An aerial photo of a manure pit under construction at Tradition Dairy South, one mile west of Nora. (Photo courtesy of Helping Others Maintain Environmental Standards)
NORA, IL -- A water leak or an underlying fresh water spring are the last things you want to find beneath the site for a megadairy. There’s the risk of significant groundwater contamination from animal waste and from potentially deadly E. coli bacteria.
But while digging a manure pond last month in Jo Daviess County, workers sprung just such a leak.
Water poured into the pond from a point near the base of a colossal trench at the dairy that, when complete, will hold tens of millions of gallons of animal waste. The leak signifies the area is likely underlined with a spring, said Samuel Panno, a senior geochemist with the Illinois State Geological Survey who earlier this month examined photos of the manure pond.
But state officials insist it won’t derail plans for Tradition Dairy, an already controversial 5,000-cow concentrated animal feeding operation under construction a mile west of tiny Nora, a town with less than 120 residents and only one business on a main street tucked in the northwest corner of the state.
“I don’t believe this is anything out of the ordinary,” said Warren Goetsch, bureau chief of environmental programs at the Illinois Department of Agriculture. “Any time you’re constructing anything [such as this], especially something as large as this, and especially as wet as this summer has been, you’re going to have to deal with these kind of situations.”
He characterized the water as seepage from shallow groundwater, as well as leakage from a drain tile used to remove excess water from a former crop field. The engineering firm has made appropriate adjustments in the construction plans to deal with those two water sources, Goetsch said.
However, the groundwater is close enough to the surface that it would be easily contaminated with manure if the pit should leak or overflow, said soil scientist engineer Peter J. Huettl. He gave expert testimony at an Aug. 12 hearing for a complaint filed by local activist group Helping Others Maintain Environmental Standards. Numerous other community members joined in the complaint and came for the hearing, at the Jo Daviess County Courthouse in Galena.
The hearing was the third of six scheduled court dates for the complaint against the IDOA and Tradition Dairy owner A.J. Bos, of Bakersfield, Calif. The complaint alleges the bedrock in the area of the planned dairy is unsuitable for such a massive livestock facility, and that the IDOA irresponsibly approved construction despite warnings it would negatively impact nearby residents’ quality of life.
Plans for the roughly 700-acre site, which broke ground June 16 and is scheduled to begin operation by the end of this year, call for the cows to produce 90 million gallons of waste per year.
Even under perfect conditions, Huettl said the manure storage ponds, when full, will leak as much as 35,000 gallons of waste per day into surrounding soil. The leakage rate would increase as the clay liner that Bos proposed to contain the waste wears away.
“The leakage will absolutely contaminate groundwater below the facility,” Huettl charged.
The type of clay lining planned for Tradition Dairy uses “state of the art” technology, according to a January statement from the Bos Family of Companies. A small amount of water may seep through the compacted soil, but it said that the rate will be comparable to the acceptable standards for sites that handle human waste.
Still, even as these officials and others argue the risk of contamination is slight, past history raises community concerns. Raw manure that contaminated the freshwater supply in Walkerton, Ontario with E. coli in 2000 killed seven people and sickened 20,000, according to Malcolm Field, a hydrogeologist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Tradition owner Bos, a man known for wearing jeans and sweatshirts when he visits Jo Daviess and who put up nearly $44 million for the site, declined to respond to repeated requests for comment.
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of llinois, the Democratic presidential nominee, hasn’t spoken out on the Tradition Dairy case. But he has taken a position on CAFOs that would require stricter federal regulation. In addition to tougher monitoring by the U.S. EPA and costly fines for violations, he said on his campaign Web site that local governments should have more control over where CAFOs are sited and how they are regulated.
He wants the U.S. EPA to categorize CAFOs as direct point source Superfund polluters. This would put industrial farms in the same category as the hazardous waste dump Love Canal, which forced more than 221 families to move from the Niagara Falls area in the 1970s due to the effects of toxic chemicals in the abandoned waste site.
U.S. Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential hopeful, has not released a position on CAFOs.
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