The Number One Menace - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 38

Moreover, the agricultural lobby has blocked efforts to regulate runoff that causes
water pollution. In Brown County, Wisconsin , for example, officials instituted new
rules to limit dairy operations and prohibit the spraying of manure during high-runoff
months. But farm lobbyists inserted a provision requiring the state to finance up to 70
percent of the cost for some farms to follow the regulations, which made the program
prohibitively expensive.
Other nations have grappled with these issues, and some have pioneered tough reg-
ulation. Holland instituted policies in the 1980s to limit the size of livestock farms, cap-
ping the amount of manure allowed per hectare; if a Dutch farmer wants to produce
more manure than his allotment, he must buy more land to accommodate extra cows.
While such an approach could theoretically work in the United States, in practice the
agricultural lobby would certainly oppose it.
In the 1970s, Congress identified CAFOs as polluters to be regulated under the Clean
Water Act. But the biggest facilities were able to avoid government regulation by claim-
ing they do not discharge pollutants into waterways protected by the CWA. Incensed, a
coalition of environmental groups sued the EPA in 2009 to force regulators to monitor
the effects of factory farms on waterways more closely. Gathering more—and higher-
quality—data, the environmentalists hope, will eventually lead to tougher regulations
and better water protection. The EPA has settled the suit and committed to finalizing
new rules by 2012.
Urban dwellers hear of these battles over manure and assume that they don't affect
them; after all, they don't draw water from wells, don't live next to CAFOs, and don't
understand how agricultural runoff could possibly impact their water supplies. But it
does.
When she testified about water pollution before Congress in 2009, Judy Treml poin-
ted out that Stahl's manure runoff was not simply her problem: the creek he polluted
flows into the Kewaunee River, which supplies Lake Michigan, the third largest of the
Great Lakes. Twelve million people live along the shores of the lake, including in ma-
jor cities such as Milwaukee and Chicago. Lake Michigan was badly polluted during the
Industrial Age but has recently been the focus of intensive cleanup efforts. This has put
the states around it—Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan—in an ironic predic-
ament: while they have made costly and largely successful efforts to clean up the lake,
they have simultaneously provided incentives for farms to grow, which creates more ag-
ricultural runoff.
“It makes no sense to clean up a lake only to have all the water that drains into it pol-
luted,” Treml told Congress. She added that as a homeowner, a taxpayer, and a mother,
she was astounded by the lack of regulation for agricultural runoff: “It's not a matter of
convenience,” she said. “We need water to survive.”