The Number One Menace - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 35

law firm, they filed a notice of their intent to sue Stahl Farms for violating the Clean
Water Act. The state Department of Justice also filed suit against Stahl, who had allowed
manure to leak from his feedlot for twenty years while receiving more than $10,000 in
state assistance to prevent environmental pollution. In January 2006, a US federal court
judge approved a settlement under which Stahl's insurance company paid the Tremls
$80,000 in damages. Stahl agreed not to spread manure on the field across from the
Tremls' house from December through March, the period of highest risk for groundwa-
ter contamination.
Testifying before Congress about water quality in the fall of 2009, Judy Treml asked,
“What's it going to take for the WDNR to enforce the Clean Water Act? I hope for our
state that a death, or several deaths, isn't what it takes!”
Regulating and stopping agricultural runoff is not easy. In tight-knit farm communities,
confronting neighbors is socially awkward. State regulators are torn between maintain-
ing water quality and being sensitive to farmers, who provide food, jobs, and commu-
nity leadership, while Congress has allowed large farms to “self-police,” a rule that has
proven ineffective.
Most farmers care deeply about the land and do not intentionally pollute. But, ac-
cording to the EPA, agricultural runof is now the single biggest source of water pollu-
tion in America. Pathogens such as E.coli are responsible for 35 percent of the nation's
impaired waterways, and large “factory farms” are one of the most common sources of
pathogens.
An estimated 19.5 million Americans are sickened each year from waterborne bac-
teria, viruses, or parasites, including those from animal and human sewage, according
to a 2008 study by the scientific journal ReviewsofEnvironmentalContaminationand
Toxicology.
In the United States, farmed animals produce more than 1 billion tons of manure per
year. As the population, and its demand for food, continues to rise, the amount of cow,
pig, goat, and poultry excrement continues to grow and to infiltrate water supplies.
The problem is not limited to Wisconsin. The Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mex-
ico—two of the most ecologically rich aquasystems in the world—have been badly con-
taminated by agricultural runoff. In California, up to 15 percent of wells in farming re-
gions have water pollution above federal thresholds. In Arkansas, Maryland, and Ok-
lahoma, residents and regulators have charged that poultry farmers have polluted im-
portant drinking supplies. Runoff from dairies and farms had such a devastating effect
on Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades that the South Florida Water Management Dis-
trict has spent $2 billion to build forty-five thousand acres of “filter marshes” to remove
some of the phosphorus flowing into the water.