Georgia's Environment: Feds Warn of Potential Water Contamination from Manure

A report blasting Georgia's environmental oversight of large livestock farms has raised concerns about potential contamination of Georgia waterways with chemicals from manure.

For years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been signing off on Georgia's inspection of farms with large numbers of cows, pigs or chickens. The farms generate huge amounts of manure that can pollute nearby streams and lakes with levels of nitrogen and phosphorus dangerous to fish and humans alike.

The report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Inspector General found nearly three-fourths of state inspections of 48 large farms known as "concentrated animal feeding operations" were faulty or incomplete.

Poor oversight by the state Environmental Protection Division and Georgia Department of Agriculture has left the "significant risk that Georgia's CAFO program is failing to protect water quality," the report concluded.

Most of these operations store manure in liquid form in lagoons or spray it on fields as fertilizer, and without careful management the waste can end up polluting Georgia's rivers and reservoirs. In the 1990s, studies traced contaminated groundwater in North Carolina to lagoons created by huge hog farms and the state became an example for tougher regulation.

April Ingle, executive director of the environmental group Georgia River Network, said she was taken aback by the report.

"It is surprising and unfortunate that Georgia is not doing everything it can to address these pollution problems," she said.

State and federal regulators said they still are reviewing the report, which was released in June, and have asked for additional information on the investigation. The report does not specify which farms were given inadequate inspections.

"We still have not been provided with adequate documentation from the inspector general's office for us to draw our own conclusions at this point," said Dominic Weatherill, industrial compliance manager for the Georgia Environmental Protection Division. "We can't say that we are completely on board with all of its conclusions."

Questioning the evidence

EPA officials in Atlanta charged with oversight of the state regulators say they agree with the general findings of the report. But Chris Plymale, EPA chief of storm water enforcement for the Southeast, said he does not believe these large farms are polluters.

"We really have no evidence from any surface water sampling that we can directly track back to any CAFO," he said.

But the only evidence EPA has that those operations are not polluting comes from the state inspection reports the inspector general's office deemed faulty.

Georgia Agriculture Department spokesman Arty Schronce acknowledged in an email to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that important plans to dispose of the manure on these large farms were not vetted by agriculture inspectors because of poor communication between them and EPD. That is being corrected now, he said.

Kurt Ebersbach, an attorney with Atlanta-based environmental law firm Greenlaw, said the inspector general's report casts serious doubt on the state's inspection program.

"How are you going to know whether there is a problem if you haven't been monitoring the situation?" he said.

Plymale said testing shows pollution from agricultural sources, including animal manure, in Georgia's rivers and lakes. Manure is high in nitrogen and phosphorous, chemicals derived from the food the livestock consume. In the right doses, manure makes a good fertilizer, but use too much and the excess chemicals can leach into ground and surface water.

EPD's most recent water quality report found "nutrient" pollution had damaged more than 2,700 acres of reservoirs and lakes in the state, but Plymale said there is no telling where the contamination originated. EPD does not have figures on how many miles of rivers and streams are polluted by nutrients, in part because the agency has not developed acceptable standards for running water. EPA estimates 80,000 miles of rivers and streams across the nation are "impaired" by nutrients.

Nutrient pollution --- specifically elevated nitrate levels --- have been linked to methemoglobinemia, a condition that robs the oxygen from red blood cells and can cause serious illness in adults and death in infants. Removing nutrients from drinking water supplies is an added expense on public water systems and can result in excessive levels of disinfectants in drinking water.

The problem is worse for people who rely on well water. A federal survey sampling wells from 48 states found nitrate contamination in 72 percent of private wells.

Georgia issues permits to 766 farms in the state, including 185 large farms that store liquid manure. Of those, 48 are large enough to qualify as concentrated animal feeding operations, requiring a federal permit because of their potential to spill manure into streams and lakes.

While EPD is responsible for enforcing both federal and state water quality regulations for the farms, it uses Georgia Department of Agriculture inspectors to do the actual work, in part because it saves money.

EPD determined conducting its own inspections would mean hiring five additional employees. Piggybacking water quality inspections onto other agricultural inspections was "deemed more efficient," according to department documents.

Plymale said state and federal officials have met to discuss retraining sessions for inspectors. He also said EPA will be "getting a little more involved this year" in the inspections.

"We are going to be out conducting inspections with these folks, joint inspections," he said.

Not a game of 'gotcha'

Keith Boozer, who operates a 75,000-hen poultry farm in Monroe, said the most recent inspection of his operation was "very complete, very detailed." At the same time, he said the inspectors from the Department of Agriculture are not playing a game of "gotcha."

"They are more than willing to work with you. The inspectors that come out ask questions, they talk to you," he said.

The state Agriculture Department has drawn criticism before for lax regulation and close relationships with agricultural producers, especially following an outbreak of salmonella poisoning in 2009 in a southwest Georgia peanut processing plant.

Boozer said he and the inspectors who come to his farm both know their stuff. Both farmers and inspectors have to take continuing education courses from the University of Georgia on handling manure.

Schronce said the Agriculture Department already has taken steps to address findings in the report, including starting a new training program, redesigning the inspection reports and improving communication with EPD.

Boozer has operated his chicken farm for 20 years and maintains a lagoon on site to handle the manure. He said he is careful that it does not contaminate nearby water.

"I live on the land. I don't have public water. I have well water that I drink and my family drinks," he said. "Every six months I have to complete tests, and I had monitoring wells that are tested, groundwater, soil samples . . . I don't know how much more complete you have to be."

Animal waste is a significant issue for environmental regulators, mostly because there is so much of it.

According to a 2009 report by a state-federal task force, cattle, poultry and pigs generate 5 1/2 times more excrement annually than the entire human population of America. The task force found pollution caused by manure and fertilizer has grown dramatically over the past 50 years and efforts to control the damage by state and federal regulators have been "collectively inadequate."

Managing the manure

Federal regulations require facilities to develop a plan on what to do with all that manure. The inspector general found some of Georgia's large farms did not have such a plan, or if they did, they were not sticking to it.

Ebersbach said that is one of the more troubling aspects of the report. A nutrient management plan is like a budget, plotting income and outgo of tons of manure, he said.

"It's not a pro forma exercise. It's vital that these numbers work out," he said.

The plans are supposed to track manure from the farm to where it is spread on fields as fertilizer, but the inspection report found plans for six farms that proposed spreading hundreds of pounds of manure more per acres than the land could absorb.

"What kind of impact is that going to have on our waterways?" Ebersbach said.

Schronce acknowledged agriculture inspectors were not scrutinizing farms' plans for dealing with the manure.

"It appears that was falling through the cracks," he said.

Schronce said new procedures will make sure the nutrient management plans are being followed.

Ironically, the increased scrutiny comes amid a federal appeals court ruling that may loosen regulation on these large farms.

A ruling in March by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the EPA cannot require large livestock farms to have a federal permit based on the possibility they may discharge waste into surface waters. That means many of the operations cited in the inspector general's report for not having the correct permit may not need one going forward.

Weatherill said the ruling "renders a vast proportion of that report obsolete." But he said the state permits required of farms are plenty restrictive, and in some ways more restrictive than federal permits because they cover groundwater as well as surface water. Regardless, he said EPD takes the federal criticism seriously.

"We don't disagree with a majority of the findings, and we do believe that efforts can be made by EPD and the Department of Agriculture to improve our CAFO program in Georgia," he said.