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 hereand 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.
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