Supreme Beef comes before Polk County Judge
On January 20, 2023, the appeal of the Nutrient Management Plan for Supreme Beef came before Judge Scott Rosenberg in the Polk County District Court. The case was brought to the court by Sierra Club and Trout Unlimited.
Supreme Beef, a cattle operation housing 11,600 beef cattle, sits in the headwaters of the Bloody Run Creek trout stream. The facility sits on karst terrain, which is susceptible to allowing pollution to enter ground water. Furthermore, there are several sinkholes close to the Supreme Beef operation. The operation is outside of Monona, in Clayton County.
From its inception, the operation and its requests for a permit have been troubling. The operation itself has some aspects of an open feedlot and some aspects of a confined animal feeding operation. The building allows the cattle to stick their heads outdoors to eat from the feed bunks, which allows it to be called an open feedlot. Yet, the manure is first captured in a pit under the building which allows it to be called a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO). The regulations are different for the two different entities. Because of that, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) mixed and matched which regulations it followed. If it was advantageous to Supreme Beef, the open feedlot regulations were used, but if it was more advantageous, the DNR used the confinement rules.
Unfortunately, that created a situation where there will be far too much manure applied to the farm fields, sitting on top of karst terrain. That is combined with a number of errors in making the calculations, which were not corrected by the DNR before the plan was approved. In fact, the consultant who wrote the application for the permit indicated during a deposition that she had made mistakes in the calculation. Those errors under-estimated the amount of manure that the cattle produce and the concentration of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) in the manure. The result is that Supreme Beef does not have enough land to apply the manure, resulting in more nutrients than the crops can use. Excess nutrients applied to crop fields will run off the fields and enter groundwater or even Bloody Run Creek.
The Sierra Club was represented by Wally Taylor. Taylor pointed out that the picking and choosing of which laws to apply is “the very definition of arbitrary and capricious”. At the end of his argument, he stated “We are trying to protect one of Iowa’s special places. This area of Iowa, called the Paleozoic Plateau, has 32 spring-fed Outstanding Iowa Waters, algific talus slopes, and beautiful limestone bluffs. This is an area revered by trout fishermen. More than any place else in Iowa, this is the area DNR should be protecting, not manipulating the rules”.
The judge did not set a date for issuing the decision.
Below, photo of Bloody Run Creek by Larry Stone.
