To make your sunday more interesting and gratifying, please consider this report of a federal judge’s opinion about run off from a Chicken farm.
A close ally of Milloy and Dunn, Gary Baise, farmer in the Midwest, Lawyer in DC, does this kind of litigation on behalf of Farmers, and does a nice regular column on his work at the Web Site Farm Futures. Recently he has raised the alarm about the EPA coming packing to cause Farmers pain and financial losses–more than just counting cattle for methane taxes, too, all kinds of assertions about fertilizer and pesticide and water run off and such.
They would like to make the so called dead zone at the outlet of the Mississippi an excuse to make the richest and most important farmland in teh world, the US Mid West an “organic” demonstration farm.
So the Chicken Farmer gets the usual harassment from the EPA, the kind you can expect all farmers will be getting in increasing amount.
And a sensible judge says that he can tell the difference between pollutants under the Clean Water Act and natural water–which comes from rain and falls from heaven.
In Virginia recently a similar EPA action was blocked by AG of VA Cuccinelli, on a claim by EPA that a city had to curb its storm water run off.
These EPA thugs need to be stopped from their aggressive overreach.
I like the result here.
stormwater is not pollution, except in the minds of bureaucrats with too little to do.
http://news.yahoo.com/w-va-chicken-farmer-wins-203035682.html
I’m as right-wing and anti-govt as anyone here, but stormwater runoff – non-point-source pollution in EPA’s clunky phraseology – is a major problem that as far as I can see can only be fixed by government regulation. It’s the main cause of the Chesapeake Bay’s decline. The extremely shallow bay – average depth 21 ft – is the recipient of runoff from an enormous watershed, 64,299 square miles, according to Wikipedia, stretching from near the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown NY to somewhere south of Norfolk VA. Runoff from farms is one source, but far and away the biggest contributor is runoff from paved surfaces. And since the watershed encompasses the metastasizing I-95 megalopolis, the pavement is destined to grow forever it seems. Capturing the runoff in cattail-filled catchment ponds before it gets into Bay tributaries is the only effective measure instituted so far, but it’s only required for relatively new pavement. Retrofitting all the old roads, buildings and parking lots with their own catchment ponds is the simple solution to the Bay’s woes, but for all practical purposes it’s impossible – simply too big a job, and state and local governments who regulate construction and maintenance of the watershed’s pavement won’t spend the money to do it. It’s safe to say the Bay is doomed – too big not to fail.
No real farming going on here in the Mill Creek watershed of the Northwestern Philly burbs, and yet the creek is polluted to the point of being nearly void of aquatic life, which is just one testament to the impacts from those neighborly well-intentioned, but ecologically oblivious, homeowners who fertilize and sprinklerize, or pay others to facilitate it regularly. I mean really…sprinklers on the East Coast!
These regulations justify FARM SUBSIDIES (new technology & farming method investments)….Dead Zones are turned off Carbon Sinks (Browning Aquatic Carbon **Browning Terrestrial Carbon”* whose decomposition increase ocean acidity & reduce CO2 cyclying/ocean Carbon sink capacity… Idiotic Atmospheric CO2 concerns give impetus to irrational political maneuvering which seeks to take all Farm Subsidies (justified w/ Free Market conditionals) and allocate them as Green Energy subsidies to forestall the mystical Carbon Dioxide apocalypse even though Green Energy doesn’t address the Ocean Sink Capacity part of the the molecularly heavy atmospheric CO2 equation (ala CO2 will just keep rising……..
The smart side needs to stop being so ideologically shortsighted so that the complaining roots of outright graft can be eliminated
Farms pollute less per acre than they used to as farmers have methods for minimizing fertilizer use while maximizing crop yields.
Homeowners in the vast number of new tracts built in the last couple of decades, on the other hand, over water and over fertilize.
Their runoff goes directly into the storm drains.
I’ve seen how it ruins creeks in formerly rural areas.
And there will be more runoff from parking lots in the future as people hold onto older cars and scrimp on repairs.
The Obama economy is increasing pollution.
The early October blizzard in SD killed thousands of cattle. How long before the EPA fines these hapless ranchers for “polluting the environment”?
Howdy BofH
I’m not rooting for the EPA, gosh knows. More broadly, it’s reasonable to be concerned about runoff that picks up real stuff, though.
Not a pollution issue, but I can imagine that changing the surface of an area could change the behavior of runoff so that it creates erosion problems too. Such things should be identified, considered, and sometimes mitigated.
Geoff, the issue here is that the EPA attempted to impose permitting requirements on a farm stormwater discharge, something that was specifically exempted from the permitting in the law. This pretty much is a making-up-the-law case. Stormwater permits do exist for industrial facilities, and SPCC plans are important, but farms are exempt from a lot of these requirements for a variety of reasons (not least of which is the fact that a dozen workers can be responsible for hundreds of acres).
I’m as worried as most people are about the granola-crunchers and their bad habits. Still, it’s true that runoff from parking lots and agricultural operations can contain real pollutants and often does. To the degree that this pollution can be mitigated at a reasonable cost, it’s appropriate to do so. That’s a lot easier to propound than to define or execute, of course, and the EPA has always been too officious for my taste.