By Gail Philbin, Assistant Director, Michigan Chapter
Toledo’s recent bout with poisoned drinking water should
serve as a huge wake-up call to Michigan to take seriously the link between
factory farming, water pollution and public health.
The story of how dangerous levels of a toxin ended up in
the water supply of Ohio’s fourth-largest city is in large part the story of
how we grow our food today and who decides what are considered good farming
practices. The impetus for Toledo’s weekend water ban was microcystin, a toxin
experts say can cause diarrhea, vomiting or abnormal liver function that
probably formed in a recent algae bloom in Lake Erie. The soupy, pea-green
growth in one of our Great Lakes is an increasingly common occurrence fed by
phosphorus run-off from southern Michigan and northwestern Ohio fields applied
with commercial fertilizer or factory farm waste.
Why all the fertilizer and animal waste in our water?
Because we eat lots of meat, dairy, poultry and eggs. The United States is the
largest producer of corn in the world.
Eighty percent of what we grow is consumed not by people but by domestic
and overseas livestock, poultry and fish production, according to the US
Environmental Protection Agency. Vast monocultures of corn require large
amounts of fertilizer to grow.
We also like cheap food and most of us buy products that
come from industrial-scale, concentrated livestock facilities, many of which
have been constructed in the last decade in western Lake Erie watersheds that
include southern Michigan. Such operations are favored by federal Farm Bill
subsidies that keep their product prices artificially low. This taxpayer-funded
support often goes to help construct manure lagoons and other systems for
handling the huge amount of waste factory farms generate. Even so, it can end
up polluting nearby waterways, as shown in the Less=More sustainable
agriculture coalition’s 2013 report about subsidies and factory farm pollution,
Restoring the Balance to Michigan’s
Farming Landscape. The current subsidy system rewards polluters, giving an
unfair advantage over the kind of healthy, sustainable livestock farms that
more Michigan consumers seek to support at farmers markets and other local
outlets.
Both monoculture crop farms and industrial livestock
operations populate the landscape of the two main watersheds affecting Lake
Erie, and it’s not clear how much of each is involved in the Toledo algae
bloom. However, the role of the region's new livestock producers’ waste, much
of it liquefied manure, and field runoff from the largest operations has
scarcely been quantified up until now. John Klein, president of the citizen
group Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan, calculates
that just the dairy and beef factory farms in the headwaters of the Maumee
River and Raisin River, watersheds that impact western Lake Erie, annually
generate about six million pounds of phosphorus.
Last spring, a diverse coalition of Great Lakes groups
predicted the kind of threat Toledo just experienced when it called on the
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) to end the application of
manure on frozen or snow-covered ground as an allowable practice of permitted Concentrated
Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). The coalition cautioned that when snow melts
or ground thaws, this common practice can result in runoff of phosphorus-loaded
waste that ends up in Lake Erie. Reports by the International Joint Commission
in February and the Ohio Lake Erie Phosphorus Task Force in 2013 also advocate
prohibiting this practice.
Toledo’s recent nightmare should send an alarm to all
state agencies with oversight of modern agricultural operations about the
connection between the highest-risk factory farming practices, water pollution
and public health. The Michigan Natural Resources Conservation Service, a
state-based agency of the US Department of Agriculture that allocates Farm Bill
conservation subsidies, must reassess the practices it prioritizes with
taxpayer money and stop supporting polluting factory farms. The MDEQ, which is
still in the process of reviewing its general permit for CAFO operators, need
wait no further to ban winter manure application. And the Michigan Department
of Agriculture and Resource Development should immediately follow suit and keep
winter manure application out of the best management practices in its voluntary
Michigan Agricultural Environmental Assurance Program.
We must get serious about how we raise our food. We have
healthy, sustainable alternatives to industrial agriculture, but we can't
replace the Great Lakes.
