St. Croix County residents have raised concerns about a November manure spill on a western Wisconsin dairy farm. The same operation was recently fined in for a similar incident in 2016.
According to a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources spill report, manure sprayed Nov. 20, 2019, at Emerald Sky Dairy ran off the property and into Hutton Creek, a Willow River tributary. Dead minnows were found downstream of “manure laden water.”
Town of Emerald resident Virginia Drath said she spotted crews on the farm assembling pipes to transfer manure from a lagoon to the fields on Nov. 19. Drath, who took her concerns to the Jan. 7 St. Croix County Board meeting, said she notified a DNR specialist after learning rain was forecast and that frost was already up to 10 inches into the ground at that point.
“I am wondering what the heck is going on,” she said.
The Wisconsin Manure Management System Advisory System, a program run by the state’s Department of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection, provides 72-hour forecasts for conditions and the risk of manure runoff. The risk level listed for Nov. 20 for all of St. Croix County was “severe,” which indicates frozen soil or snow.
DNR Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations specialist Jeff Jackson went to Emerald Sky Dairy that day and inspected the operation. Manure was being applied to an approximately 42-acre field, according to the DNR. The manure appeared to be migrating downfield, stated an audit report submitted by Jackson.
He told the dairy to reduce its application and the dairy complied, the audit report states.
The area received about 0.38 inches of precipitation between Nov. 20-21, with temperatures falling as low as 30 degrees.
In an interview with RiverTown Multimedia, Jackson said conditions in the field were “stiff,” but not frozen. He said the contributing factors to the spill appeared to be the firm ground conditions and the rain.
While farms aren’t allowed to spread manure within 24 hours of a forecast rain event that could cause a runoff issue, Jackson said: “that’s kind of hard to define until it happens.”
And while his job is to provide farmers with information, Jackson said it’s not his call on whether they can spread or not.
“They have to make their business decision on whether they’re going to spread that day,” he said.
Efforts to reach Emerald Sky Dairy, which operates a 1,500-milking-cow operation in St. Croix County, for comment were unsuccessful.
‘BROWN, TURBID AND SMELLED OF MANURE’
The following day — Nov. 21 — an anonymous person reported manure flowing down the County Road G ditch along the farm’s boundary.
Jackson returned to Emerald Sky Dairy, where he spoke with the farm’s compliance manager. The dairy had a septic hauler remove manure-infested water from the ditch; farm officials also ran tilling passes along the field to help drive the manure and stormwater into the soil. Jackson said those measures likely stemmed additional runoff contamination.
Jackson and DNR game wardens tracked “manure laden water” from the ditch to Hutton Creek, according to Jackson’s spill report. The water “was brown, turbid and smelled of manure.”
DNR officials found four species of forage minnows, about 24 in all, dead about 10 meters downstream of the County Road G bridge.
Laboratory analysis revealed contamination in the ditch that included phosphorus levels of 14.8 milligrams per liter. Jackson said the acceptable level is about 0.75 milligrams per liter.
The November spill remains an active investigation and that any enforcement action would likely be months away, Jackson said. Prior incidents on a farm can be taken into consideration as part of an investigation.
A PREVIOUS SPILL
The November spill was not the first at Emerald Sky Dairy.
A pumping system failure sometime between Dec. 9 through Dec. 19, 2016, caused a spill of up to 275,000 gallons of liquid manure, according to a report by Ecosystems, LLC.
According to the complaint filed in a St. Croix County civil case, the spill was discovered Dec. 19, 2016. The spill went unreported until March 29, 2017.
“Significant adverse impact to the wetland took place when it was inundated with manure to such depths that is toxic to plant life,” a DNR wetland identification specialist wrote in his report on a follow-up inspection in April 2018.
A May 2019 judgment in a civil lawsuit against the dairy resulted in an $80,000 fine.
“If Emerald Sky Dairy had been inspecting its liquid storage and containment structures as required by the WPDES permit, Emerald Sky Dairy would have noticed hundreds of thousands of gallons of manure were missing,” the complaint states. “Upon making this discovery, a reasonable operator would have investigated and likely discovered the leaking manure transfer pipe earlier, mitigating the magnitude of the manure discharge.”
The dairy made its first payment of $16,000 in September 2019, with subsequent payments of $16,000 scheduled annually through 2023.