Big Ag Admits Role in Wisconsin Well Water Contamination

Industrialized CAFO or Confined Animal Feeding Operation
is pictured above. The factory farm model emits toxins into
the environment, pollutes water wells and surface water
with dangerous pathogens, and devastates community home
and business property values. Manure has over 160 different
known pathogens, viruses and bacteria, and includes barn cleaners
and their chemical make-up, antibiotics, hormones
and other industrial wastes. (Kewaunee CARES)

Update: An opponent of a proposed massive CAFO in Wood County Wisconsin writes me the end game of industrialized mega-farm operations in Kewaunee County "is to claim that aerial spraying of manure is environmentally sound, which it is not."
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In Wilson Mutual Ins. Co. v. Falk, (2014 WI 136 (Dec. 30, 2014)), the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled industrialized CAFOs are emitting "pollutants" when neighboring water wells are contaminated by cow manure, (Behm, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel).

This significant precedent-setting ruling codifies what neighbors and communities located next to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, (CAFOs) already know: CAFOs vector toxins into the environment and present a grave threat to families and communities, (Mal Contends).

To hear factory farming operations admitting what they have done is huge news.

By James Rowen of The Political Environment

Some of Wisconsin's largest Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, (CAFOs), are now admitting what everyone else has been screaming about: these large producers of milk, and thus runoff, seepage and manure, are putting nitrate pollutants into nearby groundwater and wells.

From Adam Rodewald, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin:

Three of Kewaunee County’s most prominent dairy farmers are changing their opinions on whether large-scale agriculture is to blame for groundwater contamination. 

These large farms have certainly played a role in polluting people’s private wells, and farmers need to find a solution, the owners of Kinnard Farms Inc., Pagels Ponderosa Dairy and Dairy Dreams LLC said during an interview with Press-Gazette Media ...

'We are the larger producer of nitrates. We have to have played a role in it,' Dairy Dreams Owner Don Niles said.

It's a start, though "played a role in it" isn't going to cut it.

Public awareness about contaminated drinking water has grown since the catastrophic poisoning of drinking water in Flint, Michigan - - and opposition to CAFOs is spreading from dairy operations in central and NE Wisconsin to Bayfield County, where an Iowa operator wants to put a 26,000 pig CAFO - - by far the state's largest such operation - - within smelling distance of Ashland's drinking water supply and Lake Superior.

Wisconsin public interest attorneys, environmentalists, CAFO neighbors and activists, including this blog, have been sounding the alarm here repeatedly, and it's time that the Wisconsin Legislature and the DNR stop serving special water interests - - and given that the DNR is blatantly obstructionist and ideologically tone-deaf - - federal officials need to be here yesterday to take the lead.