By: Margie Van Cleve, Washington State Sierra Club Conservation Chair
Sixty percent of Washington state residents rely on groundwater for their clean drinking water supply, however, an unlikely polluter threatens the health and safety of our communities and our environment.
The perpetrator? Dairy cows!
In 2017, the US Department of Agriculture estimated that there were 274,000 dairy cows in Washington State, the 10th highest population in the country. In the average day, each of these cows generates 120 pounds of manure--meaning that Washington state produces close to 33 million pounds of dairy waste, collectively, each and every day.
Many of these dairy cows reside in CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations); these farms contain over 200 animals that are confined for 45 days of the year or more in barns and feedlots. Conditions are often horrific with animals are forced to stand in their own waste every single day. The State of Washington estimates there are about 245 CAFOs in the state, most of them dairies.
Surprisingly, the enormous quantity of waste generated by dairy CAFOs are not sent to any kind of wastewater treatment plant like human waste but are typically stored in large storage lagoons or piled in huge quantities on the ground. Afterwards, the waste from the lagoons is spread on the fields as fertilizer, and the piles are typically compost piles. At one dairy in Yakima, the compost area is over 90 acres. To put that into perspective, Disneyland is 85 acres.
The Problem with CAFOs
According to a study done by state agencies, all unlined manure storage lagoons leak at least 1,000 gallons per day per acre. This is incredibly dangerous because this waste leaches into our surface and groundwater, causing significant public health and pollution problems. In Washington state, there are 415 unlined manure storage lagoons in close proximity to the waters that feed Puget Sound, contaminating our waters with nitrates, fecal coliform, and other pollutants.
The biggest pollutant are nitrates--colorless, odorless, tasteless and toxic. High doses of nitrates threaten pregnant mothers, babies and seniors, causing the potentially fatal methemoglobinemia, or “blue baby syndrome,” named for the bluish hue caused by poorly oxygenated blood.
Department of Ecology reports that Yakima and Whatcom Counties, which have the highest number of cows and dairies in the state, also have elevated levels of nitrates in the groundwater. In a report done by the Washington Department of Ecology and the U.S. Geological Survey, 29% of sampled wells in the Sumas-Blaine aquifer, located in north Whatcom County, exceed the nitrate maximum contaminant level (MCL) by 114%.
In addition to leakage, the common practice of over-application of manure to fields as fertilizer contributes 66% of nitrate inputs to the aquifer, the major supply of drinking water for the county’s 27,000 residents.
But mismanagement of dairy waste doesn’t just threaten people’s health, it also threatens their livelihoods. The Washington Department of Health, other agencies and tribal governments have confirmed that manure from dairy CAFOs is largely responsible for the shellfish bed closures that have plagued Puget Sound, affecting the shellfish industry
The Fight for Solutions
In 2016, the Washington State Department of Ecology proposed a new draft CAFO permit for the state. A coalition of environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, submitted detailed technical comments urging Ecology to adopt a more protective permit. However, Ecology opted to not include vital safeguards, and instead finalized the new permit in early 2017. The final permit was appealed by both the dairy industry and a coalition of environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club.
The vital safeguards that the permit failed to include were:
-A mechanism to ensure compliance with state water quality standards for surface and groundwater
-Facilities to implement adequate technology base controls to reduce or eliminate discharges to surface and groundwater
-A system to monitoring the discharges and impacts to surface and groundwater
In addition, the permit violates the Clean Water Act by preventing the public from reviewing and commenting on the management plans that directly affected their health and safety. Equally startlingly is that very few CAFOs statewide are actually covered by the permit - leaving much of the pollution flowing from these facilities largely unregulated. At present, only 23 of Washington’s estimated 230 CAFOs are regulated by the CAFO permits.
The appeal was argued before Washington State’s Pollution Control Hearings Board (PCHB) in May and June, 2018. In October 2018, the PCHB issued an unfavorable decision, keeping the ill-fated permit intact. The following month, Sierra Club and partners appealed the PCHB’s decision to Thurston County Superior Court. The dairy industry also appealed.
Arguing that additional delay in lengthy lower court legal proceedings would be detrimental to the public’s interest in the protection of the quality of state waters, the parties requested direct review by the Washington Court of Appeals. In April 2019, the Washington Court of Appeals accepted direct review, agreeing that “protection of the state’s waters is a fundamental and urgent issue, especially as the permits apply to CAFOs across the state”. An on-record review at this level is now underway. While those working on the review are hopeful that the decision will be announced in early 2020, the Court process have been known to take 12 months or longer to issue an opinion.
In the meantime, we are continuing to advocate for the health and safety of our communities. Faced with the opportunity to protect Washingtonians from industrial agriculture pollution, Ecology failed to address the four major sources of pollution from CAFOs: land application, lagoons, compost areas and animal pens. Instead, Ecology issued a problematic, two-tiered permit scheme that fails to protect our most fundamental natural resource–clean water.
If you’d like to stay updated on our fight to protect Washington’s clean water for our communities, sign up for our Legislative Action Team to keep current on our efforts to regulate this harmful practice and find out ways to get involved.
Thank you to Katelyn Kinn, the Staff Attorney for Puget Soundkeeper and Andrew Hawley, Staff Attorney for Western Environmental Law Center for your contributions.