Acting on a tip, state environmental inspectors in February paid a surprise visit to a dairy farm in Eatonton. They found the owner pumping gallon upon gallon of liquefied cow manure into a freshwater pond.
From there the toxic brew leached into neighboring streams, the inspectors said.
Seven months later, the farmer signed a consent order agreeing to bring his farm up to regulations, update some equipment and take classes on managing the huge amounts of manure his cows generate. (A single dairy cow may produce an astonishing 140 pounds of manure a day.)
The Georgia Environmental Protection Division chose not to fine the Eatonton farmer.
In a state with dozens of “concentrated animal feeding operations” — also known as factory farms — Georgia environmental authorities do not often cite farmers for polluting water with animal manure. And fines against factory farms are rarer still.
A new review of regulatory documents by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows that, in three years, EPD cited five farms among the 152 large farms it is supposed to inspect for the federal government. It assessed one fine — of $3,750 — during that time.
That’s good news, said Bert Langley, EPD district office coordinator, who says the low number of cases means that farmers are following environmental regulations.
“We get very few complaints, which is typically our window into whether there are gross problems occurring,” he said.
Justine Thompson, executive director of the Atlanta environmental law firm GreenLaw, finds that attitude ludicrous.
“If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? If a farm is not inspected or looked at, does it have a violation?” Thompson said. “They are not inspecting these places. To unequivocally make a proclamation that places they’ve never seen are in compliance is inconceivable.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has vowed to keep a closer eye on water contamination from Georgia’s factory farms after a federal report this summer criticized the EPA and Georgia for lax oversight of large-scale animal feeding operations.
In that report, federal investigators found incomplete or confusing inspection records and evidence that some of Georgia’s most environmentally risky farming operations were over-applying manure to fields, which risks sending excess excrement into rivers and streams.
In a Sept. 22 letter to the EPA inspector general, Gwendolyn Fleming, EPA administrator for the Southeast region, said the agency is requiring the state to notify EPA every three months of violations on Georgia’s large livestock farms.
While EPD is responsible for upholding clean water laws, it doesn’t actually do the inspecting of factory farms. Instead, the division uses inspectors from the Georgia Department of Agriculture to check farmers’ paperwork and make sure they are following environmental regulations. That’s where the problems developed.
Federal investigators found three-fourths of environmental inspection reports were faulty or incomplete, leaving the state’s waters at “significant risk” of pollution.
According to the EPA letter, the new contract with the agriculture department will include better training for inspectors and joint state-federal inspections of Georgia’s large livestock operations.
The heightened scrutiny already may be having an effect. Three of EPD’s five enforcement actions against the farms came this year, after the start of the federal investigation.
Langley said the timing has more to do with the tough economic times than with the federal inquiry.
“The economy has hurt our agricultural operations and we see more chances of them making mistakes,” he said.
But the actual violations discovered appear to have little to do with the economy.
Along with the Eatonton dairy, in neighboring Madison County a dairy was cited in August for failing to provide an adequate plan for storing manure and disposing of animal waste. The quantities involved are mind-boggling: 22 million gallons of liquid manure and 6,933 tons of dry manure generated every year.
A week later a letter went to a hog farm in Homer that was operating without a required nutrient management plan — a written plan calculating how much manure can be spread across available agricultural land before chemicals like nitrogen and phosphorus pollute water sources. Inspectors also cited the farm for missing or incomplete records and failure to monitor well water for contamination.
“It sounds like he is just not maintaining his farm according to regulation,” Langley said.
State law allows EPD to pursue fines of up to $50,000 per day for environmental violations, but Langley said the division is more interested in bringing an end to the pollution than assessing fines. Besides, some operators could not afford to pay, he said.
“While they may seem like big operations, they are relatively small in terms of profit-making,” he said. “A large civil penalty [and] they would be happy to hand us the keys to the place.”
In fact, EPD has shown great patience in stopping the actual pollution as well.
The agency began pursuing Alma Exchange Bank & Trust in southeast Georgia in March 2008, a month after the bank foreclosed on a poultry farm there. Regulators wanted the bank to get a permit and submit a plan to deal with the large lagoon of liquefied chicken manure on the property.
Nearly a year later, the state was still waiting, so inspectors went to the farm and found high levels of nitrogen in monitoring wells. The bank and the state finally agreed on a course of action in January of this year — nearly three years after EPD originally requested it.
Langley acknowledged that the state was not aggressive enough in that case.
“We spent too much time on that one trying to get the message across,” he said. “We have internally taken some steps to stop that from happening.”
Bank officials said last week they have now capped the lagoon — a final step in complying with the consent order.
“Our geologist is informing EPD of this as we speak,” said Wayne Hall, compliance officer for the bank.
“I had to go to school so I could do the management plan,” Hall said, noting that the bank was not aware of the manure issue when it foreclosed on the farm. “We have spent probably upwards of $200,000 cleaning it up.”
Bank president Lawrence Bennett said getting someone to take the chicken manure off their hands was a singular challenge. “The main problem was transporting it where it was supposed to go,” he said.
The state has not fined the bank.
Prodigious production
The violations underscore a central problem with large livestock operations — they just produce too much manure.
The Madison County dairy cited in August generates enough liquid manure every year to fill all the exhibits at the Georgia Aquarium twice, and the farm’s annual production of dry manure weighs about as much as a nuclear submarine.
Paul Weiss, an Ohio State University professor of animal sciences who has studied the problem of manure in livestock operations, said the growth of large livestock feed lots has created a storage problem that did not exist for past generations of farmers. Exactly how much can be stored in lagoons as liquid manure or spread on fields as fertilizer is a complicated question that varies from farm to farm depending on soil content, he said.
“Even in the best conditions, the lagoons they use settle,” he said. “It’s not uniform. It’s difficult.”
State regulations have been helpful in standardizing the handling of billions of gallons of manure, but Weiss said the environmental consequences are not completely understood. For instance, state regulators rarely conduct independent tests of water surrounding a large farm unless there is a specific complaint, he said.
“In general, the environmental oversight of these farms is pretty minimal,” said Patrick Woodall, research director for Food & Water Watch, a Washington-based environmental advocacy organization.
Much of the oversight of the farms relies on self-reporting, which Woodall described as a misguided policy.
“If operations contend that they are not discharging waste, the oversight is almost nonexistent,” he said.
Weiss said management of the large amounts of manure is complicated by the geographic concentration of the livestock operations.
Franklin County in northeast Georgia is home to 17.5 million broiler chickens, according a 2007 federal agriculture census. Weiss said virtually every ton of manure produced by those chickens could be used to fertilize crops at other farms, except that those large operations generally are in other parts of the state.
Just as the Alma bank found, “it’s really a problem of economics of transportation,” Weiss said.
EPA spokesman Davina Marraccini said Georgia will be under greater scrutiny now.
Surrounding states are not required to submit reports of environmental violations from livestock operations to their federal partners. And Marraccini said EPA will be going behind state regulators and checking their work.
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Watchdog journalism
Two months ago, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke the news of a federal investigation that found lax inspections of factory farms in Georgia. The newspaper digs deeper into the issue today with a review of state regulatory documents.
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