Did you know that a 20-mile stretch of New York’s Black River near Adirondack Park was polluted by 3 million gallons of raw liquid manure from a 5,000-cow dairy in 2005?

The extent of the contamination and fish kill of 375,000 was described as one-fourth the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The catastrophe was caused by a rupture of an earthen “lagoon” or liquid manure pit at a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation).

Local businesses and governments in Lewis County, which has population and economic profile comparable to Vernon’s, have largely borne the brunt of the mega-dairy’s manure spill. Marks Dairy Farm was fined $2.2 million and New York’s conservation agency, akin to Wisconsin’s DNR, made a slough of changes to how it monitors and enforces CAFO permits.

Wisconsin should take a lesson from New York, another state with strong agricultural roots. Petry Trust of Loves Park, Ill., is planning a dairy CAFO of a similar size in Vernon County, where we also value our family farming, fishing, diverse communities, high quality of life and local self-rule in the form of town and county governments. We ought not burden ourselves with the deep costs associated with a large CAFO owned by an outside investor.

Like the CAFO industry in Wisconsin today, big-monied lobbyists in New York were successful at promoting their unsustainable farming model and at minimizing protections for communities and public health.

The Dairy Business Association (DBA) seems to be Wisconsin’s go-to source on how CAFOs are the solution to our economic crisis and why legislation like the Livestock Siting Law “works.” Laurie Fischer, DBA’s director, is quoted in almost every article on the subject of the Livestock Siting Law, which strips ordinary faithful taxpayers of local control. If you are as tired as I am of DBA’s well-funded propaganda machine, take time to read “The Wasting of Rural New York State: Factory Farms and Public Health,” available on the web. This document was released just after the Black River spill by citizens’ groups concerned for years about damage being done by CAFOs. Many of its recommendations were applied by New York in the wake of the disaster. Let’s not let an expensive spill or chronic inappropriate liquid manure spreading harm Wisconsin’s Driftless Area.

Sara Martinez

Viroqua

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