Cow manure is flooding homes right now in Yakima Valley, Washington, and residents have been warned not to drink their water. The residents can’t use their water for any domestic uses, including drinking, cooking, showering, or even brushing their teeth. The very area where my organization, Public Justice, helped to bring lawsuits stopping a cluster of dairies from contaminating well water with cow manure that is literally inundated with the waste from a levee breaking on a field at DeRuyter Brothers Dairy, where rushing water swept over a cow manure covered field and carried the manure into the local community. Meanwhile, the Dairy denies responsibility, and is pointing fingers at the local irrigation district, who in turn proved the dairy’s allegations to be false. While this was not one of the dairies subject to our suits, it highlights what happens when waste management is not carefully regulated at facilities that must deal with hundreds of millions of gallons of it every year.
It’s worth mentioning that these are not your average dairies. There are no black and white spotted cows out in the fields here. And no red barn to speak of. These are massive milk and manure factories, confining thousands of cows in cement houses and crowded dirt pens. If the manure produced at these facilities isn’t handled properly, it can make people in the surrounding community sick. High levels of E.coli bacteria and nitrate is commonly found in water contaminated with farmed animal manure.
Like in Yakima, many communities in rural America are completely reliant on private well water. There is currently no federal law that requires private wells to be routinely sampled or monitored, leaving these communities on their own. Nitrate and bacteria cannot be seen, smelled, or tasted. The bacteria from animal manure can make people extremely sick, and infants can die from blue baby syndrome if their formula is mixed with water with even low levels of nitrate (10 mg/L). It is therefore vital to give communities tools and resources to protect their water when industries contaminate it.
Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) - in whose own district the current crisis is taking place - is sponsoring a bill (along with 34 other Members of Congress) that would make it more difficult to regulate waste from farms when it contaminates drinking water, and would take one of these critical tools away from rural communities. HB 848 would make regulating manure by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act impossible.
The bill strips the power of people to bring citizen suits as a way to stop factory farms from polluting drinking water supplies that are contaminated as a result of the farms’ mismanagement of waste.
America’s dairy industry, along with farms raising animals for food, are integral parts of rural America. Almost all of them are strong members of their community. Allowing a few bad actors to say that dairy, eggs, or meat must be produced at the expense of clean drinking water and public health puts all farmers in the same category as the outlying polluters. America’s producers of animal products like milk, eggs, and meat, should stand up and say that their food is not produced at the expense of public health.
Here is a list of the co-sponsors who are putting industry interests over clean drinking water for rural communities.
This post was co-authored by Public Justice Food Project Attorney Jessica Culpepper. Photo via KING 5 Television.