Contact: Nora Naughton, nora.naughton@sierraclub.org
Lansing, Mich. – Sierra Club Executive Committee Member Anne Woiwode provided testimony before Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy on Friday, Aug. 8, advocating for the state agency to restore important protections in updated permits for industrial farming.
Big factory farms – also known as CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) – are notorious for polluting Michigan’s rivers, lakes, and drinking water with toxic runoff and other hazardous waste. The state updated its permit to better control this pollution in 2020, but industrial farming groups have fought back at every turn delaying the implementation.
The Michigan Supreme Court recently upheld the state’s authority to issue environmentally protective permits, but disappointingly an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) stripped out several key protections in a separate administrative ruling. The case now moves to EGLE for review, with the Director of EGLE having the final say, and the ability to reinstate those critical protections.
Below, find Anne Woiwode’s full testimony, which was cut off by time limits during the hearing:
In 1999, Sierra Club joined with other organizations to submit a petition I wrote to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) urging them to withdraw Michigan’s delegation under the Clean Water Act. This unusual action was prompted by what we had learned about Governor Engler’s Department of Environmental Quality’s refusal to comply with both state and federal regulations for NPDES permits for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).
During the 1990s the Engler DEQ and lawmakers had undone or simply ignored every requirement for CAFOs to comply with environmental laws. The DEQ under then director Russ Harding joined with the head of state’s Department of Agriculture to tell the EPA staff to stay off any livestock operations in Michigan, and seek concessions from the federal government to agree that voluntary standards were sufficient to meet the requirements of the law. The evidence in the waterways of southern Michigan told an entirely different story. In 2002, the Engler administration, under threat of losing their water quality program delegation, agreed that regulation of and permits for CAFOs would be required starting the following year.
The state of Michigan has made significant progress over the years. However, 26 years after we and others raised the alarm about the horrific impact of these large, polluting operations, it is troubling to see that some of the same issues and problems identified then are not only still present, but that the proliferation of CAFO’s taking advantage of the weak regulations has made them worse.
The documentation and revelations in the early 2000s by the Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan (ECCSCM) and others show that one of the major sources causing contamination of waterways is from field tiles and the application of CAFO wastes to those fields should have changed the rules for CAFOs at the time this was exposed.
Instead, for more than two decades we’ve seen delay and lobbying by the CAFO industry to block the implementation of common sense solutions to these problems.
A fundamental concept that the application of CAFO wastes to fields needs to be calibrated to ensure that nutrients are taken up by the plants that are being grown is essential to proper regulation of these facilities. The proposed permit provisions, while an improvement over prior permits, are at odds with this bottom line reality and Michigan’s regulations need to address this serious problem.
Sierra Club urges you to ensure that the permit and any additional regulations of CAFOs recognize and address the following issues:
- Allowing excessive amounts of liquid CAFO wastes to be disposed of on tiled farm fields has been repeatedly shown to be tantamount to causing a direct discharge of pollutants into drains and waterways, comparable to directly and illegally pumping these wastes into Michigan’s surface waters.
- Application of CAFO wastes to farm fields in winter does not result in the uptake of nutrients by dormant plants, and frequently results in run off during snow melt, rainfall or thawing of the soil. CAFOs must be required to properly plan for waste handling throughout the year and in all weather conditions. CAFO operators should not simply be allowed to build bigger storage facilities for the waste as opposed to implementing actual solutions to producing too much waste for their facility to handle in increasingly unpredictable weather conditions brought on by climate change.
- Permitting CAFO wastes to be shipped offsite for application to fields that are not covered by the CAFO operator’s permit and for which the CAFO operator is not being held accountable is a dangerous loophole that undermines the protection of Michigan’s waterways and public health.
Thank you for taking time to listen to the concerns of Michigan citizens who have confidence that EGLE and the state of Michigan can do much better when it comes to protecting our inland waters and the Great Lakes from this serious problem.
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The Sierra Club is America’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization, with more than 4 million members and supporters nationwide, and over 150,000 in Michigan. In addition to creating opportunities for people of all ages, levels and locations to have meaningful outdoor experiences, the Sierra Club works to safeguard the health of our communities, protect wildlife, and preserve our remaining wild places through grassroots activism, public education, lobbying, and litigation. For more information, visit http://www.sierraclub.org.