I keep hearing the newscasters on South Dakota Public Radio reciting a distressing phrase to describe some CAFO complications:
Officials with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources say they’re getting an increased number of calls from feedlot producers about how to handle spreading manure on fields this year.
The short window for applying that manure on fields could leave some producers without a choice but to violate their permit [emphasis of problematic language mine; Lee Strubinger, “Late Harvest, Frozen Soil Complicate Fall Manure Application,” SDPB Radio, 2018.12.10].
I understand the bind CAFO operators are in: rain, late harvest, and now frozen ground kept CAFOs from unloading their usual amounts of manure this fall. If CAFOs can’t spread their manure, they may max out their storage lagoons.
But are CAFOs really “without a choice but” to break the law?
Here at my house, if circumstances somehow cause me to have more waste than I can fit in my garbage can and recycle bin, my options are not limited to throwing my excess trash into the street or into my neighbors’ yards. I can haul the excess waste away myself to a proper disposal facility. I can hire someone else to do it. Or I can try generating less waste until the circumstances subside.
If I run a factory and my normal production practices produce X amount of waste a day, and if my normal disposal plan breaks down and I only have space to store 100X amount of waste, I don’t see lawbreaking as my only option. I consider building more storage, securing a new disposer, and/or scaling back production.
If you run a CAFO and your lagoon runneth over, you have an obligation to prevent that violation without committing other violations. Maybe you’ll need to build bigger lagoons. Maybe you’ll need to invest in a few visits from the honey wagon and some longer drives to fields farther south that aren’t frozen. Maybe you should call TransCanada or Dakota Access and see if they’ll let you ship your waste to warmer climes through their common-carrier pipelines.
Or maybe you should just plan on thinning your herd and producing less manure until you can draw down your lagoon levels.
The possibility that you might not make money if you keep doing things legally does not leave you with no choice but to behave illegally. DENR permits apply to and bind CAFO operators to legal behavior in good weather and bad, warm and cold, early harvest years and late.
More simply, your failure to plan does not oblige your neighbors to take your s—.
CAFO owners have legal choices. The press should not say otherwise.
Sorry, no excuses. These CAFOs submitted plans and specifications as to how they would operate in order to not pollute. They should have taken into consideration, and DENR should have made them, any such extreme weather situations. It’s not as if such weather conditions aren’t a normal part of any farm operation, and any farmer worth anything has to plan for that. If they are too big to plan, they are too big to farm. They need to go out of business.
What are the odds DENR will enforce any of those regulations?
More crap for the environment. South Dakota needs to get smart (not likely) but in other parts of the world, people actually innovate, what a concept.
“JINAN, China (Reuters) – In the near pitch-dark, you can hear them before you see them – millions of cockroaches scuttling and fluttering across stacks of wooden boards as they devour food scraps by the tonne in a novel form of urban waste disposal.
The air is warm and humid – just as cockroaches like it – to ensure the colonies keep their health and voracious appetites.
Expanding Chinese cities are generating more food waste than they can accommodate in landfills, and cockroaches could be a way to get rid of hills of food scraps, providing nutritious food for livestock when the bugs eventually die and, some say, cures for stomach illness and beauty treatments.
On the outskirts of Jinan, capital of eastern Shandong province, a billion cockroaches are being fed with 50 tonnes of kitchen waste a day – the equivalent in weight to seven adult elephants.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-cockroaches/bug-business-cockroaches-corralled-by-the-millions-in-china-to-crunch-waste-idUSKBN1O90PX
In South Dakota, we all seem to think it is okay for cow poop to be in our water supplies and in the air we breathe. We may find out soon that some of the amoeba released in our water can eat your brain away like we find in Seattle, Washington. Oh, you say, that has already happened here…we elected NOem and trump.
OT again. https://www.rawstory.com/2018/12/white-house-delays-new-farm-aid-payments-china-trade-deal-hopes-sources/
Farmers appear to be getting the shaft from Drumpf again.
mfi, a couple of those guys who got the $2 dollar checks will be thrilled to receive yet another two bucks from the boys who have bought the biggest most massive fraud yet to America. Pride and joy are ringing in the new year for trump supporters. Yes, they have done it to us.
People can turn them in. There’s a process at DENR for people to complain if you catch them. DENR does have to respond to complaints. If they don’t turn DENR in to EPA. You can also sue to get enforcement.
We used periodic airplane flights to monitor what the mines were doing, but now there are drones which makes citizen enforcement of environmental laws much easier.
Does Cory know CAFO’s are also owned by family farms?
Huh ??
So if you have a “family” farm, it’s ok to break the law??
Caroline, with Kristi Noem in charge? Zero.
Jason, no business has a right to break the law or the contract it has signed with the government in the form of its permit.
My neighbor has a family. My neighbor still has no right to throw his family’s garbage on my yard or to pee in my well (if I had a well).
It’s not breaking the law if the DENR gives them a variance because of the weather.
Sure, Jason, sure. So, here’s another subject you know nothing about. Where have we heard that one before? Oh, that’s how we got the Gilt Edge Superfund Site. Giving the Canadian-Australian mining company a break because it rained, was just a great decision.
One would think that these “family farmers” might know a little thing that my farming relatives know: weather happens, and you have to plan, not just the for average weather, but for extremes. When you concentrate animals beyond the carrying capacity of the land, it makes it all the more important that you factor in extremes, Jason.
In the 80s and 90s many of us said these facilities would need treatment plants similar to the ones that are used for human sewage. Spreading this sh__ on the land works only insofar as weather and soil characteristics will allow. There is no need to give variances. There is a need to stop the pollution.
SDPB is so compromised i can barely pronounce its acronym.
CAFO’s are required to have at least a year’s worth of storage for their manure. They can wait until next spring.
The livestock should be culled to cut back on the waste. The humanely slaughtered meat should then be donated to the needy. That is what is being done in Rapid City with the geese that crap on the sidewalk. What is different?
“For anyone visiting city parks to enjoy Rapid City’s resident and migratory waterfowl population, there’s an obvious unwritten caveat.
Watch the ducks and geese and watch your step.
Scott Anderson, parks division manager for the city, said droppings from primarily Canada geese and other waterfowl are a messy problem year-round in areas of the city with open water, including Canyon Lake, Meadowbrook Golf Course and Memorial Park, and along Rapid Creek.” Rapid City Journal 12/13/2018
Problem solved.