We have a pretty neat kiddo. She can do amazing crescent kicks reaching above my head, helps with laundry without being asked, and manages to spout quips that make me seriously envious. For pure fun and mental hijinks she asked me to come up with some law topics she could explore over winter break. This morning I received this email, explaining the basics of water law and CAFOs.
Something this good was meant to be seen by more eyes than mom's, but since she's only thirteen years old she isn't quite ready for a Daily Kos account of her own. So please jump over the fold and read the first Arctic Belle diary Feedlots and Manure 101. (Full disclosure: Arctic Belle is a freshman doubling majoring in Chemistry and Environmental Science at our state University- and she's having a blast.)
Euphemisms are the next big thing in Iowa, the land of "confinement feeding operation structures" and "production cycles." The Clean Water Act is big in Iowa as well, and it doesn't have a good definition of what, exactly, constitutes two adjacent "animal feeding operations." Luckily, the state stepped in and defined what "near" means. If two structures are within 1,250 feet and have less than 4 million pounds of cow capacity, they're adjacent, and if it's between 4 million and 6 million pounds, "adjacent" means 1,500 feet away. Go a pound over that upper limit, and suddenly everything 2,500 feet away or less is adjacent, and you're beginning to understand what role really big tape
measures play in factory farming.
If you aren't raising cows, weight ranges are rather lower, a limit that perhaps has to do with the heretofore-unknown fact that cows, and only cows, can be stacked three high before the whole thing gets a bit wobbly. This statute also mentions horses, but doesn't sweep them in with cows for the high limits. One could infer, then, that horses don't stack. (It must be the necks.) Swine farrow-to-finish operations are in their own separate weight category, put between cows and everything else.
Distance matters because little feedlots are combined into one big feedlot blob if they're adjacent (or if they share the same manure storage pit). The Clean Water Act then regulates the blob as a single mess rather than a lot of little messes, which counts as "economy." Or something. If farms edge right up against one another so that buildings belonging to different people would be treated as parts of the same blob under the adjacent structures rule, an exception kicks in and the operations are treated as separate, immiscible blobs.
One last definition- animal units determine how big a farm is by counting animals and multiplying times some unexplained, but presumably lobbied-about, constant. Horses count as 2.0, and "broiler or layer chickens" are at the opposite end of the spectrum, with 0.01 units per chicken. Now that all the animals are expressed in the same units, we can start dealing with waste, which comes in the same units to start with.
Water cleanliness requirements, if you excuse the liberty of calling that highly noxious stuff "water," come squelching in, messing up the carpet and looking rather like the sort of thing you would cross the street to avoid smelling. All feedlots have to settle solids when treating manure, which means using terraces or other approved methods (there's a suggestions list) to reduce the flow of waste to a standardized rate for at least five minutes. The method a manager chooses has to continue to meet that requirement during ten-year rainstorms, as long as that hypothetical rain is all delivered within an hour.
Standards are a bit more stringent for open feedlots, which need to keep all the manure on their own lots during a 25-year storm that lasts a full day. An appendix lists several practices that would be acceptable, unless they happen to break state water quality laws. Let's look at one of these rare beasts, which are legal, yet could easily break the very laws they're designed to keep unbroken. If manure is spread twice a year, in July and November, a basin that can catch the expected rainfall during the rest of the year or the amount resulting from a 25-year flood (whichever is bigger) is required. Solids have to be settled, and each application can't take more than ten days from start to finish. Manure can be disposed of whenever the owner wants (especially if there's bad weather during the scheduled removal dates), but during the two designated removal months, the manure capture spot can't be running at more than ten percent of capacity.
Yes, Virginia, that's how so much regulation can effectively stop people from regulating.
Let's see if there's anything notably good about this current incarnation of the rules. Permit applications, drainage, county comment- wait, did I say county comment? Actually, the provision is a bit of a misnomer. There's a mandatory thirty-day period between receipt of the permit and approval. The board of supervisors can say if there's a sinkhole in the way that wasn't mentioned in the applications, but only if they notice and formally comment within fourteen days of the permit's receipt. The clock appears to keep running on weekends, holidays, and Friday afternoons. Citizens themselves don't get a chance to speak within this provision.
There are, of course, requirements for separation from homes, businesses, and public areas. If manure is stored only in dry form, though, or if owners of the land agree, these limits can be waived. Older facilities are grandfathered in as long as they expand away from the facility they're already too close to, the capacity doesn't double, and the facilities aren't really, really big. If they are really, really big, then building expansions more than 2,500 feet away from the main facility and digging a separate manure pit should clear up the regulatory trouble. All buildings must be at least five hundred feet away from known sinkholes (there is no grandfathering-in provision). Finally, CAFOs and their ilk need to be at least 200 feet away from navigable streams, rivers, and lakes, unless the lake is privately owned or a farm pond undergoing an identity crisis.
When attempting to build a new manure-holding structure, drainage tile is a bad idea. Thus, prospective builders are required to look for it, then remove any known tile plus any tile they find while looking. Tiles, in case you haven't guessed, would let feces-saturated water be efficiently conducted to, well...wherever those tile lines used to go. To the credit of the regulators, secondary containment around the storage basin must be installed and must meet the same requirements as primary containment.
One final question presents itself to your rather disillusioned wannabe regulator. Egg washwater structures have been mentioned over and over, and the deliberately bland name suggests something nefarious. Actually, the strict definition appears less than earth-shattering. An egg washwater structure, I'm told, is used to store water from washing eggs to be packaged. After looking at it for a minute, though, the specific mention of not being allowed to include manure in the structure's contents makes one wonder what was on those eggs to begin with. The specifics are often more revealing than the overarching theory.
I used the regulations in here to write my piece. It's only for Iowa, and I didn't cover every single bit in there.
http://www.legis.state.ia.us/Rules/Current/iac/567iac/56765/56765.pdf