American Farm Bureau.
But a cool thing happened: The community fought back. After twenty years of fighting for the basic right of clean water and a clean environment, local community groups and some terrific Washington state lawyers teamed up with national environmental warriors, and in February 2013 they filed a case under a great federal environmental law called the Resource Conservation Recovery Act. It gives courts the power to restrict “solid waste” pollution that may be endangering public health or the environment. The dairies argued that no court had ever before held that cow manure can be a solid waste under RCRA, which was true. As they put it, how can “liquid gold” be a solid waste? (Full disclosure – I am the head of Public Justice, one of the public interest law firms involved in the case, and so strongly believe in it.)
And then a second cool thing happened: On January 15, 2015, after extensive testing had been conducted and scientific evidence gathered, Judge Thomas Rice of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington held that in this case, the mega-dairies’ use of that manure had nothing to do with fertilizer. Instead, the Judge said that, given the evidence and the dairies’ own admissions, they were essentially using their crop fields, compost piles and cow pens as a giant open dump. You see, dairy producers happen to be producing, well, dairy. But when you industrially produce dairy the way a sweat shop produces t-shirts, and not the way a small family farm lives off the land, it’s not farming; it’s manufacturing. And like all manufacturing, there’s a byproduct; in this case it’s manure. And they produce way more of it than could ever possibly be used on a few hundred acres.
In fact, the extent of the contamination and the overwhelming scientific testimony about the risk of harm to the public was so great, the Judge said- even before there was a trial - that there was no doubt that the dairies violated RCRA.
The dairies talked about trying to appeal the court’s decision, but the carefully reasoned 111-page order could be put into the Wikipedia definition of “precedent setting,” and the dairies were going to have a hard time explaining away the facts in the case. For example, while the dairies effectively insisted that the ground water was perfectly safe to drink, they were installing reverse osmosis systems for their own employees. When their lawyers effectively said the water was clean, what they meant was “clean enough for you.”
And then yesterday, the coolest thing of all happened: On the eve of the trial on all the remaining issues in the cases, all of these mega-dairies in Yakima Valley reached a settlement with the community groups. The settlement should be a national model for how mega-dairies around the country should operate. The settlement takes a big step toward protecting the health of the local residents, requiring the dairies to pay an independent contractor to provide safe, alternative drinking water to everyone in a roughly three mile downgradient radius. The dairies have to continue to provide this water until the ground water (which will be closely monitored) falls below a safe level for contamination for two straight years.
The settlement also will require the dairies to operate in a dramatically cleaner manner. Until now, the millions of gallons of liquid manure were stored in what was essentially a pit dug into the ground and the hundreds of thousands of tons of dry manure was just piled on the bare ground. (No Brooke Shields movies were going to be filmed near these so-called “lagoons,”, which were essentially gigantic pits of manure the size of a bunch of football fields.) Now, the dairies will have to install double linings for all their cesspools and wastewater catch basins and keep their manure train yard on reinforced surfaces. This should protect against further leaks into the aquifer.
The settlement further requires the dairies to use centrifuge systems that pull manure solids out of the wastewater and make it less harmful and places strict limits on the application of that wastewater when the fields are already saturated with nitrates, and to install sensors to detect when that occurs.
There is also a substantial way in which running a cleaner operation necessarily means one that is less horrible for the animals. Until now, the pens where the cows are kept was essentially lined with several feet of manure and ponds of water. While most of us have positive associations with the word pond, making cows stand knee deep in a mixture of their own filth and standing water is a pretty miserable existence, and now the pens will have to be evened out to stop ponding, and manure must be removed on a weekly basis. I guess standing in a single week of your own crapulence is better than 3 months’ worth.
This isn’t to claim that factory farms are now perfect places, by any means. But the industry advocates (both their lawyers in court and their lobbyists and affiliated media) have been saying that it was impossible to run a cleaner operation – you choose: water or milk? When the people of Yakima objected to contaminated water from small lakes and mountains of manure, the gist of the industry’s answer was “too bad, that’s the only way we can run our business.” It turns out that’s wrong. It will cost the dairies more to operate dramatically cleaner operations, but it’s not exactly the economic equivalent of the asteroid hitting Mexico, it’s just the price of running a far more responsible business.
The era of letting factory farms do whatever they want, no matter what it does to their animals, the environment, their neighbors, and consumers needs to end. Other factory farms and mega-dairies around the country should meet the same standards that the Yakima dairies will now have to meet. We intend to pursue a lot of them, and try to make sure that they do.
This post was co-authored by Jessica Culpepper, Food Safety & Health Attorney at Public Justice.
