The proposed CAFO will sit where Indiana’s largest fresh water lake used to be.
Beaver Lake was drained around 1900 by farmers and ranchers – but farmers today still struggle with drainage issues.
A petition has been filed by a Lake Village resident with the office of Environmental Adjudication for administrative review of the permit granted to the diary by IDEM in hopes of stopping the CAFO.
She and other residents are very concerned about water contamination because of the area’s high water table.
“I am concerned about the water quality, as well as the smell that thousands of cows will produce,” said Liz Sonaty, local landowner, Newton County.
“The aquifer was almost obliterated from that one year.
The proposed dairy will use a massive amount of water, putting an enormous strain on an already fragile aquifer.
Clean water is the most precious of our resources, and we need to protect it.” +5 Wildlife enthusiasts join residents in their concern as the proposed CAFO is adjacent to several large natural areas including Willow Slough Fish and Wildlife Area and The Nature Conservancy’s Kankakee Sands- and not far Lake Village Elementary School and North Newton High School.
“It was a sportsman’s paradise – until shortsighted authorities drained the lake to make way for row-cropping.
A CAFO is not worth the risk to our region’s heritage as the ‘Everglades of the North.’ It took decades to restore the area after our ancestors’ decisions.

Your Views: Factory farms threaten state’s drinking water.
Factory farms have turned dairy cows into machines and are producing more excrement than Wisconsin’s landscape can handle.
In Kewaunee County, up to 60 percent of the drinking water wells are contaminated.
This is not Wisconsin farming.
The manure is typically flushed out with water so its volume is multiplied several times over and then channeled into holding tanks or open pit lagoons.
Operators don’t just apply the waste once but over and over as these are animal factories producing excrement in huge volumes.
By repeatedly dumping liquid and solid manure on these fields, an underground sewage system exists that contaminates waterways and ultimately drinking water wells.
Scott Walker to declare “No more CAFOs.
No more using Wisconsin’s land, water and air as a manure pit.”
Elkhorn

Robert Kennedy Jr: ‘Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) Are Destroying Democracy’.
The transcript is as follows: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Emerson Urry: The military is the biggest [water] polluter in the country.
And then, as you point out, the second biggest polluter are factory farms — are CAFOs.
And in terms of water pollution, they are destroying the water supplies of our country.
Those are concentrated animal feed operations, but the real description of them is factory farms.
They have to corrupt public officials in order to get away with dumping their waste into our waterways.
They destroy family farms.
You’re seeing the occupation of the American landscapes by giant corporations.
It’s why he didn’t want to give corporate charters, because he said: American democracy can only function if it’s rooted in tens of thousands of independents freeholds, owned by family farmers, each with a stake in our system of government.
You know, if you get rid of that diverse control of the landscapes, American democracy is doomed.

Nancy Utesch: DNR’s low-key response to Kewaunee’s water crisis not nearly enough.
The Department of Natural Resources’ recent low-key roll-out of help for Kewaunee County residents dealing with contamination so great that they cannot drink nor should they bathe in their water highlights the DNR’s continued failures, lack of integrity, and continued lack of urgency in responding to Kewaunee’s health and water crisis.
Our animal numbers have surpassed the 98,000 mark, while our human population is roughly 20,500.
This burgeoning problem, akin to pouring gasoline on the fire, is rarely discussed — nor is the reality that we can no longer shoulder the burdens of the intensive farming taking place where we live and the resulting water contamination, human health threats, plunging property values, and severe quality of life issues that are as widespread as our growing water contamination rates.
Walker and industry interests make silver-bullet promises of fertilizer plants, biogas plants, digester cures and more remedies — but don’t discuss actually curtailing the addition of more cows in our county and the massive contaminating waste that’s generated.
Initiatives by local farmers addressing conservation practices are slowly being implemented, but lack of DNR oversight and enforcement of CAFOs continues to be a major problem, and safeguards such as herd caps and in-ground monitoring wells at lagoon sites and spreading fields continue to be contested in court.
Make no mistake, citizens and various attorneys, including Midwest Environmental Advocates, have done the heavy lifting on the manure situation in Kewaunee.
On the latest research findings, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Mark Borchardt stated: “We have never seen this level of contamination before.” Work groups engaged stakeholders for over a year, formulating recommendations for addressing the problems that plague our community and its water, only to have Gov.
Scott Walker gut the recommendations after meeting with industry interests, with the Dairy Business Association claiming rule revisions would make dairy farmers scapegoats.
Nancy Utesch is a farmer from Kewaunee and a petitioner of the Safe Drinking Water Act, filed to the EPA in October 2014, about Kewaunee’s water crisis.

Health Dept fines Big Island Dairy for pollution violations.
HONOLULU – The Hawaii State Department of Health (DOH) has issued a Notice of Violation and Order to Big Island Dairy, LLC for the unlawful discharge of wastewater from the dairy’s Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations (CAFO), located in O’okala on Hawaii Island, to Kaohaoha Gulch.
The DOH has ordered Big Island Dairy, LLC to immediately cease discharging wastewater to state waters, pay a penalty of $25,000 to the state, and take corrective actions to prevent future unlawful discharges from the dairy to state waters.
Further, the dairy is required to apply to DOH for a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit required under the Federal Clean Water Act, and State of Hawaii water pollution laws.
Additional DOH oversight of other past and current dairy issues is continuing.
Requirement for an NPDES Permit Authorizing the Discharge to State waters Under the federal Clean Water Act and state water pollution laws, a dairy with 700 or more mature milking cows which operates as a CAFO and discharges is required to obtain and comply with an NPDES permit.
NPDES permits regulate the discharges from the dairy to state and federal waters by requiring implementation of pollution reducing practices and compliance reporting.
The CNMP will be an enforceable provision of the NPDES permit.
The dairy must develop corrective action plans if the dairy finds any evidence of waste or wastewater within state waters due to dairy operations.
The Hawaii Department of Health’s Clean Water Branch protects the health of residents and visitors who enjoy Hawaii’s coastal and inland water resources.

Big Island Dairy Fined for Water Pollution Violations.
The Hawai‘i Department of Health has issued a Notice of Violation and Order to Big Island Dairy LLC for the unlawful discharge of wastewater from the dairy’s Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations (CAFO), located in O‘okala to Kaohaoha Gulch.
The DOH has ordered the dairy to immediately cease discharging wastewater to state waters, pay a penalty of $25,000 to the state and take corrective actions to prevent future unlawful discharges from the dairy to state waters.
Further, the dairy is required to apply to DOH for a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit required under the Federal Clean Water Act and State of Hawai‘i water pollution laws.
Additional DOH oversight of other past and current dairy issues is continuing.
Requirement for an NPDES Permit Authorizing the Discharge to State waters Under the federal Clean Water Act and state water pollution laws, a dairy with 700 or more mature milking cows which operates as a CAFO and discharges is required to obtain and comply with an NPDES permit.
NPDES permits regulate the discharges from the dairy to state and federal waters by requiring implementation of pollution-reducing practices and compliance reporting.
The CNMP will be an enforceable provision of the NPDES permit.
The dairy must develop corrective action plans if the dairy finds any evidence of waste or wastewater within state waters due to dairy operations.
The Hawai‘i Department of Health’s Clean Water Branch protects the health of residents and visitors who enjoy Hawai‘i’s coastal and inland water resources.

Known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, the facilities confine and raise large populations of livestock.
And lawyers on both sides of the cases agree the legal landscape is expected to change even further as a result of a new federal appeals court decision that rejected the Environmental Protection Agency’s air emission reporting exemption for CAFOs.
“EPA recently estimated that there are about 19,000 CAFOs in the country and that of those, about three-quarters probably discharge into waterways and should be regulated under the Clean Water Act,” Tarah Heinzen, staff attorney for Food & Water Watch in Washington, told Bloomberg BNA.
They also say the regulatory vacuum hampers citizen suits filed under such federal statutes as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
“This rule had been in place since 2008, and essentially the court held that Congress made it very clear that all facilities that report over a certain threshold of regulated pollutants have to report.” The ruling, unless it is overturned on appeal, could extend beyond federal cases.
State right-to-farm laws typically apply a who-was-there-first rule, and protect a farm from nuisance liability if it lawfully operated for more than a year and wasn’t considered a nuisance when it began.
“If you suddenly have a court ruling that says that many farms are not complying with the law because they’re not doing air emission reporting, that could potentially impact right-to-farm act defenses,” Janzen said.
Nuisance Suits Surge Regardless of environmentalists’ recent victories under the right-to-know law and RCRA, state-law nuisance claims, not federal environmental actions, are the bread-and-butter of most CAFO cases, some of the lawyers said.
But many cases are still pending, including dozens on a mass tort docket in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, where wholly-owned subsidiaries of Smithfield Foods are among the defendants.
848, would amend the federal statute to make clear it doesn’t govern animal or crop waste from farms.

News Food | Media Release Center for Food Safety, Kupale Ookala will take megadairy to court for polluting HI waters.
"The residents of Ookala were disappointed that the State Department of Health and Department of Agriculture didn’t take action in 2014 when reports from an investigation clearly showed wrongdoing by the Big Island Dairy.
Our community is standing strong and we want to be in the driver’s seat so we can hold this polluter accountable and protect our community," said Charlene Nishida, member of the community group Kupale Ookala.
Intensive confined animal operations like Big Island Dairy have devastating environmental and human health impacts, and our local communities unfairly must bear the brunt of those harms," said Dr. Ashley Lukens, Director of the Hawai’i Center for Food Safety.
Any unpermitted discharge from Big Island Dairy would violate state and federal water pollution laws.
"The Clean Water Act prohibits Big Island Dairy from releasing animal waste pollution," said Sylvia Wu of the Center for Food Safety and attorney for the groups.
"These laws and regulations are in place to protect our communities and waterways, and it is time for the Big Island Dairy to play by the rules."
"The Clean Water Act provides communities such as Ookala the means to protect themselves.
### Center for Food Safety’s mission is to empower people, support farmers, and protect the earth from the harmful impacts of industrial agriculture.
Twitter: @CFSTrueFood

And within 10 years, 90 percent of Missouri’s independent hog producers were forced out of business by their competition.
He’s also reviewed countless studies on CAFOs prepared by highly reputable research institutions.
Ikerd found serious consequences from CAFOs are inevitable.
However, the economic, ecological, and social consequences are inevitable for any significant group of CAFOs at any point in time and for any individual CAFO over a significant period of time."
On water pollution, he said the EPA found waste generated by large-scale hog and other CAFOs had polluted over 35,000 miles of river and contaminated groundwater in 17 states.
"The environmental regulation of CAFOs has been far less stringent, and far less effective, than for other industries because CAFO supporters have been able to convince lawmakers that CAFOs are agricultural, not industrial, operations.
This expert in sustainable agriculture writes that negative effects on water quality are a consequence of waste from too many animals in areas too small to effectively assimilate it.
CAFOs should be regulated like any industrial operation, he wrote, and animal waste should be regulated much like human waste to protect public health.
Pig waste is 39 times more concentrated than human waste, "so animal waste can quite logically be thought of as a form of toxic waste.
Those who express scientifically justifiable concerns over the inevitable environmental effects of a CAFO located in an ecologically sensitive watershed are labeled by those behind CAFOs as emotional over-reactors and "radical, idealistic environmentalists who just don’t understand modern agriculture," Ikerd wrote.

State regulators revise standards for concentrated livestock sites.
PIERRE – The state Department of Environment and Natural Resources issued the latest version of its general water pollution control permit for concentrated animal feeding operations throughout South Dakota last week.
The 2016 version of the permit covers producers that confine and feed large numbers of animals.
Producers have one to four years to apply for coverage by the 2016 version of the CAFO permit, depending upon when they are scheduled for re-approval.
CAFOs covered under the 2003 general permit will retain coverage until they are approved under the 2016 version of the general permit, according to DENR officials.
DENR issued its first CAFO permit covering new and expanding swine operations in 1997.
Together they have more than 1.3 million acres in approved nutrient management plans in South Dakota.
The original hearing was scheduled for Dec. 16, 2015, but Pirner received an appeal to delay the hearing on Dec. 8, 2015.
The 2016 permit includes a permeability standard that can be used rather than constructing a liner for a permanent manure-stockpiling site.
All fields scheduled for manure application must be sampled prior to manure application.