Here & Now

“We Can’t Milk Our Way Out of This”

Frederica Freyberg:
As for state budget action on clean water regulation, Republicans on Joint Finance approved two of the five scientist positions Governor Tony Evers requested. But cut more than $40 million from programs the governor had proposed toward reducing water pollution. The budget committee postponed a vote on an Evers proposal to increase fees on concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs which consist of farms with more than 1,000 animals like large dairy operations. There are about 300 CAFOs in Wisconsin with more every year. The executive budget would increase fees on CAFOs to $5,910 for five-year permits. That’s up from $1,725 currently. The extra fees would go to pay for DNR regulation and enforcement protection of drinking water from farm pollution. A lobbying group for the state’s large dairy operations oppose the fee increases. Cindy Leitner is president of the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance. She joins us from Fond du Lac. Thanks very much for being here.

Cindy Leitner:
Thank you for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:
So again, your group lobbied against the increase in permit fees for CAFOs. Why?

Cindy Leitner:
Well, we’d like to look at why it’s needed. The permit fees actually are not very good for our farms. We are struggling in this industry, whether it’s a CAFO or whether it’s a small farm. Five years of bad milk prices, the export issues of this year. We’re all struggling. We’re struggling just to survive. Added fees aren’t going to help. And what are the added fees used for? Extra positions. So let’s look at the positions. Are they needed? Do we need to have more positions? We have 14 positions in field positions for CAFOs in the state of Wisconsin. We have approximately 305 CAFOs in the state of Wisconsin. That includes pigs and chickens and goats and other CAFOs. 274 are dairy. That would mean, in a five-year period, each one of those 14 people that are going out to the dairies is required by law to make one visit every 10 1/2 weeks for permit renewal. That leaves quite a bit of other time for them to come and visit farms. Quite a bit of other time for enforcement. In fact, that probably leaves them, if they only do it half their time a year, at least once a month they should be on the farm talking to the dairy person or talking to somebody about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, how they can do it better and building that relationship so that we’re all looking towards no discharge in water.

Frederica Freyberg:
So again, 14 positions for 305 CAFOs you believe is adequate.

Cindy Leitner:
Yes. The renewal permit requirement is only once every five years. So it’s mandatory for them to go once every five years to these farms. That’s a three to five hour visit and then they have to write something up. Beyond that, they can go there any time they want. They can go to the farm any time they want and visit with these people. So that’s the field positions. They also have eight positions in-house so — and I’ve gotten mixed signals from people in Madison and talking to them. Are we talking about enforcement positions? Or are we talking about permit positions for upping the permitting time and renewing the permits faster? I’m not sure which they’re going for.

Frederica Freyberg:
You believe, again, that an approximately $1,000 a year permit fee is onerous even for the largest of the dairy operations?

Cindy Leitner:
Nobody has escaped the milk prices. Five years of this. Five years and we can’t milk our way out of it. We can’t produce more milk so that we have more money. Yet, our input costs, the cost of doing business has gone up. And that’s for every single dairy and that’s why we’re losing so many dairies. We’re losing big dairies also in the state of Wisconsin. We’re not just losing small dairies. We’re losing all dairies and this is $43 billion of our economy. We produce in the dairy industry, $82,500 a minute in the Wisconsin economy. We have people that are leaving our state because it’s too hard to work here as a dairy.

Frederica Freyberg:
Do you feel as though the regulations for CAFOs to comply with water pollution are onerous?

Cindy Leitner:
We believe that the regulations we have right now are fine and we’re working with them and we’re working with the DNR. We’re not asking for release of regulations. We’re not asking for less regulations. What we like to do is work with the DNR. We’ve met with Todd Ames and we’ve met — we’re meeting with DATCP. We’d like to help. We believe that because we are a zero discharge by our WPDES permit, we are required not to discharge, no poop in the water. We have a unique perspective of how to do this and we can help. We can help in all aspects. But we have to look at the whole problem. So we have 7800 farms approximately in the state of Wisconsin. 274 are dairy farms that are CAFOs. We have 1.3 million cows in the state of Wisconsin. 300,000 are CAFOs. Yet we produce 40% of the milk. So let’s get rid of the CAFOs. Let’s just get rid of them. Have we solved our problem in water quality? We haven’t. We have to look at every aspect. We have to work with Senator Novak and the Water Quality Task Force. We have to look at different regions. We have to look at water sheds. We have to look at municipalities. We have to look at homeowners. You know, with fertilizer. We have to look at everything and we’re here to help them do that.

Frederica Freyberg:
Do you feel as though then that CAFOs are catching the blame erroneously for water pollution in this state?

Cindy Leitner:
I think they’re catching the majority of the blame and, you know, it’s okay to assign blame where someone’s done something wrong and you can prove they’ve done something wrong. But for instance, look at — let’s look at Mark Borchardt’s data up in Kewaunee County. Kewaunee County has been in all kinds of news and yet they still are number two in tourism dollars in the state of Wisconsin for two years in a row. So there’s something good happening in Kewaunee County. In his research, he said that 50% of things they found in the wells came from bovine and 50% came from human. There are five times more cows in Kewaunee County than there are humans. That means there’s 210 — it’s a 210-1 ratio in bovine waste to human waste. If we got rid of all the cows, would we have solved our problem in Kewaunee County?

Frederica Freyberg:
We need to leave it there.

Cindy Leitner:
We have to look at everything.

Frederica Freyberg:
We need to leave it there with that question. Point taken. Cindy Leitner, thanks very much for joining us.

Cindy Leitner:
Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:
Concentrated animal feeding operations are big business in Wisconsin. For their part, environmental organizations call for higher fees and more oversight on CAFO businesses, including groups like Wisconsin’s Green Fire, a group of conservation professionals, including former DNR employees. Green Fire’s executive director is Fred Clark, who is also on the state DNR board. He speaks today on behalf of Green Fire, not as a DNR board member. Thanks very much for being here.

Fred Clark:
Great. Thanks for having me Frederica.

Frederica Freyberg:
So just to ask you first, what are the environmental impacts in Wisconsin of CAFOs?

Fred Clark:
Well, CAFOs, along with other dairy operations are a source of — unfortunately, they’re a source of contamination of rural water supplies. Primary pathway for that is animal manure that goes onto farm fields and leaves those fields through leeching and makes its way in water bodies. We’re talking about phosphorus. We’re talking about nitrates, which are a human health contaminant and we’re talking about fecal coliform bacteria that can cause human illness.

Frederica Freyberg:
Our last guest suggested that in Kewaunee County, for example, its half animal manure and half human sewage that is contaminating the wells there and that the answer is not to get rid of CAFOs or other animal operations.

Fred Clark:
Well I don’t think anyone wants to see us get rid of dairying in the dairy state. Depending on where you are, in rural areas especially, we know that unfortunately, agricultural operations are the biggest contributing factor toward rural water contamination and well contamination.

Frederica Freyberg:
How well are they being regulated?

Fred Clark:
Well, with the large CAFO program, there are a fairly complete set of regulations that both the Department of Natural Resources and Department of Agriculture, Trade, Consumer Protection enforce and CAFOs pay a relatively small fee for the regulation under the Clean Water Act that Wisconsin exercises.

Frederica Freyberg:
So would increasing the fees for these permits, for the CAFOs help the DNR and other agencies keep up with regulation and enforcement?

Fred Clark:
I think the thing to keep in mind right now is that the total cost to the DNR of the CAFO oversight program is something over $2 million. The fees that large CAFOs pay is somewhere around 5% of that total cost. So unlike many other regulated entities in Wisconsin that are carrying all of the oversight costs through their permit fees in dairy agriculture, we’ve chosen not to do that. The increase that’s been proposed would still only be a fraction of what taxpayers are picking up in order to fund the positions in DNR that oversee those operations.

Frederica Freyberg:
So it’s your sense that that kind of increase in those permitting fees would not be onerous for these large operations?

Fred Clark:
Well I’m a former business owner myself and I appreciate that costs are always a factor. If you look at the average large CAFO, dairy CAFO in Wisconsin, that operation probably has about 2,000 animals. Most of those operations are selling somewhere between $5 and $10 million worth of milk every year. These are very large businesses. They’re facing struggles in this economy. Absolutely. But the permit fee is the smallest of any of the surrounding states that also regulate dairy operations in Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:
What was your reaction when you saw that the Joint Finance Committee postponed action on this?

Fred Clark:
Well, I’m encouraged that legislators and policy makers are recognizing the water quality problems that we have in this state, probably to a degree that we’ve never seen before. So they’re — I understand that they will take that up again in a future session. We hope that the emphasis on, you know, providing enough oversight in those programs will still be there. At the end of the day though, I think is regulation important? Absolutely. But regulation alone isn’t going to solve the problem we have right now with our farm economy and the environmental problems that are associated with it. Farmers can be part of that solution and in many cases they are. And we need consumers to understand that when they buy dairy products, they need to be assured that the soil and water quality associated with those farm operations is high. Otherwise, we lose the integrity of our brand here in Wisconsin and we cannot afford to let that happen.

Frederica Freyberg:
Absolutely. Fred Clark, thanks very much.

Fred Clark:
Thank you.